Senior CIA Agent and Deputy Director of the Directorate of Intelligence Worked Closely with Many of the Largest Media Outlets… (2)
… Shows Declassified Documents
Read the first part of the article
The government is still paying off reporters to spread disinformation. And the corporate media are acting like virtual “escort services” for the moneyed elites, selling access – for a price – to powerful government officials, instead of actually investigating and reporting on what those officials are doing.
One of the ways that the U.S. government spreads propaganda is by making sure that it gets its version out first. For example, the head of the U.S. Information Agency’s television and film division – Alvin A. Snyder – wrote in his book Warriors of Disinformation: How Lies, Videotape, and the USIA Won the Cold War:
“All governments, including our own, lie when it suits their purposes. The key is to lie first.”
“Another casualty, always war’s first, was the truth. The story of [the accidental Russian shootdown of a Korean airliner] will be remembered pretty much the way we told it in 1983, not the way it really happened.”
In 2013, the American Congress repealed the formal ban against the deployment of propaganda against U.S. citizens living on American soil. So there’s even less to constrain propaganda than before.
One of the most common uses of propaganda is to sell unnecessary and counter-productive wars. Given that the American media is always pro-war, mainstream publishers, producers, editors, and reporters are willing participants.
It’s not just lying about Saddam’s non-existent weapons of mass destruction, the corporate media is still selling lies to promote war.
Former Newsweek and Associated Press reporter Robert Parry notes that Ronald Reagan and the CIA unleashed a propaganda campaign in the 1980’s to sell the American public on supporting the Contra rebels, utilizing private players such as Rupert Murdoch to spread disinformation. Parry notes that many of the same people that led Reagan’s domestic propaganda effort in the 1980’s are in power today:
“While the older generation that pioneered these domestic propaganda techniques has passed from the scene, many of their protégés are still around along with some of the same organizations. The National Endowment for Democracy, which was formed in 1983 at the urging of CIA Director Casey and under the supervision of Walter Raymond’s NSC operation, is still run by the same neocon, Carl Gershman, and has an even bigger budget, now exceeding $100 million a year.”
“Gershman and his NED played important behind-the-scenes roles in instigating the Ukraine crisis by financing activists, journalists and other operatives who supported the coup against elected President Yanukovych. The NED-backed Freedom House also beat the propaganda drums.”
“Two other Reagan-era veterans, Elliott Abrams and Robert Kagan, have both provided important intellectual support for continuing U.S. interventionism around the world. Kagan’s article for The New Republic, entitled “Superpowers Don’t Get to Retire,” touched such a raw nerve with President Obama that he hosted Kagan at a White House lunch and crafted the presidential commencement speech at West Point to deflect some of Kagan’s criticism of Obama’s hesitancy to use military force.”
“Rupert Murdoch’s media empire is bigger than ever …”
Another key to American propaganda is the constant repetition of propaganda. As Business Insider reported in 2013:
“Lt. Col. Daniel Davis, a highly-respected officer who released a critical report regarding the distortion of truth by senior military officials in Iraq and Afghanistan From Lt. Col. Davis:
In context, Colonel Leap is implying we ought to change the law to enable Public Affairs officers to influence American public opinion when they deem it necessary to «protect a key friendly center of gravity, to wit US national will.»
The Smith-Mundt Modernization Act of 2012 appears to serve this purpose by allowing for the American public to be a target audience of U.S. government-funded information campaigns.
Davis also quotes Brigadier General Ralph O. Baker – the Pentagon officer responsible for the Department of Defense’s Joint Force Development – who defines Information Operations (IO) as activities undertaken to «shape the essential narrative of a conflict or situation and thus affect the attitudes and behaviors of the targeted audience.»
Brig. Gen. Baker goes on to equate descriptions of combat operations with the standard marketing strategy of repeating something until it is accepted:
For years, commercial advertisers have based their advertisement strategies on the premise that there is a positive correlation between the number of times a consumer is exposed to product advertisement and that consumer’s inclination to sample the new product. The very same principle applies to how we influence our target audiences when we conduct COIN.
And those «thousands of hours per week of government-funded radio and TV programs» appear to serve Baker’s strategy, which states: «Repetition is a key tenet of IO execution, and the failure to constantly drive home a consistent message dilutes the impact on the target audiences.»”
Government Massively Manipulates the Web, Social Media and Other Forms of Communication
Of course, the Web and social media have become a huge media platform, and the Pentagon and other government agencies are massively manipulating both.
Documents released by Snowden show that spies manipulate polls, website popularity and page view counts, censor videos they don’t like and amplify messages they do.
The CIA and other government agencies also put enormous energy into pushing propaganda through movies, television and video games.
Cross-Border Propaganda
Mohammed Mossadegh
Propaganda isn’t limited to our own borders …
Sometimes, the government plants disinformation in American media in order to mislead foreigners. For example, an official government summary of America’s overthrow of the democratically-elected prime minister of Iran Mohammed Mossadegh in the 1950′s states, “In cooperation with the Department of State, CIA had several articles planted in major American newspapers and magazines which, when reproduced in Iran, had the desired psychological effect in Iran and contributed to the war of nerves against Mossadeq”.
The CIA has also bribed leading foreign journalists.
And CNN accepted money from the brutal Bahrani dictatorship to run pro-monarchy propaganda.
Everyone Who Challenges the Status Quo Is Labeled As a Purveyor of “Fake News” Or Worse
The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution protects the freedom of the press from censorship by government.
Indeed, the entire reason that it’s unlawful for the government to stop stories from being printed is because that would punish those who criticize those in power.
Why? Because the Founding Father knew that governments (like the British monarchy) will always crack down on those who point out that the emperor has no clothes.
But the freedom of the press is under massive attack in America today…
For example, the powers-that-be argue that only highly-paid corporate media shills who will act as stenographers for the fat cats should have the constitutional protections guaranteeing freedom of the press.
A Harvard law school professor argued that the First Amendment is outdated and should be abandoned.
When financially-savvy bloggers challenged the Federal Reserve’s policy, a Fed official called all bloggers stupid and unqualified to comment.
And the government is treating the real investigative reporters like criminals … or even terrorists:
Obama has gone after top reporters. His Department of Justice labeled chief Fox News Washington correspondent James Rosen a “criminal co-conspirator” in a leak case, and for many years threatened to prosecute Pulitzer-prize winning New York Times journalist James Risen.
The Obama administration also spied on Risen, Rosen, the Associated Press, CBS reporter Cheryl Atkinson and other media. In fact, top NSA whistleblowers told Washington’s Blog that the NSA has spied on reporters for well over a decade … to make sure they don’t reveal illegal government programs. The Pentagon smeared USA Today reporters because they investigated illegal Pentagon propaganda. Reporters covering the Occupy protests were targeted for arrest.
The government admited that journalists could be targeted with counter-terrorism laws. For example, after Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Chris Hedges, journalist Naomi Wolf, Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg and others sued the government to enjoin the NDAA’s allowance of the indefinite detention of Americans – the judge asked the government attorneys 5 times whether journalists like Hedges could be indefinitely detained simply for interviewing and then writing about bad guys. The government refused to promise that journalists like Hedges won’t be thrown in a dungeon for the rest of their lives without any right to talk to a judge.
In an effort to protect Bank of America from the threatened Wikileaks expose of the bank’s wrongdoing, the Department of Justice told Bank of America to a hire a specific hardball-playing law firm to assemble a team to take down Wikileaks.
The NSA and its British counterpart treated Wikileaks like a terrorist organization, going so far as to target its employees politically, and to spy on visitors to its website.
yogaesoteric
March 2, 2019