"How The CIA Controlled The Media" Topic

From a German journalist and also from Carl Bernstein (who looks back at the cold war era). Psychological warfare has been, of course, a part of warfare since ancient times.

In 1953, Joseph Alsop, then one of America's leading syndicated columnists, went to the Philippines to cover an election. He did not go because he was asked to do so by his syndicate. He did not go because he was asked to do so by the newspapers that printed his column. He went at the request of the CIA.

Alsop is one of more than 400 American journalists who in the past twenty?five years have secretly carried out assignments for the Central Intelligence Agency, according to documents on file at CIA headquarters. Some of these journalists' relationships with the Agency were tacit; some were explicit. There was cooperation, accommodation and overlap. Journalists provided a full range of clandestine services—from simple intelligence gathering to serving as go betweens with spies in Communist countries.

Reporters shared their notebooks with the CIA. Editors shared their staffs. Some of the journalists were Pulitzer Prize winners, distinguished reporters who considered themselves ambassadors without?portfolio for their country. Most were less exalted: foreign correspondents who found that their association with the Agency helped their work; stringers and freelancers who were as interested in the derring do of the spy business as in filing articles; and, the smallest category, full?time CIA employees masquerading as journalists abroad.

In many instances, CIA documents show, journalists were engaged to perform tasks for the CIA with the consent of the managements of America's leading news organizations.

"I was bribed by billionaires, I was bribed by the Americans to report…not exactly the truth."

– Udo Ulfkotte, a former editor of one of Germany's main daily publications, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

link

Surely more a Cold War topic?

Conrad – I am sorry. I forgot about the Cold War board. The boards overlap a bit. BTW, the German journalist is talking about more recent operations. So I would have cross posted for that anyway.

I spotted a couple of quotes on another site which may make you giggle.

"You could get a journalist cheaper than a good call girl, for a couple hundred dollars a month." – CIA operative discussing with Philip Graham, editor Washington Post, on the availability and prices of journalists willing to peddle CIA propaganda and cover stories. "Katherine The Great," by Deborah Davis (New York: Sheridan Square Press, 1991)

"The Central Intelligence Agency owns everyone of any significance in the major media." -- William Colby, former CIA Director, cited by Dave Mcgowan, Derailing Democracy

The KGB did it.
The British did it.
The French did it.
Somehow we are supposed to get the vapors because the CIA did what everybody else did.

In the USA the media have ALWAYS been in the back pocket of whatever political party their owners favored.
Am I allowed to point out obvious differences in philosophy between Fox and NBC etc? No? Then ignore that.

So the Media "cooperates" with intelligence agencies. Only those who regard "journalists" as some kind of secular saints can be surprised. Oh wait. Journalists today DO view themselves that way.

That's nice. And are they doing a good job?

Somehow we are supposed to get the vapors because the CIA did what everybody else did.

Dear Winston,

We can be interested in articles about other security services too. Don't get your knickers in a twist.

Signed,

Emmanuel Goldstein

Kind of funny though that the "left wing media elites" was the CIA stooging.

What you are calling left wing elites (e.g. the Washington Post people) had close ties with those who set up the OSS, which became the CIA. I'm reading a book which shows the directorships of the big corporations, high government posts, and those funding political parties at this period. The left and right sat side by side on boards, engaged in dodgy deals together, and married each other. Don't forget that the many "neocons" are former communists who switched to the right when it better served their people.

The CIA also recruited a lot of communists. There was a quote from one of the CIA directors who was challenged on hiring someone with communist leanings, and he said he hired nothing but communists.

Chortile

Go back and read about the career of William Duranty, the Times' Moscow News Chief who was an unabashed, unblinking apologist and sycophant for Stalin and the Soviet Union, including but not limited to validating the Soviet Show trials of the Terror and covering up the Terror Famine in the Ukraine in which 20 million Ukrainians were starved to death. Duranty did it not for money but because he was an ideological agent for Stalin and the Communists.

unabashed, unblinking apologist and sycophant for Stalin and the Soviet Union

I hope that you are aware of the vast number of people who praised Moscow from the time of the "revolution" up until (and for some even after) the Prague treason trials in 1952. As long as it was good for their people, they didn't care that millions of Russians were being murdered. It was difficult to learn the truth in newspapers. The Holodomor and Armenian Genocide have been down played and ignored for the same reasons.

