The Corporate-Run Media - formerly "Mainstream Media".
Not every item of news should be published. Rather must those who control news policies endeavor to make every item of news serve a certain purpose. Joseph Paul Goebbels Nazi Propaganda Minister
We are grateful to the Washington Post, the New York Times, Time Magazine, and other great publications (the Mainstream/Mass-Media) whose directors have attended our meetings and respected their promises of discretion for almost forty years.
It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subject to the bright lights of publicity during these years.
But the world is now more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world government. The supernational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national auto-determination practiced in past centuries. David Rockefeller C.F.R. and Trilateral Commission Founder
"It is not enough for journalists to see themselves as mere messengers without understanding the hidden agendas of the message and myths that surround it."John Pilger
"We [the Zionists] have it all under such control that no one - no one or nobody can [reach] people unless it is done through 'our' media control. We have it sewed up!!" Harold Wallace Rosenthal from the Harold Wallace Rosenthal Interview 1976
'In March, 1915, the J.P. Morgan interests, the steel, shipbuilding, and powder interest, and their subsidiary organizations, got together 12 men high up in the newspaper world and employed them to select the most influential newspapers in the United States and sufficient number of them to control generally the policy of the daily press... They found it was only necessary to purchase the control of 25 of the greatest papers.' U.S. Congressman Oscar Callaway, 1917
'The world can therefore seize the opportunity [Persian Gulf crisis] to fulfill the long-held promise of a New World Order where diverse nations are drawn together in common cause to achieve the universal aspirations of mankind.' George Herbert Walker Bush
It shapes public opinion as most people are indoctrinated to "have faith" to do as they are told, and not to think for themselves.
The Jews have the entire media from the film industry to the local news tied up.
Jews are in all of the key positions, no different from their control of the Catholic Church and the Protestant World Council of Churches.
The average Jew, though lacking in creative ability, has an IQ of 135 (100 is normal).
This is above the 98th percentile of the population. In addition, most are college educated.
While high intelligence and advanced education are desirable and noteworthy, the problem lies in what these self-appointed "Chosen of God" are doing to the detriment of the Gentile peoples in their relentless quest for Jewish world domination.
These people have played both sides against the middle for centuries in order to deceive the Gentiles.
A prime example is how Israel is openly democratic but works to promote communism behind the scenes.
In order to further add more deception, the Jewish run media would forever whine and publicize any injustices committed against the Jewish people in the former Soviet Union.
Unbeknownst to many, the Jews had full control of the Kremlin from the beginning.
This was just a front.
They don't care how many of their own they have to sacrifice to reach their goals.
Their success comes from controlling both sides.
If you can understand the above, the program of Christianity is so obvious.
On one hand, they claim to be against Christianity, but behind the scenes, they run the entire program as they are all in key positions.
Pope John Paul II, who was born of a Jewish mother (Katz) is only one of a long line of Jewish Catholic popes.
There are also many Catholic Cardinals, Bishops and high-ranking clergy who are Jews, all controlling the important positions.
Publicly claiming persecution by Christians is very clever as most people don't even stop to think.
Nearly every book about the Inquisition makes it blatant that the Jews were victimized, though the authors fail to mention that the Inquisition itself was run and operated by Jews in the Catholic Church.
All of this is to create a diversion and distraction, same as the Christian concept of the character of the Devil keeps Christians fearful and under their control.
The Jewish controlled media has always been behind blaspheming the True Creator God Satan and making the Original Gods into monsters and spooks.
They demean them and make them look like buffoons to the world.
A perfect example is a movie found in most video stores titled "Dagon."
Dagon was God of the Gentile Phoenicians and Philistines.
The box has a hideous looking monster on it and is of the "horror" genre.
The number of demeaning movies about Satan is endless.
He is depicted as the epitome of all evil, shown as a threatening monster out to possess souls and damn them to an everlasting fire, among other things.
While the Jews openly protest Christianity, they promote it behind the scenes.
Christians get the primetime slots and much positive publicity from the Jewish media. Christianity is a program with a means to an end.
It is a stepping off point to atheism which is the essence of communism.
Promoting communism, where all spiritual power is given up and denied is the real purpose of the bible.
Because Christianity is a false religion, little or nothing ever happens in the way of spirituality. Intelligent people who can think for themselves often turn to atheism while the sheep remain enslaved.
The goal of Jewish communism is the Jewish run state becomes "God" and all belief in and knowledge of spirituality is destroyed.
Spiritual powers are kept in the hands of a controlling few - again Jews.
The goal of Christianity is to make people believe spiritual power and anything of the occult and spirit world is nothing but fiction.
Again, they play both sides against the middle as the Jewish movie producers and script writes will publicly take the heat for ridiculing Christianity in movies and sitcoms, but behind the scenes, they promote it.
Below is an excerpt of an article revealing the extent of the control the Jews have over our media:
The Facts of Jewish Media Control
Electronic News & Entertainment Media
The largest media conglomerate today is Walt Disney Company, whose chairman and CEO, Michael Eisner, is a Jew.
The Disney Empire, headed by a man described by one media analyst as a "control freak", includes several television production companies:
Walt Disney Television
Touchstone Television
Buena Vista Television
its own cable network with 14 million subscribers, and two video production companies.
As for feature films, the Walt Disney Picture Group, headed by Joe Roth (also a Jew), includes:
Touchstone Pictures
Hollywood Pictures
Caravan Pictures
Disney also owns Miramax Films, run by the Weinstein brothers.
When the Disney Company was run by the Gentile Disney family prior to its takeover by Eisner in 1984, it epitomized wholesome, family entertainment.
While it still holds the rights to Snow White, under Eisner, the company has expanded into the production of graphic sex and violence.
In addition, it has 225 affiliated stations in the United States and is part owner of several European TV companies.
ABC's cable subsidiary, ESPN, is headed by president and CEO Steven Bornstein, a Jew.
This corporation also has a controlling share of Lifetime Television and the Arts & Entertainment Network cable companies.
ABC Radio Network owns eleven AM and ten FM stations, again in major cities such as:
New York
Washington
Los Angeles
and has over 3,400 affiliates.
Although primarily a telecommunications company, Capital Cities/ABC earned over $1 billion in publishing in 1994.
It owns:
seven daily newspapers
Fairchild
Publications
and the Diversified Publishing Group.
Time Warner, Inc, is the second of the international media leviathans.
The chairman of the board and CEO, Gerald Levin, is a Jew.
Time Warner's subsidiary HBO is the country's largest pay TV cable network.
Warner Music is by far the world's largest record company, with 50 labels, the biggest of which is Warner Brothers Records, headed by Danny Goldberg.
Stuart Hersch is president of Warnervision, Warner Music's video production unit.
Goldberg and Hersch are Jews.
Warner Music was an early promoter of "gangsta rap."
Through its involvement with Interscope Records, it helped popularize a genre whose graphic lyrics explicitly urge Blacks to commit acts of violence against Whites.
In addition to cable and music, Time Warner is heavily involved in the production of feature films (Warner Brothers Studio) and publishing.
Time Warner's publishing division (editor-in-chief Norman Pearlstine, a Jew) is the largest magazine publisher in the country:
Time
Sports Illustrated
People
Fortune
When Ted Turner, a Gentile, made a bid to buy CBS in 1985, there was panic in media boardrooms across the nation.
Turner made a fortune in advertising and then had built a successful cable-TV news network, CNN.
Although Turner employed a number of Jews in key executive positions in CNN and had never taken public positions contrary to Jewish interests, he is a man with a large ego and a strong personality and was regarded by Chairman William Paley (real name Palinsky, a Jew) and the other Jews at CBS as uncontrollable: a loose cannon who might at some time in the future turn against them.
Furthermore, Jewish newsman Daniel Schorr, who had worked for Turner, publicly charged that his former boss held a personal dislike for Jews.
To block Turner's bid, CBS executives invited billionaire Jewish theater, hotel, insurance, and cigarette magnate Laurence Tisch to launch a "friendly" takeover of the company, and from 1986 till 1995 Tisch was the chairman and CEO of CBS, removing any threat of non-Jewish influence there.
Subsequent efforts by Turner to acquire a major network have been obstructed by Levin's Time Warner, which owns nearly 20 percent of CBS stock and has veto power over major deals.
