Jeremy Scahill on Media Matters
May 12th, 2010 § 1 Comment
On April 18 award-winning investigative journalist and author Jeremy Scahill was interviewed by Bob McChesney of Media Matters. You can listen to their fascinating discussion on the current state of investigative journalism below.
Jeremy Scahill is a Polk Award-winning investigative journalist. He is a Puffin Foundation Writing Fellow at The Nation Institute and a frequent contributor to The Nation magazine, where he reports on Iraq war contractors. His New York Times best-selling book Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army was published in 2007 by Nation Books. AlterNet named it best progressive book of the year. Blackwater was recently released in a thoroughly revised and updated paperback edition. This is a pre-recorded program.
Bob McChesney is a research professor in the Institute of Communications Research and the Graduate School of Information and Library Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “The media are central to all our lives,” he says. “Yet the media are the most frequently misunderstood parts of our lives. We want to help people understand the role of media in society.”
Professing shock at the use of mercenary forces can be seen as a re-direction from questioning the very basis of the pro-war narrative, the validity of the global war on terror.
This viewpoint is now augmented by the revelation of Scahill’s appalling denunciation of 9/11 skepticism:
This really should not surprise us though because The Nation, Democracy Now and Alternot are all renowned for promoting war on the sly. Sad to say, Scahil seems to have joined the club.