There is a cartoon of a sheep being *ahem* assaulted from both left and right which is appropriate.

That sound you hear is the orbital railguns training in on Chortle's coordinates…

'We have news organizations that every day report "not exactly the truth."'

Yet that 'not exactly the truth' is always believed by the people of whichever Nationality presenting it, while the actual truth is often not believed if it doesn't correspond to the readers fixed viewpoint/beliefs.

Whereas today over 30 former-journalists now work for the current administration, not to mention the husband and wife teams that closely link senior news executives to White House staffers. Good job they are/were able to maintain their unbiased news coverage.

One of the fathers of my best friend, who was a freighter captain, was given a Jane's ship recognition book, by a CIA agent, so that he could report on any Soviet warships transiting the Panama Canal. If they are using merchant ship personnel as 'spies', they damn well would have been using the media. Colour me un shocked, far worse is the collusion between the current administration and the media, which destroys faith in the democratic process.

@Javelin98 – best laugh I have had all day (and yes I know you can't hear anything in space), I still loved it…

Let's just call it what it is – a symbiotic relationship. Journalists trade access to information in exchange for advocacy.

pjm

It occurs to me to ask a question which may sound very naive but I think is worth some thought. If it is not shocking that journalists and media, which claim to be impartial, collude with intelligence organisations, why not shock everyone and sue/prosecute them for fraud? They are misrepresenting themselves for profit and that is the definition of both civil and criminal fraud. In a nation as litigious as the US is, it is shocking that no one has done this.
A second question which occurs to me is why are journalists who disseminate information which the state would rather keep secret pilloried and occasionally prosecuted for doing so, but journalists who knowingly disseminate disinformation or propaganda rewarded for fraudulent behaviour?
It is clear to me that the "public interest" is very different from the "national interest" and when these interests conflict the public interest gets very short shrift?
Finally, when a reporter or media organisation disseminates information which is in the public interest to know, but which hurts the national interest, why do citizens stand around with their hands in their pockets, while the apparatus of the state persecutes and prosecutes these persons for doing their legally recognised job?
It is the state's job to keep secrets and it is the media's job to report the truth, including leaked state secrets. They are adversarial roles which are needed to keep the state in check and answerable to a fully informed public. If leakage of secrets threatens many lives, the reporting of them can be delayed but never should it be stopped. The framers of the US constitution gave specific protection to the press so that it would be able to check the power of the state, so the media has an implied responsibility to report the news without collusion between itself and the state. If these ties between the state's security apparatus and media personnel exist and can be proved in a court of law then both media and state persons involved in such pernicious collusion should be punished harshly, for this is tantamount to a kind of 'domestic treason'.
I think perhaps the rail guns will be moving to acquire a new target.
Rod Robertson.

Heck, what I miss the most from when I was in the Navy is access to the "Early Bird" news digest. It grabbed every wire service, almost every major national news agency, and would not only translate the news, it would add comments on the ideological background of the source.

Nothing particularly classified, or something that you couldn't discover on you own by reading a couple dozen articles from each source, but having the background tagged at the bottom of each story let you avoid the couple hours work to analyze each source yourself.

Nothing new. William Randolph Hurst started the Span-Am War. Probably at the request of his Mossad handlers…

Winston:
"The KGB did it.
The British did it.
The French did it.
Somehow we are supposed to get the vapors because the CIA did what everybody else did."

Get the vapors! Priceless.

Dan

Rod, you'd have to arrest most of the senior US press corps today for active collusion, in promoting a particular political agenda. The politicization of the press has a greater impact on a democracy, than 'collusion' with intelligence agencies, during the period of an all-encompassing, ideological 'conflict'.

Millites:
So, start by suing them for fraud, and then if the behaviour continues, prosecute them criminally.
Rod Robertson.