Viacom, Inc, headed by Sumner Redstone (born Murray Rothstein), a Jew, is the third largest megamedia corporation in the country, with revenues of over $10 billion a year.
Viacom, which produces and distributes TV programs for the three largest networks, owns 12 television stations and 12 radio stations.
It produces feature films through Paramount Pictures, headed by Jewess Sherry Lansing.
Its publishing division includes Prentice Hall, Simon & Schuster, and Pocket Books.
It distributes videos through over 4,000 Blockbuster stores.
Viacom's chief claim to fame, however, is as the world's largest provider of cable programming, through its:
Showtime
MTV
Nickelodeon
and other networks.
Since 1989, MTV and Nickelodeon have acquired larger and larger shares of the younger television audience.
With the top three, and by far the largest, media companies in the hand of Jews, it is difficult to believe that such an overwhelming degree of control came about without a deliberate, concerted effort on their part.
What about the other big media companies?
Number four on the list is Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, which owns Fox Television and 20th Century Fox Films.
Murdoch is a Gentile, but Peter Chermin, who heads Murdoch's film studio and also oversees his TV production, is a Jew.
Number five is the Japanese Sony Corporation, whose U.S. subsidiary, Sony Corporation of America, is run by Michael Schulhof, a Jew.
Alan Levine, another Jew, heads the Sony Pictures division.
Most of the television and movie production companies that are not owned by the largest corporations are also controlled by Jews.
For example, New World Entertainment, proclaimed by one media analyst as
"The premiere independent TV program producer in the United States,"
is owned by Ronald Perelman, a Jew.
The best known of the smaller media companies, Dreamworks SKG, is a strictly kosher affair.
Dream Works was formed in 1994 amid great media hype by recording industry mogul David Geffen, former Disney Pictures chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg, and film director Steven Spielberg, all three of whom are Jews.
The company produces:
movies
animated films
television programs
and recorded music.
Two other large production companies, MCA and Universal Pictures, are both owned by Seagram Company, Ltd.
The president and CEO of Seagram, the liquor giant, is Edgar Bronfman Jr., who is also president of the World Jewish Congress.
It is well known that Jews have controlled the production and distribution of films since the inception of the movie industry in the early decades of the 20th century.
This is still the case today.
Films produced by just the five largest motion picture companies mentioned above--
Disney
Warner Brothers
Sony
Paramount (Viacom)
and Universal (Seagram)--accounted for 74 per cent of the total box- office receipts for the first eight months of 1995.
The big three in television network broadcasting used to be:
ABC
CBS
NBC
With the consolidation of the media empires, these three are no longer independent entities.
While they were independent, however, each was controlled by a Jew since its inception:
ABC by Leonard Goldenson, CBS first by William Paley and then by Lawrence Tisch, and NBC first by David Sarnoff and then by his son Robert.
Over periods of several decades, these networks were staffed from top to bottom with Jews, and the essential Jewishness of network television did not change when the networks were absorbed by other corporations.
The Jewish presence in television news remains particularly strong.
As noted, ABC is part of Eisner's Disney Company, and the executive producers of ABC's news programs are all Jews:
Victor Neufeld (20- 20), Bob Reichbloom (Good Morning America), and Rick Kaplan (World News Tonight).
CBS was recently purchased by Westinghouse Electric Corporation.
Nevertheless, the man appointed by Lawrence Tisch, Eric Ober, remains president of CBS News, and Ober is a Jew.
At NBC, now owned by General Electric, NBC News president Andrew Lack is a Jew, as are executive producers:
Jeff Zucker (Today)
Jeff Gralnick (NBC Nightly News)
Neal Shapiro (Dateline)
The Print Media After television news, daily newspapers are the most influential information medium in America.
Sixty million of them are sold (and presumably read) each day.
These millions are divided among some 1,500 different publications.
One might conclude that the sheer number of different newspapers across America would provide a safeguard against Jewish control and distortion.
However, this is not the case.
There is less independence, less competition, and much less representation of our interests than a casual observer would think.
The days when most cities and even towns had several independently owned newspapers published by local people with close ties to the community are gone.
Today, most "local" newspapers are owned by a rather small number of large companies controlled by executives who live and work hundreds or ever thousands of miles away.
The fact is that only about 25 per cent of the country's 1,500 papers are independently owned; the rest belong to multi-newspaper chains.
Only a handful are large enough to maintain independent reporting staffs outside their own communities; the rest depend on these few for all of their national and international news.
The Newhouse empire of Jewish brothers Samuel and Donald Newhouse provides an example of more than the lack of real competition among America's daily newspapers: it also illustrates the insatiable appetite Jews have shown for all the organs of opinion control on which they could fasten their grip.
The Newhouses own 26 daily newspapers, including several large and important ones, such as:
the Cleveland Plain Dealert
the Newark Star-Ledger
the New Orleans Times-Picayune
the nation's largest trade book publishing conglomerate, Random House, with all its subsidiaries; Newhouse Broadcasting, consisting of 12 television broadcasting stations and 87 cable-TV systems, including some of the country's largest cable networks; the Sunday supplement Parade, with a circulation of more than 22 million copies per week.
Some two dozen major magazines, including:
the New Yorker
Vogue
Mademoiselle
Glamour
Vanity Fair
Bride's
Gentlemen's Quarterly
Self
House & Garden
and all the other magazines of the wholly owned Conde Nast group.
This Jewish media empire was founded by the late Samuel Newhouse, an immigrant from Russia.
The gobbling up of so many newspapers by the Newhouse family was in large degree made possible by the fact that newspapers are not supported by their subscribers, but by their advertisers.
It is advertising revenue--not the small change collected from a newspaper's readers--that largely pays the editor's salary and yields the owner's profit.
Whenever the large advertisers in a city choose to favor one newspaper over another with their business, the favored newspaper will flourish while its competitor dies.
Since the beginning of the 20th century, when Jewish mercantile power in America became a dominant economic force, there has been a steady rise in the number of American newspapers in Jewish hands, accompanied by a steady decline in the number of competing Gentile newspapers--primarily as a result of selective advertising policies by Jewish merchants.
Furthermore, even those newspapers still under Gentile ownership and management are so thoroughly dependent upon Jewish advertising revenue that their editorial and news reporting policies are largely constrained by Jewish likes and dislikes.
It holds true in the newspaper business as elsewhere that he who pays the piper calls the tune.
Three Jewish Newspapers
The suppression of competition and the establishment of local monopolies on the dissemination of news and opinion have characterized the rise of Jewish control over America's newspapers.
The resulting ability of the Jews to use the press as an unopposed instrument of Jewish policy could hardly be better illustrated than by the examples of the nation's three most prestigious and influential newspapers:
the New York Times
the Wall Street Journal
the Washington Post
These three, dominating America's financial and political capitals, are the newspapers which set the trends and the guidelines for nearly all the others.
They are the ones which decide what is news and what isn't, at the national and international levels.
They originate the news; the others merely copy it, and all three newspapers are in Jewish hands.
The New York Times was founded in 1851 by two Gentiles, Henry Raymond and George Jones.
After their deaths, it was purchased in 1896 from Jones's estate by a wealthy Jewish publisher, Adolph Ochs.
His great-grandson, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Jr., is the paper's current publisher and CEO.
The executive editor is Max Frankel, and the managing editor is Joseph Lelyveld.
Both of the latter are also Jews.
The Sulzberger family also owns, through the New York Times Co., 33 other newspapers, including the Boston Globe; twelve magazines, including McCall's and Family Circle with circulations of more than 5 million each; seven radio and TV broadcasting stations; a cable-TV system; and three book publishing companies.
The New York Times News Service transmits:
news stories
features
photographs
from the New York Times by wire to 506 other:
newspapers
news agencies
magazines
Of similar national importance is the Washington Post, which, by establishing its "leaks" throughout government agencies in Washington, has an inside track on news involving the Federal government.
The Washington Post, like the New York Times, had a non- Jewish origin.
It was established in 1877 by Stilson Hutchins, purchased from him in 1905 by John McLean, and later inherited by Edward McLean.
In June 1933, however, at the height of the Great Depression, the newspaper was forced into bankruptcy.
It was purchased at a bankruptcy auction by Eugene Meyer, a Jewish financier.
The Washington Post is now run by Katherine Meyer Graham, Eugene Meyer's daughter.
She is the principal stockholder and the board chairman of the Washington Post Co.
