List of Journalists Fired or Self-exiled From Mainstream Media Outlets Because They Expressed or Wanted to Express Views (Like Being Critical of U.S. Wars) Unacceptable to the Outlets They Were Working For

We just updated [and updated here again on December 3, 2018] our list of journalists exiled or fired from mainstream media for expressing views that were unacceptable to their employers.  As you'll note, it was frequently because they expressed views that were critical of U.S. waged war.   We started this list in connection with our forums on where to get reliable news.  See our page here: Coming June 1st - Forum (The second) Where Do You Get Your News? What Are The Channels of Public Information Communication You Can Plug Into?

We are pretty sure we need to make additions to the this list and invite your suggestions. . . 


List of journalists fired or self-exiled from mainstream media outlets because they expressed or wanted to express views unacceptable to the outlets they were working for:

•        Phil Donahue- Legendary television host fired from his top-rated program by the “supposedly liberal” MSNC in 2003 during the run up to the Iraq War because he was expressing anti-war views.

    •    Bill Maher- Fired by ABC from his “Politically Incorrect” program for not saying exactly the right things about 9/11 in its aftermath.  He said that terrorists “staying in the airplane” that was to hit a building could not described as “cowardly.”  Since that time Maher has been has been doing Real Time With Bill Maher on HBO where he has always been careful not to be anti-corporate and has, as well, been careful about what he says about 9/11.

    •    James Risen- Risen was a reporter for the New York Times.  He and another Times reporter, Eric Lichtblau, wrote a story about the  secret illegal and unconstitutional surveillance of the American public by the George W. Bush administration that won the New York Times a Pulitzer Prize in 2006, but the Times originally suppressed that story.  Risen now works for the Intercept.

    •    Robert Parry- An award-wining American investigative journalist (and finalist for the 1985 Pulitzer Prize) best known for his role in covering the Iran-Contra affair for the Associated Press (AP) and Newsweek.  In 1995, Parry self-exiled himself from mainstream media to found Consortium News (the Consortium for Independent Journalism Inc.)

    •    Ed Schultz- Fired from the position if MSNBC in the spring of 2014 host after bridling about things such as directions he received from MSNBC management concerning what to cover and not to cover, including directions not to cover the Bernie Sanders campaign, including Sanders’ announcement that he was going to run for president.  Schultz now works for RT where he says he has far more freedom to cover what he wants how he wants.

•        Gary Webb- A journalist forced to resign from the San Jose Mercury News in 1997 and subsequently railroaded out of journalism with the CIA working at it in the background after Webb wrote a 1996 series uncovering the CIA's role in importing cocaine into the U.S. to secretly fund the Nicaraguan Contra rebels through the manufacture and sale of drugs in the U.S.  Pressured to drop pursuit of his story Webb published his evidence in the series "Dark Alliance" for which the national Society of Professional Journalists voted Webb "Journalist of the Year" for 1996.  Webb had earlier contributed Pulitzer Prize winning work at the paper.   He subsequently experienced a vicious smear campaign during which he found himself defending his integrity, his career, his family that ended in his unfortunate death.  Later revelations about CIA involvement in illegal drugs coming into the United States validated and amplified what Webb was the first to report.

    •    Seymour Hersh- It is observed that Hersh has been “increasingly marginalised and his work denigrated” although he once worked for the New York Times Washington Bureau to report such stories as the Watergate scandal, and exposed the My Lai Massacre and the US military’s abuses of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib.  Hersh has been forced from one outlet to another, each outlet more remote from where U.S. citizens are likely to learn what he is reporting: Publication of Hersh's work has moved from the New Yorker, to the London Review of Books to the German publication, Welt am Sonntag.  Thus the American public is unlikely to learn about Hersh's most recent reporting that although a sarin gas chemical weapons attack in Syria was used as an excuse for Trump's recent order of a “retaliatory” strike against the country, there was zero evidence of such an attack.  Similarly, previously reporting, based on what Hersh's contacts within the security and intelligence establishments, revealed that Assad's alleged use of sarin gas in Ghouta, outside Damascus in 2013 also failed to stand up to scrutiny.  In between the Hersh's reporting on these alleged sarin attacks mainstream media reacted in a suspectly ostracizing way to Hersh's scoop about ways in which the public was misled respecting the reported killing of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan.  Even in the London Review of Books the bin laden story immediately attracted so much attention it reportedly crashed the LRB servers. (In the fascinating Netflix "Wormwood" documentary by Errol Morris, which is about the still mysterious 1953 death, subsequent coverup and probable assassination by our government of an American scientist and Central Intelligence Agency employee participating in a secret government biological warfare program, Mr. Hersh explains what he is and isn't willing to report about events within the very secret intelligence community without sufficient sourcing.)

