Consortium News is an independent investigative news outlet John Kiriakou writes for. He says he went to work for the outlet out of respect for its editor, Joe Lauria — formerly of the Christian Science Monitor and, for roughly a decade, the United Nations correspondent for the Wall Street Journal — and for its founder, Robert Parry, a Polk Award-winning journalist who was one of the major forces behind breaking the Iran-Contra story.[1]
Kiriakou’s place in the independent press
Writing op-eds is a major part of Kiriakou’s livelihood, spread across a range of mostly alternative sites — Consortium News, Reader Supported News, TruthDig, and occasionally the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times.[2][3]
That position carried a cost. A Washington Post article on fake news identified four of the sites Kiriakou contributes to as Russian fronts, Russian dupes or otherwise tied to Russia — none of which, he says, was true. Google and Facebook then altered their algorithms and cut traffic to those sites by fully half, with no proof offered at all. Kiriakou treats it as a case study in an anti-Russian hysteria that will be hard to reverse.[2][4]
His prescription for writers on that side of the press is not to retreat into it. Publishing in Reader Supported News, Consortium News, TruthDig and TruthOut means sitting around agreeing with each other; the harder and more necessary work is getting into the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the New York Times and the Washington Times, and forming alliances with conservatives — because the ideological spectrum is not a straight line but a circle, and the point where right and left meet is civil liberties.[5][6]
The columns
Several of Kiriakou’s Consortium News pieces are documented in his own interviews from 2019. “John Bolton’s Long Goodbye” argued from White House chatter that Trump had about had it with his national security advisor — a prediction that preceded Bolton’s departure that year.[7]
“In Search of a Russiagate Scalp: The Entrapment of Maria Butina” took apart the prosecution of Maria Butina, a Russian graduate student at American University routinely described in the mainstream press as a convicted Russian spy. She was never accused of spying, never charged with spying: she was convicted of conspiring to fail to fill out a form, under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, a 1938 law.[8][9][10] The piece also set out that the FBI had directed an informant to initiate a sexual relationship with Butina, which he did — after which prosecutors went to the press claiming she had traded sexual favours for access, a smear that made her into a honeypot sent to suborn the Republicans.[11][12] Drawing on his own acquaintance with the federal sentencing schedule, Kiriakou noted that the offence ranks among the most minor felonies available, alongside making a false statement, with a guideline of zero to six months for a first-time offender.[13]
He also used the column for memoir — a September 2019 piece on his first foreign tour, sent to Riyadh as a twenty-five-year-old officer to babysit the Saudi royal family after Iraq crossed the Kuwaiti border[14] — and for tradecraft criticism. “What Was This CIA Officer Thinking?”, on the 2019 Ukraine-call whistleblower, rested on the observation that the complaint does not read like a whistleblower report at all but like something written by committee, which is how the agency works: everything, literally everything, goes through the chain of command.[15][16]
The PayPal dispute
Kiriakou describes PayPal permanently shuttering Consortium News’s account, initially seizing the $9,350 held in it. The company only released the funds after public complaints — and, even then, continued to refuse to reinstate the account.[17]
30th-anniversary panel (November 2025)
On 15 November 2025 Consortium News marked its thirtieth birthday with a live panel featuring editor Joe Lauria in Washington, executive producer Kathy Vogans in Sydney, Elizabeth Vos in Arkansas and columnists Mary Kostakidis, Patrick Lawrence, Ray McGovern and John Kiriakou.[18] Kiriakou used his contributions to argue that the outlet’s continuing role is to publish a small stable of writers — Patrick Lawrence, McGovern, Kostakidis and Lauria — whose judgment can substitute for the video news he refuses to consume, and to defend the survival of independent outlets by way of curated distribution through X and Blue Sky where those writers can still be found.[19][20][21]
The 2026 recommendation
Asked in January 2026 to name his favourite independent media sources — and, first, which to avoid — Kiriakou put Consortium News at the head of the list of the ones worth having. “I’m very proud of Consortium News. I mean, Chris Hedges is there and Ray McGovern is there and so many people whose opinions I respect. So I like Consortium very much.”[22]
He framed the whole exercise as a shrinking field: there are, he and his co-host agreed, “fewer than there used to be.”[23] The outlets he named alongside it were CovertAction Magazine, antiwar.com and Reason — and the one he named to avoid was The Intercept.[22]