In 1979, she appointed her son Donald publisher of the paper. He now also holds the posts of president and CEO of the Washington Post Co.
The Washington Post Co. has a number of other media holdings in:
newspapers
television
magazines
most notably the nation's number-two weekly newsmagazine, Newsweek.
The Wall Street Journal, which sells 1.8 million copies each weekday, is the nation's largest-circulation daily newspaper.
It is owned by Dow Jones & Company, Inc., a New York corporation which also publishes 24 other daily newspapers and the weekly financial tabloid Barron's, among other things.
The chairman and CEO of Dow Jones is Peter Kann, who is a Jew. Kann also holds the posts of chairman and publisher of the Wall Street Journal.
Most of New York's other major newspapers are in no better hands than the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.
The New York Daily News is owned by Jewish real-estate developer Mortimer B. Zuckerman.
The Village Voice is the personal property of Leonard Stern, the billionaire Jewish owner of the Hartz Mountain pet supply firm.
Other Mass Media
The story is pretty much the same for other media as it is for:
television
radio
newspapers
Consider, for example, newsmagazines.
There are only three of any not published in the United States:
Time
Newsweek
U.S. News and World Report
Time, with a weekly circulation of 4.1 million, is published by a subsidiary of Time Warner Communications.
The CEO of Time Warner Communications, as mentioned above, is Gerald Levin, a Jew.
Newsweek, as mentioned above, is published by the Washington Post Company, under the Jewess Katherine Meyer Graham.
Its weekly circulation is 3.2 million. U.S. News & World Report, with a weekly circulation of 2.3 million, is owned and published by Mortimer Zuckerman, a Jew. Zuckerman also owns the Atlantic Monthly and New York's tabloid newspaper, the Daily News, which is the sixth- largest paper in the country.
Among the giant book-publishing conglomerates, the situation is also Jewish.
Three of the six largest book publishers in the U.S., according to Publisher's Weekly, are owned or controlled by Jews.
The three are first-place Random House (with its many subsidiaries, including Crown Publishing Group), third-place Simon & Schuster, and sixth-place Time Warner Trade Group (including Warner Books and Little, Brown).
Another publisher of special significance is Western Publishing.
Although it ranks only 13th in size among all U.S. publishers, it ranks first among publishers of children's books, with more than 50 percent of the market. Its chairman and CEO is Richard Snyder, a Jew, who just replaced Richard Bernstein, also a Jew.
The Effect of Jewish Control of the Media
These are the facts of Jewish media control in America.
Anyone willing to spend several hours in a large library can verify their accuracy.
I hope that these facts are disturbing to you, to say the least.
Should any minority be allowed to wield such awesome power?
Certainly, not and allowing a people with beliefs such as expressed in the Talmud, to determine what we get to read or watch in effect gives this small minority the power to mold our minds to suit their own Talmudic interests, interests which as we have demonstrated are diametrically opposed to the interests of our people.
By permitting the Jews to control our news and entertainment media, we are doing more than merely giving them a decisive influence on our political system and virtual control of our government; we also are giving them control of the minds and souls of our children, whose attitudes and ideas are shaped more by Jewish television and Jewish films than by their parents, their schools, or any other influence.
Agenda-Setting Theory - Mass-News Media
"The press may not be successful much of the time in telling people what to think, but it is stunningly successful in telling its readers what to think about." —Bernard C. Cohen, 1963 [1]
The Agenda-setting theory is the theory that the mass-news media have a large influence on audiences by their choice of what stories to consider newsworthy and how much prominence and space to give them.
Agenda-setting theory’s central axiom is salience transfer, or the ability of the mass media to transfer importance of items on their mass agendas to the public agendas.
History
Foundation The Media Agenda is the set of issues addressed by media sources and the public agenda which are issues the public consider important (Miller, 2005). Agenda-setting theory was introduced in 1972 by Maxwell McCombs and Donald Shaw in their ground breaking study of the role of the media in 1968 presidential campaign in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. [2]
The theory explains the correlation between the rate at which media cover a story and the extent that people think that this story is important. This correlation has been shown to occur repeatedly.
In the dissatisfaction of the magic bullet theory, Maxwell McCombs and Donald Shaw introduced agenda-setting theory in the Public Opinion Quarterly. The theory was derived from their study that took place in Chapel Hill, NC, where the researchers surveyed 100 undecided voters during the 1968 presidential campaign on what they thought were key issues and measured that against the actual media content.
The ranking of issues was almost identical. The conclusions matched their hypothesis: The mass media positioned the agenda for public opinion by emphasizing specific topics (Hamm, 1998). Subsequent research on agenda-setting theory provided evidence for the cause-and-effect chain of influence being debated by critics in the field.
One particular study made leaps to prove the cause-effect relationship. The study was conducted by Yale researchers, Shanto Iyengar, Mark Peters, and Donald Kinder. The researchers had three groups of subjects fill out questionnaires about their own concerns and then each group watched different evening news programs, each of which emphasized a different issue.
After watching the news for four days, the subjects again filled out questionnaires and the issues that they rated as most important matched the issues they viewed on the evening news (Griffin, 2005). The study demonstrated a cause-and-effect relationship between media agenda and public agenda. Since the theory’s conception, more than 350 studies have been performed to test the theory.
The theory has evolved beyond the media's influence on the public's perceptions of issue salience to political candidates and corporate reputation (Carroll & McCombs, 2003).
Important Aspects of Theory
Functions of Theory The agenda-setting function has multiple components
Media Agenda - issues discussed in the media (newspapers, television, radio)
Public Agenda - issues discussed and personally relevant to members of the public
Policy Agenda - issues that policy makers consider important (legislators)
Corporate Agenda - issues that big business and corporations consider important (corporate)
These four agendas are interrelated.
Two basic assumptions underlie most research on agenda-setting:
the press and the media do not reflect reality, they filter and shape it
media concentration on a few issues and subjects leads the public to perceive those issues as more important than other issues
Characteristics
Characteristics: research has focused on characteristics of audience, the issues, and the media that might predict variations in the agenda setting effect.
Need for Orientation: Research done by Weaver in 1977 suggested that individuals vary on their need for orientation. Need for orientation is a combination of the individual’s interest in the topic and uncertainty about the issue. The higher levels of interest and uncertainty produce higher levels of need for orientation. So the individual would be considerably likely to be influenced by the media stories (psychological aspect of theory) (Miller, 2005).
Issue Obtrusiveness: Research performed by Zucker (1978) suggested that an issue is obtrusive if most members of the public have had direct contact with it, and less obtrusive if audience members have not had direct experience. This means that agenda setting results should be strongest for unobtrusive issues because audience members must rely on media for information on these topics (Miller, 2005).
Various Levels of Agenda Setting
First-level agenda setting This is the level that is most traditionally studied by researchers. In this level the media use objects or issues to influence the public. In this level the media suggest what the public should think about (amount of coverage).
Second-level agenda setting. In this level the media focuses on the characteristics of the objects or issues. In this level the media suggest how the people should think about the issue.
There are two types of attributes:
cognitive (sustentative, or topics)
affective (evaluative, or positive, negative, neutral)
Intermedia agenda setting (salience transfer among the media)
(Coleman and Banning 2006; Lee 2005; Shoemaker & Reese, 1996)
Important Concepts
Gatekeeping - Control over the selection of content discussed in the media; what the public know and care about at any given time is mostly a product of media gatekeeping.
Priming - Effects of particular, prior context on retrieval and interpretation of information. The media's content will provide a lot of time and space to certain issues, making these issues more accessible and vivid in the public's mind (Miller, 2005).
Framing - Framing is a process of selective control over media content or public communication. Framing defines how a certain piece of media content is packaged so it will influence particular interpretations. This is accomplished through the use of selection, emphasis, exclusion, and elaboration. This is central to second-level agenda setting.
Usage of Theory
political advertising
political campaigns and debates
business news and corporate reputation (Carroll & McCombs, 2003)
business influence on federal policy (Berger, 2001)
legal systems, trials (Ramsey & McGuire, 2000)
role of groups, audience control, public opinion
public relations (Carroll & McCombs, 2003)
Strengths of Theory
It has explanatory power because it explains why most people prioritize the same issues as important.
It has predictive power because it predicts that if people are exposed to the same media, they will feel the same issues are important.
It can be proven false. If people aren’t exposed to the same media, they won’t feel the same issues are important.
