Book Excerpt: A Graveyard of Truthtellers (Pt 2)
Kamala Harris will be supported by nearly every writer in corporate media, or else.
As the Democratic Convention wraps up, all major Blue News outlets have fallen into lockstep behind Kamala Harris. This unison is no coincidence. Journalists at outlets like NPR, the New York Times, MSNBC and the Atlantic who go against dominant narratives about Democrats have for years been routinely silenced, demoted, and fired.
Part One of this excerpt included two journalists who were fired in 2016 for not supporting Hillary Clinton with sufficient vigor—Ed Schultz and Krystal Ball.
In this second part, we recall one more, a woman who shares a surname with the Democratic nominee: Melissa Harris-Perry.
I never aim to be partisan, and there is rampant bias in Red News outlets too, but I was unable to find journalists fired for opposing the candidacy of Donald Trump in 2016 or 2020. (Nor of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. today).
This post is another excerpt from my 2023 book Red White & Blind: The Truth About Disinformation & The Path to Media Consciousness. This specific excerpt comes from Chapter 12: Your Views Are No Longer Needed, which highlights a dozen journalists who were fired, forced out, or otherwise silenced for telling the truth. This excerpt includes three more of those 12 profiles.
Melissa Harris-Perry (MSNBC)
Fired for not supporting Hillary Clinton
An intellectual and media dynamo, Melissa Harris-Perry was the only tenured professor with a regular television news show in 2016. With professorships at Princeton and Tulane under her belt, her MSNBC show was “about race, poverty, and gender [and] operated about 20 grade levels above the rest of television,” according to Dave Wiegel of Slate at the time. She built her #Nerdland show into one of MSNBC’s most popular over the course of four years. Then, as the election of 2016 approached, Harris-Perry, who is Black, found her show repeatedly preempted for “other news.” This happened for four weeks in a row, just as the primary and caucus contests between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders were beginning.
In an explosive letter to her fans and coworkers at the time,[1] she explained:
Here is the reality: our show was taken down—without comment or discussion or notice—in the midst of an election season. After four years of building an audience, developing a brand, and developing trust with our viewers, we were effectively and utterly silenced.[2]
MSNBC assigned her a slot on air, but it was to read news headlines rather than to do her normal show. To Harris-Perry, this was an attempt to suppress her complex analysis of the news. In an election year when MSNBC clearly wanted simple and straightforward support for Hillary Clinton (see treatment of Krystal Ball and Ed Schultz),[3] the historical perspective, complex analysis, and uncomfortable questions Harris-Perry brought to the table were just too challenging. Like Schultz, she directly called out NBC News Chairman Andrew Lack and MSNBC President Phil Griffin:
I will not be used as a tool for their purposes. I am not a token, mammy, or little brown bobble head. I am not owned by Lack, Griffin, or MSNBC. I love our show. I want it back. I have wept more tears than I can count and I find this deeply painful, but I don’t want back on air at any cost...
I have stayed in the same hotels where MSNBC has been broadcasting in Iowa, in New Hampshire, and in South Carolina [for the primaries], yet I have been shut out from coverage. I have a PhD in political science and have taught American voting and elections at some of the nation’s top universities for nearly two decades, yet I have been deemed less worthy to weigh in than relative novices and certified liars. I have hosted a weekly program on this network for four years and contributed to election coverage on this network for nearly eight years.
While MSNBC may believe that I am worthless, I know better… I care only about substantive, meaningful, and autonomous work.[4]
Two days after penning this letter, on February 28, 2016, Harris-Perry was fired by MSNBC.[5] She has continued to write and teach, and she publishes regularly for The Nation and Elle magazines. She has never been hired to host another corporate media television program.
Tareq Haddad (Newsweek)
Silenced when attempting to reveal the truth about Syria
As discussed in Chapter 10, there was almost certainly no gas attack by Syrian President Bashar Assad in Douma, Syria in April 2018, despite the corporate media’s—and the US Government’s—repeated narrative that one had occurred. The story had been steadily falling apart ever since its original claims splashed across Americans’ evening news. Tareq Haddad, an American-trained reporter, was working for Newsweek out of London. Haddad had published hundreds of articles for mainstream publications, and he prepared an article in December 2019 that pulled together the various pieces of evidence demonstrating that the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) had doctored reports from its own experts.[6] Three separate whistleblowers from within the OPCW came out to protest the doctored reports, Haddad wrote, but the mainstream media ignored their voices and even labeled it a “conspiracy theory” to mention their names. No one in corporate media talked to the OPCW whistleblowers. Narrative management was in full effect.
Haddad’s article was rejected numerous times by his editors at Newsweek. Witnessing the deadly airstrikes launched on Syria that the media justified by the alleged attack, Haddad resigned rather than swallow his disgust.[7]
Haddad penned a remarkable, eloquent, and comprehensive resignation letter. Rather than attempt to maintain his connections with the corporate media narrative managers who had censored him, he explained in detail how his Syria story was suppressed. Haddad’s letter is, in fact, a heroic tour de force worth reading in full, as it spells out the situation we are in at the dawn of the New Enlightenment. He lists the specific steps that were taken to suppress his writing, the complaints of the OPCW whistleblowers, and then he goes deeper, describing the workings of Newsweek from the inside out. He names the editors who were government plants working primarily to manage narratives inside the prestigious magazine. His letter even cites Herman and Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent, reveals the unmistakable signs of Operation Mockingbird going on inside the mainstream publication, and exposes government and intelligence agency plants managing stories. The letter is listed in this book’s endnotes, and again, I recommend reading it in its entirety.
