Jack Cashill is a man of wide ranging interests: an investigative journalist, author of more than a dozen books, essayist, editor and co-writer of additional books, film-maker, and advertising/communications/political consultant. I got to know Jack, who is one year younger than me, because he shares my conservative political and social outlook, and recently, he and I have worked on some essays together on the Derek Chauvin prosecution for American Thinker and American Spectator.

I report here on Jack’s latest book Empire of Lies: Big Media’s 30-Year War on Truth, 1994-2024 ($20 for a paperback on Amazon), which summarizes his observations and his investigations of major political matters of the past 30 years in America, and the lies that mainstream media manufactured about those important events.

There was once a trust that the American public held for the media (tv/radio/print) which has been sufficiently eroded. Jack has been in the middle of it all, and he writes with authority and insight, focusing on the story with a keen eye and ear for the dynamics, the players, and the deceptions that support his foundational thesis: the lies of the media and their deceptions, by commission or omission, have been critical weaponry used to control the public’s perceptions and hide the truth.

Jack was born and raised the son of a Newark policeman, from an Irish Catholic family in a middle class neighborhood.  He attended Manhattan’s Regis Jesuit High School, then Sienna College before Purdue for a PhD in American Studies. He has authored 15 books, written essays and edited/coauthored many more, contributed to many magazines, and lectured at domestic, and even foreign, venues.

Jack writes in plain English and tells good stories, and he opens his book with the following: 

I really cannot complain that the major media have chosen not to do their job these last thirty years.  It has left the field of truth telling to independent journalists like myself… At the turn of the century, weary of making TV commercials and writing ads, I found myself with as much information at my fingertips as the editor of the New York Times without … political restraints.

So Jack in the 2000s started writing stories about the things he knew and other things he discovered; that’s the content of this book, a book that is ideal for readers of American Thinker, conservatives with a taste for political issues and a concern about the future of the uniquely superior Republic—America.

I can’t possibly tell the reader how much information and knowledge Jack Cashill covers in the 23 stories of political/media matters, which he knows so well: the Clintons, TWA 800, Oklahoma City, Benghazi, Ron Brown, Obama, Trayvon Martin, J6, Biden, lawfare.  In many cases he interviewed the players in the stories.

Jack’s ability to dredge up and organize information and make sense of it for the readers’ benefit will be well demonstrated before you find yourself even one quarter of the way through the no-nonsense, efficient, fast-moving, 23 chapters.  I read the book in two sessions, I found it so riveting and compelling. While I was familiar with these events and knew about some of the lies, Jack made me see mo’ better, and I am better for it.

If you are a political person and care about our country, reading Jack’s book will make you wiser.  As Sun Tzu the military master said, know your enemy and know yourself.

Jack Cashill’s book is like a debriefing on the last 30 years of media lies that Trump properly labeled and continues to call, “fake News.”  Jack nailed this story—but that’s what good journalists do.

John Dale Dunn is an emergency physician and attorney in Brownwood, Texas.

Image: Book cover.