Its meta-theoretical assumptions are balanced on the scientific side.
It lays groundwork for further research.
It has organizing power because it helps organize existing knowledge of media effects.
Limitations
Media users may not be as ideal as the theory assumes. People may not be well-informed, deeply engaged in public affairs, thoughtful and skeptical. Instead, they may pay only casual and intermittent attention to public affairs and remain ignorant of the details.
For people who have made up their minds, the effect is weakened.
News media cannot create or conceal problems, they may only alter the awareness, priorities and salience people attached to a set of problems.
Research has largely been inconclusive in establishing a causal relationship between public salience and media coverage.
Newspapers should have mastheads that mirror the world:
The Westinghouse Evening Scimitar
The Atlantic-Richfield Intelligentser
It is beginning to dawn on a growing number of armchair ombudsmen that the public print reports news from a parallel universe - one that has never heard of politically-motivated assassinations, CIA-Mafia banking thefts, mind control, death squads or even federal agencies with secret budgets fattened by cocaine sales - a place overrun by lone gunmen, where the CIA and Mafia are usually on their best behavior.
In this idyllic land, the most serious infraction an official can commit - is a the employment of a domestic servant with (shudder) no residency status.
This unlikely land of enchantment is the creation of MOCKINGBIRD.
It was conceived in the late 1940s, the most frigid period of the cold war, when the CIA began a systematic infiltration of the corporate media, a process that often included direct takeover of major news outlets.
In this period, the American intelligence services competed with communist activists abroad to influence European labor unions. With or without the cooperation of local governments, Frank Wisner, an undercover State Department official assigned to the Foreign Service, rounded up students abroad to enter the cold war underground of covert operations on behalf of his Office of Policy Coordination.
Philip Graham, a graduate of the Army Intelligence School in Harrisburg, PA, then publisher of the Washington Post., was taken under Wisner's wing to direct the program code-named Operation MOCKINGBIRD.
"By the early 1950s," writes former Village Voice reporter Deborah Davis in Katharine the Great, "Wisner 'owned' respected members of the New York Times, Newsweek, CBS and other communications vehicles, plus stringers, four to six hundred in all, according to a former CIA analyst."
The network was overseen by Allen Dulles, a templar for German and American corporations who wanted their points of view represented in the public print. Early MOCKINGBIRD influenced 25 newspapers and wire agencies consenting to act as organs of CIA propaganda.
Many of these were already run by men with reactionary views, among them,
William Paley (CBS)
C.D. Jackson (Fortune)
Henry Luce (Time)
Arthur Hays Sulzberger (N.Y. Times)
Activists curious about the workings of MOCKINGBIRD have since been appalled to find in FOIA documents that agents boasting in CIA office memos of their pride in having placed "important assets" inside every major news publication in the country.
It was not until 1982 that the Agency openly admitted that reporters on the CIA payroll have acted as case officers to agents in the field.
"World War III has begun," Henry's Luce's Life declared in March, 1947. "It is in the opening skirmish stage already."
The issue featured an excerpt of a book by James Burnham, who called for the creation of an,
"American Empire," "world-dominating in political power, set up at least in part through coercion (probably including war, but certainly the threat of war) and in which one group of people ... would hold more than its equal share of power."
George Seldes, the famed anti-fascist media critic, drew down on Luce in 1947, explaining that,
"although avoiding typical Hitlerian phrases, the same doctrine of a superior people taking over the world and ruling it, began to appear in the press, whereas the organs of Wall Street were much more honest in favoring a doctrine inevitably leading to war if it brought greater commercial markets under the American flag."
On the domestic front, an abiding relationship was struck between the CIA and William Paley, a wartime colonel and the founder of CBS.
A firm believer in "all forms of propaganda" to foster loyalty to the Pentagon, Paley hired CIA agents to work undercover at the behest of his close friend, the busy grey eminence of the nation's media, Allen Dulles. Paley's designated go-between in his dealings with the CIA was Sig Mickelson, president of CBS News from 1954 to 1961.
The CIA's assimilation of old guard fascists was overseen by the Operations Coordination Board, directed by C.D. Jackson, formerly an executive of Time magazine and Eisenhower's Special Assistant for Cold War Strategy. In 1954 he was succeeded by Nelson Rockefeller, who quit a year later, disgusted at the administration's political infighting.
Vice President Nixon succeeded Rockefeller as the key cold war strategist.
"Nixon," writes John Loftus, a former attorney for the Justice Department's Office of Special Investigations, took "a small boy's delight in the arcane tools of the intelligence craft - the hidden microphones, the 'black' propaganda."
Nixon especially enjoyed his visit to a Virginia training camp to observe Nazis in the "special forces" drilling at covert operations.
One of the fugitives recruited by the American intelligence underground was heroin smuggler Hubert von Bleucher, the son of A German ambassador. Hubert often bragged that that he was trained by the Abwehr, the German military intelligence division, while still a civilian in his twenties.
He served in a recon unit of the German Army until forced out for medical reasons in 1944, according to his wartime records.
He worked briefly as an assistant director for Berlin-Film on a movie entitled One Day..., and finished out the war flying with the Luftwaffe, but not to engage the enemy - his mission was the smuggling of Nazi loot out of the country. His exploits were, in part, the subject of Sayer and Botting's Nazi Gold, an account of the knockover of the Reichsbank at the end of the war.
In 1948 he flew the coop to Argentina. Posing as a photographer named Huberto von Bleucher Corell, he immediately paid court to Eva Peron, presenting her with an invaluable Gobelin tapestry (a selection from the wealth of artifacts confiscated by the SS from Europe's Jews?).
Hubert then met with Martin Bormann at the Hotel Plaza to deliver German marks worth $80 million. The loot financed the birth of the National Socialist Party in Argentina, among other forms of Nazi revival.
In 1951, Hubert migrated northward and took a job at the Color Corporation of America in Hollywood. He eked out a living writing scripts for the booming movie industry. His voice can be heard on a film set in the Amazon, produced by Walt Disney.
Nine years later he returned to Buenos Aires, then Dusseldorf, West Germany, and established a firm that developed not movie scripts, but anti-chemical warfare agents for the government.
At the Industrie Club in Dusseldorf in 1982, von Bleucher boasted to journalists,
"I am chief shareholder of Pan American Airways. I am the best friend of Howard Hughes. The Beach Hotel in Las Vegas is 45 percent financed by me. I am thus the biggest financier ever to appear in the Arabian Nights tales dreamed up by these people over their second bottle of brandy."
Not really.
Two the biggest financiers to stumble from the drunken dreams of world-moving affluence were, in their time, Moses Annenberg, publisher of The Philadelphia Inquirer, and his son Walter , the CIA/mob-anchored publisher of the TV Guide. Like most American high-rollers, Annenberg lived a double life. Moses, his father, was a scion of the Capone mob.
Both Moses and Walter were indicted in 1939 for tax evasions totaling many millions of dollars - the biggest case in the history of the Justice Department. Moses pled guilty and agreed to pay the government $8 million and settle $9 million in assorted tax claims, penalties and interest debts. Moses received a three-year sentence.
He died in Lewisburg Penitentiary.
Walter Annenbeg, the TV Guide magnate, was a lofty Republican.
On the campaign trail in April, 1988, George Bush flew into Los Angeles to woo Reagan's kitchen cabinet.
"This is the topping on the cake," Bush's regional campaign director told the Los Angeles Times.
The Bush team met at Annenberg's plush Rancho Mirage estate at Sunnylands, California.
It was at the Annenberg mansion that Nixon's cabinet was chosen, and the state's social and contributor registers built over a quarter-century of state political dominance by Ronald Reagan, whose acting career was launched by Operation MOCKINGBIRD.
The commercialization of television, coinciding with Reagan's recruitment by the Crusade for Freedom, a CIA front, presented the intelligence world with unprecedented potential for sowing propaganda and even prying in the age of Big Brother.
George Orwell glimpsed the possibilities when he installed omniscient video surveillance technology in 1948, a novel rechristened 1984 for the first edition published in the U.S. by Harcourt, Brace.
Operation Octopus, according to federal files, was in full swing by 1948, a surveillance program that turned any television set with tubes into a broadcast transmitter. Agents of Octopus could pick up audio and visual images with the equipment as far as 25 miles away.