    •    Peter Arnett (and Producers April Oliver & Jack Smith)- Arnet, a Pulitzer Price who worked for CNN for 18 years and was famous for reporting from Baghdad during the Gulf War was, he said “muzzled,” and then fired by CNN, like his producers April Oliver and Jack Smith they did entitled "Valley of Death," (and a more senior producer resigned), because of an investigative report (a joint production of CNN and Time magazine), presenting evidence about how Army special forces venturing into Laos in September of 1970 used sarin gas in an operation to kill American soldiers who had defected into Laos from Vietnam.

•        Dan Rather (and his producer Mary Mapes)-  Dan Rather and others including his "60 Minutes" program producer Mary Mapes were fired by CBS (Rather's was a slow-burn firing) when covering the 2004 presidential election campaign they were subject to criticism for alleged liberal bias in reporting a basically true story about preferential treatment of George W. Bush in the National Guard (1968 to 1973 during which time Bush did not show up for a medical exam and stopped fulfilling his flying commitments).  The criticism leading up to the firing focused on the fact that documents with which the newspeople had been supplied to support their story were likely faked in whole or in part by somebody, possibly in a dirty trick intended to sucker them.  When a 2015 feature film, "Truth," starring Cate Blanchett and Robert Redford was made dramatizing the issues and events with respect to the firing CBS refused to run advertisements for it.

 •        Chris Hedges- Hedges was another award winning journalist working with a team to win a Pulitzer Prize for the New York Times in 2002.  Amnesty International gave him an award that year for international journalism.  He’s worked for Christian Science Monitor, NPR and was a foreign correspondent for the Times for fifteen years.  Hedges, under pressure from the Times, was forced to leave the Times in 2003 (listen at 14 minutes) because he had been denouncing the those urging the U.S. forward to its invasion of Iraq.  (Hedges was an early critic of the war.- We invaded in March of 2003.)  Hedges now writes for Truthdig and is a host of “On Contact” for RT.          

 •        Ashleigh Banfield-  NBC fired news journalist Ashleigh Banfield, host of “MSNBC Investigates,” from MSNBC in 2004 after officially scolding her in the spring of 2003, and thereupon banishing her, because she criticized her TV news colleagues for “sugarcoating Iraq war coverage with patriotism and not showing the reality of the conflict.”  She had criticized  “cable news operators who wrap themselves in the American flag and go after a certain target demographic.”

 •        Marc Lamont Hill- In November, 2018, Mr. Hill, an American academic, author, activist, and television personality, a Professor of Media Studies and Urban Education at Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, was fired from his position as a commentator for CNN twenty-four hours after he expressed his opinion on the Arab–Israeli conflict before the U.N. saying that Palestinians have a right to resist their occupation by Israel through international boycotts of Israel and to defend themselves from the Israeli military.  This point of view was considered unacceptably anti-Israel (while some tried to cast his view as being antisemitic). The coverage by FAIR, Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting, is especially insightful and detailed, plus it includes a call to action.

 •         William M. Arkin- (Added after January 2019 resignation)- We will see whether William M. Arkin who resigned NBC with his 2,228-word farewell “blistering critique” of what he calls “perpetual war” and the “creeping fascism of homeland security” stays self-exiled from NBC and the rest of the mainstream, corporately-owned media.  He may not have a choice.  Arkin was clear his critique “applies to all of the mainstream networks,” CNN, Fox, etc, not just NBC.  And Arkin said he wanted to “step back” and “think about how we can end this era of perpetual war and how we can build some real security, both in the United States and abroad.”  Arkin pointed out that, in the prior year, the United States has been bombing (listing them) nine countries (ten if we include, as we should, the U.S. participation in the bombing of Yemen).

 •        Tareq Haddad- (added December 2019)- Tareq Haddad resigned from Newsweek at the end of 2019 because Newsweek and its senior editors were burying a scandal.  The scandal was about the covering up of evidence, now with an every greater number of whistleblowers from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons coming forward, that a supposed chemical attack in Duoma, Syria, supposedly by the Assad regime, was faked to provoke the United States to escalate military actions in the country.  Haddad’s furnished a very detailed account, complete with screen shots of emails from his senior editors, of how his story was suppressed and how Newsweek mobilized with not so subtle efforts to communicate that he was out of line to think these kinds of stories should get published.  Haddad said about suppression of information by mainstream corporate media (providing evidence he cited) that "The U.S. government, in an ugly alliance with those the profit the most from war, has its tentacles in every part of the media — imposters, with ties to the U.S. State Department . .  filter out what can or cannot be reported. Inconvenient stories are completely blocked."