To Parry, "truth is a battle" and "the reality is that there are no automatic mechanisms for stopping lies and distortions":

What I have seen during more than three decades in Washington is that many truths remain effectively hidden, even if technically they have been revealed. A rare moment of truth-telling can be easily overwhelmed by a steady barrage of falsehoods and an infusion of well-calibrated doubts.

Before long, it is the oft-repeated faux reality that is remembered. It becomes Washington’s conventional wisdom and then the official history. [See, for instance, Robert Parry’s Lost History.]

In the United States today, there is a massive infrastructure for spreading lies and distortions--a right-wing media machine that reaches from newspapers, magazines and books to cable TV, talk radio and the Internet.

By simple repetition, this machine can transform any crazy theory or bald-faced lie into something that many Americans believe.

Case in point is "when the right-wing media... pushed the lies about Iraq's WMD and intimated that Iraq’s Saddam Hussein was connected to the 9/11 attacks." See the FAIR magazine Extra!: "From Speculation to History: 'Saddam's Bluff' Becomes Conventional Wisdom--With No Evidence Presented" (5–6/04) by Seth Ackerman.

While those crimes were underway, major U.S. media outlets avoided stating the obvious because any recognition that Bush waged "a war of aggression" would force other conclusions, such as the need to subject him, his senior advisers and some foreign allies (i.e., Tony Blair) to a war crimes tribunal.

The big news organizations also didn't want to admit their own complicity in this crime, since almost everyone in American journalism who wanted to keep a comfortable seat at the Establishment's table either endorsed the enterprise or kept quiet.

So even today--more than five months after Bush left office--it's still much easier to dismiss what happened as "unnecessary," to cite the pre-war "intelligence failures," and to criticize Bush primarily for his tactical misjudgments in planning an effective occupation--not committing enough troops and not having a detailed enough post-invasion plan.

Parry well knows that "accusing him of criminality is much trickier," since, "after all, in the view of the mainstream news media, war crimes are something that 'rogue states' commit, petty tyrants from Rwanda or Yugoslavia who can then be dragged off to The Hague and put on trial." Alas, "Such humiliations are not for the former 'Leader of the Free World' and his subordinates."

Check out the overriding corporate media reaction to even the most tepid congressional gestures toward accountability for members of the George W. Bush government in FAIR's Action Alert: "CNN Scoffs at White House Critics: Anchor With Bush Ties Dismisses Abuse-of-Power Hearings as 'Stagecraft'" (7/31/08).

Parry also is "curious to see U.S. news organizations care suddenly about legitimate elections when most of them ignored, ridiculed or covered-up evidence that George W. Bush stole the U.S. presidential election in 2000 and possibly in 2004 as well":

In Election 2000, Florida--a state controlled by Bush’s brother Jeb and Jeb’s cronies--was the scene of widespread election irregularities. Then, when a recount was attempted, the Bush campaign sent well-dressed hooligans from Washington to Miami to stage a riot aimed at intimidating vote counters. Finally, Bush got five partisan Republican justices on the U.S. Supreme Court to stop the counting of votes and award the White House to Bush.

Yet the U.S. press corps was extraordinarily passive about this well-documented election theft. Even when it became clear that Al Gore won the popular vote and would have carried Florida if all legal ballots had been counted, major U.S. news organizations, including the New York Times and CNN, misrepresented the facts to protect Bush’s "legitimacy."...

Similarly, serious irregularities in Election 2004, especially in the key state of Ohio, were never seriously investigated by the mainstream news media, which instead mocked Internet sites (including ours) and citizens groups as "conspiracy theorists" for citing some of the bizarre vote tallies favoring Bush.

"When an election occurs in another country and an 'unpopular' leader appears to win," Parry tells how "an opposite set of rules apply," and in corporate journalists' eyes, "anyone who doesn't immediately accept the assumption of voter fraud is naïve; every 'conspiracy theory' is cited respectfully while contrary evidence is downplayed or ignored."

Through the 1980s, the neocons spearheaded an assault on the CIA's analytical division by pushing a politicization of intelligence that reversed the tradition of giving policymakers the best possible information. Instead, careerists got rewarded for tailoring intelligence to fit the neocon agenda--and those who wouldn't go along were pushed aside or out the door.

Simultaneously, within the Washington news media, the neocons and allied right-wing attack groups took aim at journalists who dug up unwanted information. Instead of rewards for such work, there were punishments. Many truth-telling reporters were "controversialized," while journalists who played ball moved to the center of the profession.

That last point is on a phenomenon Parry is regrettably quite familiar with--see the FAIR magazine Extra!: "America's Debt to Gary Webb: Punished for Reporting the Truth While Those Who Covered It Up Thrived" (3–4/05) by Robert Parry.