Hale Boggs was investigating Operation Octopus at the time of his disappearance in the midst of the Watergate probe.
In 1952, at MCA, Actors' Guild president Ronald Reagan - a screen idol recruited by MOCKINGBIRD's Crusade for Freedom to raise funds for the resettlement of Nazis in the U.S., according to Loftus - signed a secret waiver of the conflict-of-interest rule with the mob-controlled studio, in effect granting it a labor monopoly on early television programming.
In exchange, MCA made Reagan a part owner.
Furthermore, historian C. Vann Woodward, writing in the New York Times, in 1987, reported that Reagan had,
"fed the names of suspect people in his organization to the FBI secretly and regularly enough to be assigned 'an informer's code number, T-10.' His FBI file indicates intense collaboration with producers to 'purge' the industry of subversives."
No one ever turned a suspicious eye on Walter Cronkite, a former intelligence officer and in the immediate postwar period UPI's Moscow correspondent.
Cronkite was lured to CBS by Operation MOCKINGBIRD's Phil Graham, according to Deborah Davis.
Another television conglomerate, Cap Cities, rose like a horror-film simian from CIA and Mafia heroin operations. Among other organized-crime Republicans, Thomas Dewey and his neighbor Lowell Thomas threw in to launch the infamous Resorts International, the corporate front for Lansky's branch of the federally-sponsored mob family and the corporate precursor to Cap Cities.
Another of the investors was James Crosby, a Cap Cities executive who donated $100,000 to Nixon's 1968 presidential campaign. This was the year that Resorts bought into Atlantic City casino interests. Police in New jersey attempted, with no success, to spike the issuance of a gambling license to the company, citing Mafia ties.
In 1954, this same circle of investors, all Catholics, founded the broadcasting company notorious for overt propagandizing and general spookiness. The company's chief counsel was OSS veteran William Casey, who clung to his shares by concealing them in a blind trust even after he was appointed CIA director by Ronald Reagan in 1981.
"Black radio" was the phrase CIA critic David Wise coined in The Invisible Government to describe the agency's intertwining interests in the emergence of the transistor radio with the entrepreneurs who took to the airwaves.
"Daily, East and West beam hundreds of propaganda broadcasts at each other in an unrelenting babble of competition for the minds of their listeners. The low-price transistor has given the hidden war a new importance," enthused one foreign correspondent.
A Hydra of private foundations sprang up to finance the propaganda push.
One of them, Operations and Policy Research, Inc. (OPR), received hundreds of thousands of dollars from the CIA through private foundations and trusts. OPR research was the basis of a television series that aired in New York and Washington, D.C. in 1964, Of People and Politics, a "study" of the American political system in 21 weekly installments.
In Hollywood, the visual cortex of The Beast, the same CIA/Mafia combination that formed Cap Cities sank its claws into the film studios and labor unions. Johnny Rosselli was pulled out of the Army during the war by a criminal investigation of Chicago mobsters in the film industry.
Rosselli, a CIA asset probably assassinated by the CIA, played sidekick to Harry Cohn, the Columbia Pictures mogul who visited Italy's Benito Mussolini in 1933, and upon his return to Hollywood remodeled his office after the dictator's. The only honest job Rosselli ever had was assistant purchasing agent (and a secret investor) at Eagle Lion productions, run by Bryan Foy, a former producer for 20th Century Fox.
Rosselli, Capone's representative on the West Coast, passed a small fortune in mafia investments to Cohn. Bugsy Seigel pooled gambling investments with Billy Wilkerson, publisher of the Hollywood Reporter.
In the 1950s, outlays for global propaganda climbed to a full third of the CIA's covert operations budget. Some 3, 000 salaried and contract CIA employees were eventually engaged in propaganda efforts. The cost of disinforming the world cost American taxpayers an estimated $265 million a year by 1978, a budget larger than the combined expenditures of Reuters, UPI and the AP news syndicates.
In 1977, the Copely News Service admitted that it worked closely with the intelligence services - in fact, 23 employees were full-time employees of the Agency.
Most consumers of the corporate media were - and are - unaware of the effect that the salting of public opinion has on their own beliefs. A network anchorman in time of national crisis is an instrument of psychological warfare in the MOCKINGBIRD media. He is a creature from the national security sector's chamber of horrors.
For this reason consumers of the corporate press have reason to examine their basic beliefs about government and life in the parallel universe of these United States.
How the Washington Post Censors the News - A Letter to The Washington Post
April 25, 1992 Richard Harwood, Ombudsman The Washington Post 1150 15th Street NW Washington, DC 20071
Dear Mr. Harwood,
Though the Washington Post does not over-extend itself in the pursuit of hard news, just let drop the faintest rumor of a government "conspiracy", and a klaxon horn goes off in the news room.
Aroused from apathy in the daily routine of reporting assignations and various other political and social sports events, editors and reporters scramble to the phones. The klaxon screams its warning: the greatest single threat to herd-journalism, corporate profits, and government stability the dreaded "CONSPIRACY THEORY"!!
It is not known whether anyone has actually been hassled or accosted by any of these frightful spectres, but their presence is announced to Post readers with a salvo of warnings to avoid the tricky, sticky webs spun by the wacko "CONSPIRACY THEORISTS".
Recall how the Post saved us from the truth about Iran-Contra.
Professional conspiracy exorcist Mark Hosenball was hired to ridicule the idea that Oliver North and his CIA-associated gangsters had conspired to do wrong (*1). And when, in their syndicated column, Jack Anderson and Dale Van Atta discussed some of the conspirators, the Post sprang to protect its readers, and the conspirators, by censoring the Anderson column before printing it (*2).
But for some time the lid had been coming off the Iran-Contra conspiracy. In 1986, the Christic Institute, an interfaith center for law and public policy, had filed a lawsuit alleging a U.S. arms-for-drugs trade that helped keep weapons flowing to the CIA-Contra army in Nicaragua, and cocaine flowing to U.S. markets (*3).
In 1988 Leslie Cockburn published Out of Control, a seminal work on our bizarre, illegal war against Nicaragua (*4). The Post contributed to this discovery process by disparaging the charges of conspiracy and by publishing false information about the drug-smuggling evidence presented to the House Subcommittee on Narcotics Abuse and Control. When accused by Committee Chairman Charles Rangel (D-NY). of misleading reporting, the Post printed only a partial correction and declined to print a letter of complaint from Rangel (*5).
Sworn testimony before Senator John Kerry's Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics, and International Operations confirmed U.S. Government complicity in the drug trade (*6). With its cover-up of the arms/drug conspiracy evaporating, the ever-accommodating Post shifted gears and retained Hosenball to exorcise from our minds a newly emerging threat to domestic tranquility, the "October Surprise" conspiracy (*7). But close on the heels of Hosenball and the Post came Barbara Honegger and then Gary Sick who authored independently, two years apart, books with the same title, "October Surprise" (*8).
Honegger was a member of the Reagan/Bush campaign and transition teams in 1980. Gary Sick, professor of Middle East Politics at Columbia University, was on the staff of the National Security Council under Presidents Ford, Carter, and Reagan. In 1989 and 1991 respectively, Honegger and Sick published their evidence of how the Republicans made a deal to supply arms to Iran if Iran would delay release of the 52 United States hostages until after the November 1980 election. The purpose of this deal was to quash the possibility of a pre-election release (an October surprise). which would have bolstered the reelection prospects for President Carter.
Others published details of this alleged Reagan-Bush conspiracy. In October 1988, Playboy Magazine ran an expose "An Election Held Hostage"; FRONTLINE did another in April 1991 (*9). In June, 1991 a conference of distinguished journalists, joined by 8 of the former hostages, challenged the Congress to "make a full, impartial investigation" of the election/hostage allegations. The Post reported the statement of the hostages, but not a word of the conference itself which was held in the Dirksen Senate Office Building Auditorium (*10).
On February 5, 1992 a gun-shy, uninspired House of Representatives begrudgingly authorized an "October Surprise" investigation by a task force of 13 congressmen headed by Lee Hamilton (D-IN). who had chaired the House of Representatives Iran-Contra Committee. Hamilton has named as chief team counsel Larry Barcella, a lawyer who represented BCCI when the Bank was indicted in 1988 (*11).