Here is an excerpt:
The U.S. government, in an ugly alliance with those who profit the most from war, has its tentacles in every part of the media—imposters, with ties to the U.S. State Department, sit in newsrooms all over the world. Editors, with no apparent connections to the member’s club, have done nothing to resist. Together, they filter out what can or cannot be reported. Inconvenient stories are completely blocked. As a result, journalism is quickly dying. America is regressing because it lacks the truth.[8]
Tareq Haddad has founded his own independent news organization and is currently reporting on the Free Speech issues at stake in the persecution and extradition of a man we will discuss at the end of this chapter, Julian Assange.
Amy Robach (ABC)
Silenced when attempting to report on Jeffery Epstein
Sometimes, you do everything right as a journalist. You follow the best traditions of your profession, you investigate wrongdoing, you question witnesses and victims, you verify corroborating evidence, and you methodically prepare a remarkable story. Sometimes, the mainstream media won’t air or print the story. Not because of weak ratings, production costs, or journalistic ethics, but because the story runs counter to the dominant narrative of the day—or maybe because it just makes some reactionary billionaire or his friends look bad.
As discussed in this book’s introduction, Amy Robach, co-host of ABC’s 20/20 and onetime host of Good Morning America and MSNBC’s Weekend Today, revealed in 2019 that she had the entire story of reactionary pedophile, sex-trafficker Jeffery Epstein in 2016, during the presidential primary. An unknown ABC News executive suppressed it. Three years later, in 2019, when the story broke all over the world, a “hot mic” on a set for ABC’s Good Morning America caught her frustration that the story hadn’t come out earlier:
I’ve had the story for three years. I’ve had this interview with Virginia Roberts. We would not put it on the air… We convinced her to come out. We convinced her to talk to us. It was unbelievable what we had: Bill Clinton, we had everything. I tried for three years to get it on, to no avail.[9]
Robach added in a later interview that the British royal family threatened the network, but given Epstein’s connections to Clinton and Trump and Dershowitz and many other huge names in the American plutocracy, it’s unlikely ABC needed to be threatened. Systemic bias and the filter around Elite Sources would do the trick quietly.[10] The network’s structure and the people in executive positions would instinctively prevent the creation of a new narrative this way as well as the publication of something potentially so damaging to elite sources.
[1] Smith, Jamil. “Melissa Harris-Perry’s Email to Her #nerdland Staff.” Medium, Feb 26, 2016. medium.com/@JamilSmith/melissa-harris-perry-s-email-to-her-nerdland-staff-11292bdc27cb#.a53n1i5n7
[2] Byers, Dylan. “MSNBC's Melissa Harris-Perry Walks Off Show in Protest.” CNN, February 27, 2016. money.cnn.com/2016/02/26/media/melissa-harris-perry-msnbc/index.html
[3] Weigel, David. “Melissa Harris-Perry and Rand Paul Agree on One Thing: Hillary Clinton’s ‘Appalling Choice.’” Slate, February 11, 2014. slate.com/news-and-politics/2014/02/melissa-harris-perry-and-rand-paul-agree-on-one-thing-hillary-clinton-s-appalling-choice.html
[4] See Smith, above.
[5] Folkenflik, David. “MSNBC Fires Host Melissa Harris-Perry Over Controversial Memo.” NPR, March 9, 2016. www.npr.org/2016/03/09/469837015/msnbc-fires-host-melissa-harris-perry-over-controversial-memo
[6] Dorman, Sam. “Newsweek Reporter Quits, Claiming Outlet ‘Suppressed’ Story on Global Chemical Weapons Watchdog.” Fox News, December 7, 2019. www.foxnews.com/media/newsweek-reporter-tareq-haddad-quits
[7] MacLeod, Alan. “Inside Journalist Tareq Haddad’s Spectacular Departure from Newsweek.” MintPress News, December 20t 2019. www.mintpressnews.com/newsweek-journalist-tareq-haddad-quits-corruption-journalism/263667
[8] Haddad, Tareq. “Lies, Newsweek and Control of the Media Narrative.” December 14, 2019. www.tareqhaddad.com/investigation-lies-newsweek-and-control-of-the-media-narrative-first-hand-account
[9] Colen, Aaron. “Frustrated ABC News Anchor Caught on Hot Mic Saying Network Suppressed Epstein Story for Years.” Blaze, November 5, 2019. www.theblaze.com/news/frustrated-abc-news-anchor-caught-on-hot-mic-saying-network-suppressed-epstein-story-for-years
[10] Folkenflik, David. “A Dead Cat, a Lawyer’s Call, and a Five-Figure Donation: How Media Fell Short on Epstein.” All Things Considered, August 22, 2019. www.npr.org/2019/08/22/753390385/a-dead-cat-a-lawyers-call-and-a-5-figure-donation-how-media-fell-short-on-epstei