Pulitzer-Prize Winning Journalist Casts Critical Eye on Today's State of Independent Journalism

The Manchurian Journalist: New Book By Pulitzer-Prize Winning Journalist Casts Critical Eye on Today's State of Independent Journalism and Doesn't Like What's Found

NEW ORLEANS, June 19, 2024 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- Available for interview: Author Dan Luzadder, The Manchurian Journalist: Lawrence Wright, the CIA, and the Corruption of American Journalism

Forty-year investigative reporter Dan Luzadder went from writing as an employee for America's newspapers and magazines to being a freelance reporter for national publications like the New York Times and New York Daily News. He even was inducted into the Scripps Howard Journalism Hall of Fame in 1993 for covering stories like the Columbine High School massacre.

But when he accepted a challenge from the Church of Scientology to examine the veracity of claims made about the church's more controversial practices found in a best-selling book titled Going Clear by fellow Pulitzer-Prize winner Lawrence Wright, Luzadder found a journalistic environment far from the hallowed image of the "free press" he built his career on.

By examining the writings of Lawrence Wright as his principal example, Luzadder shows how America's post-World War Two obsession with preserving a freedom-fighting global war machine led to open manipulation of the nation's independent press, film, and publishing industries to advance systemic propaganda.

This examination of America's supposedly free media moves through the rise of the Central Intelligence Agency, the increasing corporate monopolization of the nation's free press, the creation of preferred publishing houses like Harper & Row and Franklin Books, as well as today's withered and fractured press landscape threatened by outside manipulation and a loss of institutional memory. 
Noting that the press rarely reports on itself, Luzadder's book explores beyond the uncomfortable links between the CIA and the international and domestic press as covered by Carl Bernstein in a 1977 Rolling Stone expose to examine the roots of today's public distrust of American journalism.

"This book is an explosive detective story identifying by name individuals, organizations, and institutions that influenced the US media for decades, shaping what the public read and believed, and creating myths that undermine historical accuracy," said Luzadder.
"The Manchurian Journalist raises and attempts to answer ominous questions about journalism's transparency with readers, its fealty to the truth, and how its relationship to secret intelligence interests has distorted what Americans understand about our own political environment."

Luzadder's in-depth, extensively documented, and critical examination of the Fourth Estate is a tough look at what must be done to restore the independence and integrity of America's watchdog of democracy, its independent journalists.

"As the nation witnesses the collapse of fact-based, unbiased, democracy-supporting journalism, amid our current political dystopia, a truly free and independent press remains a democratic dream yet unrealized," said Luzadder. "Rebuilding the dream of a functional media rooted in truth and integrity, committed to the fundamentals of democracy, is dependent on that truth being known."

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SOURCE TrineDay