Like the Washington Post, Hamilton had not shown interest in pursuing the U.S. arms-for-drugs operation (*12). He had accepted Oliver North's lies,and as Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee he derailed House Resolution 485 which had asked President Reagan to answer questions about Contra support activities of government officials and others (*13). After CIA operative John
Hull (from Hamilton's home state). was charged in Costa Rica with "international drug trafficking and hostile acts against the nation's security", Hamilton and 18 fellow members of Congress tried to intimidate Costa Rican President Oscar Arias Sanchez into handling Hull's case "in a manner that will not complicate U.S.-Costa Rican relations" (*14). The Post did not report the Hamilton letter or the Costa Rican response that declared Hull's case to be "in as good hands as our 100 year old uninterrupted democracy can provide to all citizens" (*15).
Though the Post does its best to guide our thinking away from conspiracy theories, it is difficult to avoid the fact that so much wrongdoing involves government or corporate conspiracies:
In its COINTELPRO operation, the FBI used disinformation, forgery, surveillance, false arrests, and violence to illegally harass U.S.citizens in the 60's (*16).
The CIA's Operation MONGOOSE illegally sabotaged Cuba by "destroying crops, brutalizing citizens, destabilizing the society, and conspiring with the Mafia to assassinate Fidel Castro and other leaders" (*17).
"Standard Oil of New Jersey was found by the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice to be conspiring with I.G.Farben... of Germany. ...By its cartel agreements with Standard Oil, the United States was effectively prevented from developing or producing [for World War-II] any substantial amount of synthetic rubber," said Senator Robert LaFollette of Wisconsin (*18).
U.S. Government agencies knowingly withheld information about dosages of radiation "almost certain to produce thyroid abnormalities or cancer" that contaminated people residing near the nuclear weapons factory at Hanford, Washington (*19).
Various branches of Government deliberately drag their feet in getting around to cleaning up the Nation's dangerous nuclear weapons sites (*20). State and local governments back the nuclear industry's secret public relations strategy (*21).
"The National Cancer Institute, the American Cancer Society and some twenty comprehensive cancer centers, have misled and confused the public and Congress by repeated claims that we are winning the war against cancer. In fact, the cancer establishment has continually minimized the evidence for increasing cancer rates which it has largely attributed to smoking and dietary fat, while discounting or ignoring the causal role of avoidable exposures to industrial carcinogens in the air, food, water, and the workplace." (*22).
The Bush Administration cover-up of its pre-Gulf-War support of Iraq "is yet another example of the President's people conspiring to keep both Congress and the American people in the dark" (*23).
If you think about it, conspiracy is a fundamental aspect of doing business in this country.
Take the systematic and cooperative censorship of the Persian Gulf War by the Pentagon and much of the news media (*24).
Or the widespread plans of business and government groups to spend $100 million in taxes to promote a distorted and truncated history of Columbus in America (*25). along the lines of the Smithsonian Institution's "fusion of the two worlds", (*26). rather than examining more realistic aspects of the Spanish invasion, like "anger, cruelty, gold, terror, and death" (*27).
Or circumstances surrounding the U.S. Justice Department theft from the INSLAW company of sophisticated, law-enforcement computer software which "now point to a widespread conspiracy implicating lesser Government officials in the theft of INSLAW's technology", says former U.S. Attorney General Elliot Richardson (*28).
Or Watergate.
Or the "largest bank fraud in world financial history" (*29), where the White House knew of the criminal activities at "the Bank of Crooks and Criminals International" (BCCI) (*30), where U.S. intelligence agencies did their secret banking (*31), and where bribery of prominent American public officials "was a way of doing business" (*32).
Or the 1949 conviction of "GM [General Motors], Standard Oil of California, Firestone, and E. Roy Fitzgerald, among others, for criminally conspiring to replace electric transportation with gas- and diesel-powered buses and to monopolize the sale of buses and related products to transportation companies throughout the country" [in, among others, the cities of New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, St. Louis, Oakland, Salt Lake City, and Los Angeles] (*33).
Or the collusion in 1973 between Senator Abraham Ribicoff (D-CT). and the U.S. Department of Transportation to overlook safety defects in the 1.2 million Corvair automobiles manufactured by General Motors in the early 60's (*34).
Or the A. H. Robins Company, which manufactured the Dalkon Shield intrauterine contraceptive, and which ignored repeated warnings of the Shield's hazards and which "stonewalled, deceived, covered up, and covered up the cover-ups...[thus inflicting] on women a worldwide epidemic of pelvic infections." (*35).
Or that cooperation between McDonnell Douglas Aircraft Company and the FAA resulted in failure to enforce regulations regarding the unsafe DC-10 cargo door which failed in flight killing all 364 passengers on Turkish Airlines Flight 981 on March 3, 1974 (*36).
Or the now-banned, cancer-producing pregnancy drug Diethylstilbestrol (DES). that was sold by manufacturers who ignored tests which showed DES to be carcinogenic; and who acted "in concert with each other in the testing and marketing of DES for miscarriage purposes" (*37).
Or the conspiracies among bankers and speculators, with the cooperation of a corrupted Congress, to relieve depositors of their savings. This "arrogant disregard from the White House, Congress and corporate world for the interests and rights of the American people" will cost U.S. taxpayers many hundreds of billions of dollars (*38).
Or the Westinghouse, Allis Chalmers, Federal Pacific, and General Electric executives who met surreptitiously in hotel rooms to fix prices and eliminate competition on heavy industrial equipment (*39).
Or the convictions of Industrial Biotest Laboratories (IBT). officers for fabricating safety tests on prescription drugs (*40).
Or the conspiracy by the asbestos industry to suppress knowledge of medical problems relating to asbestos (*41).
Or the 1928 Achnacarry Agreement through which oil companies "agreed not to engage in any effective price competition" (*42).
Or the conspiracy among U.S. Government agencies and the Congress to cover up the nature of our decades-old war against the people of Nicaragua a covert war that continues in 1992 with the U.S. Government applying pressure for the Nicaraguan police to reorganize into a more repressive force (*43).
Or the conspiracy by the CIA and the U.S. Government to interfere in the Chilean election process with military aid, covert actions, and an economic boycott which culminated in the overthrow of the legitimately elected government and the assassination of President Salvador Allende in 1973 (*44).
Or the conspiracy among U.S. officials including Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and CIA Director William Colby to finance terrorism in Angola for the purpose of disrupting Angola's plans for peaceful elections in October 1975, and to lie about these actions to the Congress and the news media (*45). And CIA Director George Bush's subsequent cover up of this U.S.-sponsored terrorism (*46).
Or President George Bush's consorting with the Pentagon to invade Panama in 1989 and thereby violate the Constitution of the United States, the U.N. Charter, the O.A.S. Charter, and the Panama Canal Treaties (*47).
Or the "gross antitrust violations" (*48) and the conspiracy of American oil companies and the British and U.S. governments to strangle Iran economically after Iran nationalized the British-owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Company in 1951. And the subsequent overthrow by the CIA in 1953 of Iranian Prime Minister Muhammed Mossadegh (*49).
Or the CIA-planned assassination of Congo head-of-state Patrice Lumumba (*50).
Or the deliberate and willful efforts of President George Bush, Senator Robert Dole, Senator George Mitchell, various U.S. Government agencies, and members of both Houses of the Congress to buy the 1990 Nicaraguan national elections for the presidential candidate supported by President Bush (*51).
Or the collective approval by 64 U.S. Senators of Robert Gates to head the CIA, in the face of "unmistakable evidence that Gates lied about his role in the Iran-Contra scandal" (*52).
Or "How Reagan and the Pope Conspired to Assist Poland's Solidarity Movement and Hasten the Demise of Communism" (*53).
Or how the Reagan Administration connived with the Vatican to ban the use of USAID funds by any country "for the promotion of birth control or abortion" (*54).
Or "the way the Vatican and Washington colluded to achieve common purpose in Central America" (*55).
Or the collaboration of Guatemalan strong-man and mass murderer Hector Gramajo with the U.S. Army to design "programs to build civilian-military cooperation" at the U.S. Army School of the Americas (SOA) at Fort Benning, Georgia; five of the nine soldiers accused in the 1989 Jesuit massacre in El Salvador are graduates of SOA which trains Latin/American military personnel (*56).
Or the conspiracy of the Comanche Peak Nuclear Plant administration to harass and cause bodily harm to whistleblower Linda Porter who uncovered dangerous working conditions at the facility (*57).
