Discovering the Existence of American Pravda
I’ve always enjoyed solving historical puzzles and figuring out what really happened, but I’d never had the slightest interest in conspiracy theories, which I’d always dismissed as nonsense. As a consequence, I’d spent nearly my entire life never doubting nor questioning the broad sweep of our last century of world history, as had been so conveniently presented to me in all my academic courses, books, magazines, and newspapers.
But in the aftermath of the 9/11 Attacks, I gradually became increasingly suspicious of the credibility of the mainstream media sources that I had always relied upon for my knowledge of the world.
This first became apparent to me during the anthrax mailings that followed so soon after the terrorist attacks themselves, a wave of envelopes filled with deadly spores that so terrified our entire country and stampeded Congress into passing the controversial Patriot Act curtailing our traditional liberties. For many weeks, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and our other most influential national newspapers always presented one version of those events, while very different and far more extensive information was regularly published by the perfectly respectable journalists who worked for much smaller outlets such as the Hartford Courant and Salon, publications much less under the total sway of top government officials. A year ago I recapitulated and analyzed that very strange history.
- American Pravda: The Forgotten Anthrax Attacks
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • October 17, 2023 • 10,100 Words
My growing doubts about our media soon became even more serious as the Neocon-dominated Bush Administration moved our country towards its disastrous Iraq War, successfully using its media allies to convince nearly 70% of the American public that Saddam Hussein had been a key figure behind that unprecedented terrorist attack on America.
About a decade later in 2013 I described my outrage that our leading media publications had so easily allowed themselves to be manipulated on a matter so important to our national security
The circumstances surrounding our Iraq War demonstrate this, certainly ranking it among the strangest military conflicts of modern times. The 2001 attacks in America were quickly ascribed to the radical Islamists of al-Qaeda, whose bitterest enemy in the Middle East had always been Saddam Hussein’s secular Baathist regime in Iraq. Yet through misleading public statements, false press leaks, and even forged evidence such as the “yellowcake” documents, the Bush administration and its neoconservative allies utilized the compliant American media to persuade our citizens that Iraq’s nonexistent WMDs posed a deadly national threat and required elimination by war and invasion. Indeed, for several years national polls showed that a large majority of conservatives and Republicans actually believed that Saddam was the mastermind behind 9/11 and the Iraq War was being fought as retribution. Consider how bizarre the history of the 1940s would seem if America had attacked China in retaliation for Pearl Harbor.
True facts were easily available to anyone paying attention in the years after 2001, but most Americans do not bother and simply draw their understanding of the world from what they are told by the major media, which overwhelmingly—almost uniformly—backed the case for war with Iraq; the talking heads on TV created our reality. Prominent journalists across the liberal and conservative spectrum eagerly published the most ridiculous lies and distortions passed on to them by anonymous sources, and stampeded Congress down the path to war.
Once again, the only contrary skepticism of Saddam’s non-existent WMDs came from much smaller media outlets such as the Knight-Ridder chain of newspapers, less totally dependent upon the regular leaks and favors provided by senior administration officials. More than two decades after those events, I only recently discovered that Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, longtime chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, had been the individual responsible for leaking the true facts to those journalists, presumably after having failed to attract any interest from reporters at the New York Times or our other leading newspapers.
Although I’d been very strongly opposed to the Iraq War, I’d never doubted that Saddam possessed at least some of the WMDs that had been used to justify our invasion, and the revelation that all that evidence had been fraudulent—and generally known to be fraudulent by so many insiders—completely punctured the propaganda-bubble in which I’d been living, forcing me to reassess my understanding of the world.
A few years later that shock was greatly magnified when I stumbled across the remarkable work of Sydney Schanberg.
During the 1980s I’d become vaguely aware of the POW/MIA movement absurdly claiming that large numbers of American POWs were still being held by the Vietnamese many years after the end of the war. Despite having been thoroughly debunked by the media, such ridiculous paranoia remained stubbornly popular in right-wing circles and eventually became the inspiration for Rambo and other action films in which daring American veterans successfully rescued those imprisoned POWs from their brutal captivity despite the opposition of our own corrupt U.S. government.