Or the conspiracy of President Richard Nixon and the Government of South Vietnam to delay the Paris Peace Talks until after the 1968 U.S. presidential election (*58).
Or the pandemic cover-ups of police violence (*59).
Or the always safe-to-cite worldwide communist conspiracy (*60).
Or maybe the socially responsible, secret consortium to publish The Satanic Verses in paperback (*61).
Conspiracies are obviously a way to get things done, and the Washington Post offers little comment unless conspiracy theorizing threatens to expose a really important conspiracy that, let's say, benefits big business or big government.
Such a conspiracy would be like our benevolent CIA's 1953 overthrow of the Iranian government to help out U.S. oil companies; or like our illegal war against Panama to tighten U.S. control over Panama and the Canal; or like monopoly control of broadcasting that facilitates corporate censorship on issues of public importance (*62).
When the camouflage of such conspiracies is stripped away, public confidence in the conspiring officials can erode depending on how seriously the citizenry perceives the conspiracy to have violated the public trust. Erosion of public trust in the status quo is what the Post seems to see as a real threat to its corporate security.
Currently, the Post has mounted vituperative, frenzied attacks on Oliver Stone's movie "JFK", which reexamines the U.S. Government's official (Warren Commission. finding that a single gunman, acting alone, killed President John F. Kennedy. The movie also is the story of New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison's unsuccessful prosecution of Clay Shaw, the only person ever tried in connection with the assassination.
And the movie proposes that the Kennedy assassination was the work of conspirators whose interests would not be served by a president who, had he lived, might have disengaged us from our war against Vietnam.
The Post ridicules a reexamination of the Kennedy assassination along lines suggested by "JFK". Senior Post journalists like Charles Krauthammer, Ken Ringle, George Will, Phil McCombs, and Michael Isikoff, have been called up to man the bulwarks against public sentiment which has never supported the government's non-conspiratorial assassination thesis.
In spite of the facts that the Senate Intelligence Committee of 1975 and 1976 found that "both the FBI and CIA had repeatedly lied to the Warren Commission" (*63) and that the 1979 Report of the House Select Committee on Assassinations found that President Kennedy was probably killed "as a result of a conspiracy" (*64), a truly astounding number of Post stories have been used as vehicles to discredit "JFK" as just another conspiracy (*65).
Some of the more vicious attacks on the movie are by editor Stephen Rosenfeld, and journalists Richard Cohen, George Will, and George Lardner Jr (*66). They ridicule the idea that Kennedy could have had second thoughts about escalating the Vietnam War and declaim that there is no historical justification for this idea.
Seasoned journalist Peter Dale Scott, former Pentagon/CIA liaison chief L. Fletcher Prouty, and investigators David Scheim and John Newman have each authored defense of the "JFK" thesis that Kennedy was not enthusiastic about staying in Vietnam (*67). But the Post team just continues ranting against the possibility of a high-level assassination conspiracy while offering little justification for its arguments.
An example of particularly shabby scholarship and unacceptable behavior is George Lardner Jr's contribution to the Post's campaign against the movie. Lardner wrote three articles, two before the movie was completed, and the third upon its release. In May, six months before the movie came out, Lardner obtained a copy of the first draft of the script and, contrary to accepted standards, revealed in the Post the contents of this copyrighted movie (*68). Also in this article, (*69).
Lardner discredits Jim Garrison with hostile statements from a former Garrison associate Pershing Gervais. Lardner does not tell the reader that subsequent to the Clay Shaw trial, in a U.S. Government criminal action brought against Garrison, Government witness Gervais, who helped set up Garrison for prosecution, admitted under oath that in a May 1972 interview with a New Orleans television reporter, he, Gervais, had said that the U.S. Government's case against Garrison was a fraud (*70).
The Post's 1973 account of the Garrison acquittal mentions this controversy, but when I recently asked Lardner about this, he was not clear as to whether he remembered it (*71).
Two weeks after his first "JFK" article, Lardner blustered his way through a justification for his unauthorized possession of the early draft ofthe movie (*72). He also defended his reference to Pershing Gervais by lashing out at Garrison as a writer "of gothic fiction".
When the movie was released in December, Lardner "reviewed" it (*73). He again ridiculed the film's thesis that following the Kennedy assassination, President Johnson reversed Kennedy's plans to de-escalate the Vietnam War. Lardner cited a memorandum issued by Johnson four days after Kennedy died. Lardner says this memorandum was written before the assassination, and that it "was a continuation of Kennedy's policy".
In fact, the memorandum was drafted the day before the assassination by McGeorge Bundy (Kennedy's Assistant for National Security Affairs) Kennedy was in Texas, and may never have seen it. Following the assassination, it was rewritten; and the final version provided for escalating the war against Vietnam (*74) facts that Lardner avoided.
The Post's crusade against exposing conspiracies is blatantly dishonest:
The Warren Commission inquiry into the Kennedy Assassination was for the most part conducted in secret. This fact is buried in the Post (*75). Nor do current readers of this newspaper find meaningful discussion of the Warren Commission's secret doubts about both the FBI and the CIA (*76). Or of a dispatch from CIA headquarters instructing co-conspirators at field stations to counteract the,
"new wave of books and articles criticizing the [Warren] Commission's findings...[and] conspiracy theories ...[that] have frequently thrown suspicion on our organization" and to "discuss the publicity problem with liaison and friendly elite contacts, especially politicians and editors "and to "employ propaganda assets to answer and refute the attacks of the critics. ...Book reviews and feature articles are particularly appropriate for this purpose. ...The aim of this dispatch is to provide material for countering and discrediting the claims of the conspiracy theorists..." (*77).
In 1979, Washington journalist Deborah Davis published Katharine The Great, the story of Post publisher Katharine Graham and her newspaper's close ties with Washington's powerful elite, a number of whom were with the CIA.
Particularly irksome to Post editor Benjamin Bradlee was a Davis claim that Bradlee had "produced CIA material" (*78). Understandably sensitive about this kind of publicity, Bradlee told Davis' publisher Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,
"Miss Davis is lying ...I never produced CIA material ...what I can do is to brand Miss Davis as a fool and to put your company in that special little group of publishers who don't give a shit for the truth".
The Post bullied HBJ into recalling the book; HBJ shredded 20,000 copies; Davis sued HBJ for breach of contract and damage to reputation; HBJ settled out of court; and Davis published her book elsewhere with an appendix that demonstrated Bradlee to have been deeply involved with producing cold-war/CIA propaganda (*79). Bradlee still says the allegations about his association with people in the CIA are false, but he has apparently taken no action to contest the xetensive documentation presented by Deborah Davis in the second and third editions of her book (*80).
And it's not as if the Post were new to conspiracy work.
Former Washington Post publisher Philip Graham "believing that the function of the press was more often than not to mobilize consent for the policies of the government, was one of the architects of what became a widespread practice:the use and manipulation of journalists by the CIA" (*81).
This scandal was known by its code name Operation MOCKINGBIRD. Former Washington Post reporter Carl Bernstein cites a former CIA deputy director as saying, "It was widely known that Phil Graham was someone you could get help from" (*82). More recently the Post provided cover for CIA personality Joseph Fernandez by "refusing to print his name for over a year up until the day his indictment was announced ...for crimes committed in his official capacity as CIA station chief in Costa Rica" (*83).
Of the meetings between Graham and his CIA acquaintances at which the availability and prices of journalists were discussed, a former CIA man recalls, "You could get a journalist cheaper than a good call girl, for a couple hundred dollars a month" (*84). One may wish to consider Philip Graham's philosophy along with a more recent statement from his wife Katharine Graham, current Chairman of the Board of the Washington Post.
In a lecture on terrorism and the news media, Mrs. Graham said:
"A second challenge facing the media is how to prevent terrorists from using the media as a platform fortheir views. ... The point is that we generally know when we are being manipulated, and we've learned better how and where to draw the line, though the decisions are often difficult" (*85).
Today, the Post and its world of big business are apparently terrified that our elite and our high-level public officials may be exposed as conspirators behind Contra drug-smuggling, October Surprise, or the assassination of President Kennedy. This fear is truly remarkable in that, like most of us and like most institutions, the Post runs its business as a conspiracy of like-minded entrepreneurs a conspiracy "to act or work together toward the same result or goal" (*86).