Schanberg was a Pulitzer Prize-winning former top-ranking editor at the New York Times, widely regarded as one of our greatest war correspondents, and I was astonished to discover that he’d spent years amassing a mountain of evidence demonstrating that those “POW conspiracy theories” were actually true. Many hundreds of our POWs had indeed been deliberately left behind in Vietnam, and one of the leading figures involved in the later cover-up was former POW turned U.S. Senator John McCain, the Republican nominee during the 2008 presidential campaign. Yet despite Schanberg’s enormous journalistic stature, not a single mainstream media outlet was willing to report his expose of what certainly amounted to one of the most shameful episodes in American history.
- American Pravda: Was Rambo Right?
Ron Unz • The American Conservative • May 25, 2010 • 1,300 Words
If our entire mainstream media could flatly ignore a scandal of such gigantic proportions unearthed by one of its own most respected figures, I concluded that I simply couldn’t trust any information it provided on anything else.
The realization that the world is often quite different from what is presented in our leading newspapers and magazines is not an easy conclusion for most educated Americans to accept, or at least that was true in my own case. For decades, I have closely read the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and one or two other major newspapers every morning, supplemented by a wide variety of weekly or monthly opinion magazines. Their biases in certain areas had always been apparent to me. But I felt confident that by comparing and contrasting the claims of these different publications and applying some common sense, I could obtain a reasonably accurate version of reality. I was mistaken.
Aside from the evidence of our own senses, almost everything we know about the past or the news of today comes from bits of ink on paper or colored pixels on a screen, and fortunately over the last decade or two the growth of the Internet has vastly widened the range of information available to us in that latter category. Even if the overwhelming majority of the unorthodox claims provided by such non-traditional web-based sources is incorrect, at least there now exists the possibility of extracting vital nuggets of truth from vast mountains of falsehood. Certainly the events of the past dozen years have forced me to completely recalibrate my own reality-detection apparatus.
Those above paragraphs came from my original American Pravda article published more than a decade ago, a piece that marked my public repudiation of those mainstream sources of information that I’d always regarded as reliable.
- Our American Pravda
Ron Unz • The American Conservative • April 29, 2013 • 4,500 Words
Having concluded that the standard media narratives of some important events were false, I began wondering about many others as well. During my subsequent explorations, I spent considerable time on fringe or conspiratorial websites that I had never previously taken seriously, but while doing so I always tried to retain the rigorous research standards that I had developed in the early academic phase of my career, during which I had published articles in leading scholarly journals of Theoretical Physics and Classical History. The skill-set I had developed for the latter subject proved particularly applicable, given that it required a researcher “to extract the true pattern of events from a collection of source material that was often fragmentary, unreliable, and contradictory.” I think I also benefitted from the thousand-odd books of science fiction I had digested in my younger years.
As most people are surely aware, the Internet is awash with a vast multitude of “conspiracy theories” of every possible type, nearly all of them mutually contradictory. Although I have always tried to remain open-minded, I’d say that around 90-95% of the ones I’ve examined seem to be false or at least unsubstantiated. But the residual 5-10% were sufficiently well-documented and plausible that they served as the basis for the very lengthy American Pravda series I eventually produced, mostly during the last half-dozen years, a series that now includes more than 100 articles totaling over 800,000 words, as well as many dozens of other articles of a generally similar nature.
- The American Pravda Series
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • 813,000 Words
In all these matters, my approach has always been an extremely cautious one, not publishing anything unless and until I was solidly convinced of its validity. Thus, there are large numbers of additional matters that have raised my suspicions, but for which the evidence has never seemed strong enough to warrant putting anything into print. However, due to such caution, I feel quite confident of what I’ve produced, so much so that I would still stand behind at least 99% of everything that I’ve published over the last thirty-odd years.
Unfortunately, many others seem to have taken a very different approach, allowing the vast profusion of exciting but incorrect theories on the Internet to easily lead them astray. Sometimes a conventionally-minded individual is so shocked to discover the reality of one or two major matters that he’d always dismissed as nonsense because they had been regularly ridiculed by the media that he loses his bearings and begins carelessly swallowing many other very doubtful theories as well, failing to properly separate the wheat from the chaff.