But where the Post really parts company from just plain people is when it pretends that conspiracies associated with big business or government are "coincidence". Post reporter Lardner vents the frustration inherent in having to maintain this dichotomy. He lashes out at Oliver Stone and suggests that Stone may actually believe that the Post's opposition to Stone's movie is a "conspiracy". Lardner assures us that Stone's complaints are "groundless and paranoid and smack of McCarthyism" (*87).
So how does the Post justify devoting so much energy to ridiculing those who investigate conspiracies?
The Post has answers: people revert to conspiracy theories because they need something "neat and tidy" (*88) that,
"plugs a gap no other generally accepted theory fills', (*89. and "coincidence ...is always the safest and most likely explanation for any conjunction of curious circumstances ..." (*90).
And what does this response mean? It means that "coincidence theory" is what the Post espouses when it would prefer not to admit to a conspiracy. In other words, some things just "happen". And, besides, conspiracy to do certain things would be a crime; "coincidence" is a safer bet.
Post Ombudsman Richard Harwood, who, it is rumored, serves as Executive Director of the Benevolent Protective Order of Coincidence Theorists, (*91) recently issued a warning about presidential candidates "who have begun to mutter about a press conspiracy". Ordinarily, Harwood would simply dismiss these charges as "symptoms of the media paranoia that quadrennially engulfs members of the American political class" (*92).
But a fatal mistake was made by the mutterers; they used the "C" word against the PRESS! And Harwood exploded his off-the-cuff comment into an entire column ending it with:
"We are the new journalists, immersed too long, perhaps, in the cleansing waters of political conformity. But conspirators we ain't".
Distinguished investigative journalist Morton Mintz, a 29-year veteran of the Washington Post, now chairs the Fund for Investigative Journalism. In the December issue of The Progressive, Mintz wrote "A Reporter Looks Back in Anger Why the Media Cover Up Corporate Crime".
Therein he discussed the difficulties in convincing editors to accept important news stories. He illustrated the article with his own experiences at the Post, where he says he was known as "the biggest pain in the ass in the office" (*93).
Would Harwood argue that grief endured by journalists at the hands of editors is a matter of random coincidence? And that such policy as Mintz described is made independently by editors without influence from fellow editors or from management?
Would Harwood have us believe that at the countless office "meetings" in which news people are ever in attendance, there is no discussion of which stories will run and which ones will find inadequate space?
That there is no advanced planning for stories or that there are no cooperative efforts among the staff?
Or that in the face of our news-media "grayout" of presidential candidate Larry Agran, (*94) a Post journalist would be free to give news space to candidate Agran equal to that the Post lavishes on candidate Clinton?
Let's face it: these possibilities are about as likely as Barbara Bush entertaining guests at a soup kitchen.
Would Harwood have us believe that media critic and former Post Ombudsman Ben Bagdikian is telling less than the truth in his account of wire-service control over news:
"The largely anonymous men who control the syndicate and wire service copy desks and the central wire photo machines determine at a single decision what millions will see and hear. ...there seems to be little doubt that these gatekeepers preside over an operation in which an appalling amount of press agentry sneaks in the back door of American journalism and marches untouched out the front door as 'news'" (*95).
When he sat on the U.S. District Court of Appeals in Washington, Judge Clarence Thomas violated U.S. law when he failed to remove himself from a case in which he then proceeded to reverse a $10 million judgment against the Ralston Purina Company (*96). Ralston Purina, the animal feed empire, is the family fortune of Thomas' mentor, Senator John Danforth. The Post limited its coverage of the Thomas malfeasance to 56 words buried in the middle of a 1200-word article (*97).
Would Harwood have us believe that the almost complete blackout on this matter by the major news media and the U.S. Senate was a matter of coincidence? Could a Post reporter have written a story about Ralston Purina if she had wanted to? Can a brick swim?
Or take the fine report produced last September by Ralph Nader's Public Citizen. Titled All the Vice President's Men, it documents "How the Quayle Council on Competitiveness Secretly Undermines Health, Safety, and Environmental Programs". Three months later, Post journalists David Broder and Bob Woodward published "The President's Understudy", a seven-part series on Vice President Quayle. Although this series does address Quayle's role with the Competitiveness Council, its handling of the Council's disastrous impact on America is inadequate.
It is 40,000 words of mostly aimless chatter about Quayle memorabilia: youth, family, college record, Christianity, political aspirations, intellectual aspirations, wealthy friends, government associates, golf, travels, wife Marilyn, and net worth revealing little about Quayle's abilities, his understanding of society's problems, or his thoughts about justice and freedom, and never mentioning the comprehensive Nader study of Quayle's record in the Bush Administration (*98).
Now, did Broder or did Woodward forget about the Nader study? Or did both of them forget? Or did one, or the other, or both decide not to mention it? Did these two celebrated, seasoned Post reporters ever discuss together their jointly authored stories? Did they decide to publish such a barren set of articles because it would enhance their reputations? How did management feel about the use of precious news space for such frivolity? Is it possible that so many pages were dedicated to this twaddle without people "acting or working together toward the same result or goal"? (*99)
Do crocodiles fly?
On March 20, front-page headlines in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, USA Today, and the Washington Post read respectively:
TSONGAS DROPPED OUT OF THE PRESIDENTIAL RACE CLEARING CLINTON'S PATH
TSONGAS ABANDONS CAMPAIGN LEAVING CLINTON CLEAR PATH TOWARD SHOWDOWN WITH BUSH
TSONGAS CLEARS WAY FOR CLINTON
TSONGAS EXIT CLEARS WAY FOR CLINTON
This display of editorial independence should at least raise questions of whether the news media collective mindset is really different from that of any other cartel like oil, diamond, energy, (*100) or manufacturing cartels, a cartel being "a combination of independent commercial enterprises designed to limit competition" (*101).
The Washington Post editorial page carries the heading:
AN INDEPENDENT NEWSPAPER
Is it? Of course not. There probably is no such thing. Does the Post "conspire" to keep its staff and its newspaper from wandering too far from the safety of mediocrity?
The Post would respond that the question is absurd. In that I am not privy to the Post's telephone conversations, I can only speculate on how closely the media elite must monitor the staff. But we all know how few micro-seconds it takes a new reporter to learn what subjects are taboo and what are "safe", and that experienced reporters don't have to ask.
What is more important, however, than speculating about how the Post communicates within its own corporate structure and with other members of the cartel, is to document and publicize what the Post does in public, namely, how it shapes and censors the news.
Sincerely, Julian C. Holmes
Copies to: Public-spirited citizens, both inside and outside the news media, And - maybe a few others.
Notes to Letter of April 25, 1992:
1. Mark Hosenball, "The Ultimate Conspiracy", Washington Post, September 11, 1988, p.C1 2a. Julian Holmes, Letter to Washington Post Ombudsman Richard Harwood, June 4,1991. Notes that the Post censored, from the Anderson/Van Atta column, references to the Christic Institute and to Robert Gates. 2b. Jack Anderson and Dale Van Atta, "Iran-Contra Figure Dodges Extradition", Washington Merry-Go-Round, United Feature Syndicate, May 26, 1991. This is the column submitted to the Post (see note 2a).. 2c. Jack Anderson and Dale Van Atta, "The Man Washington Doesn't Want to Extradite", Washington Post, May 26, 1991. The column (see note 2b). as it appeared in the Post (see note 2a).. 3a. Case No. 86-1146-CIV-KING, Amended Complaint for RICO Conspiracy, etc., United States District Court, Southern District of Florida, Tony Avirgan and Martha Honey v. John Hull et al., October 3, 1986. 3b. Vince Bielski and Dennis Bernstein, "Reports: Contras Send Drugs to U.S.", Cleveland Plain Dealer, November 16, 1986. 3c. Neal Matthews, "I Ran Drugs for Uncle Sam" (based on interviews with Robert Plumlee, contra resupply pilot)., San Diego Reader, April 5, 1990. 4. Leslie Cockburn, Out of Control. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1987. 5a. Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall, Cocaine Politics, University ofCalifornia Press, 1991, p.179-181. 5b. David S. Hilzenrath, "Hill Panel Finds No Evidence Linking Contras to Drug Smuggling", Washington Post, July 22, 1987, p.A07. 5c. Partial correction to the Washington Post of July 22, Washington Post, July 24,1987, p.A3. 5d. The Washington Post declined to publish SubCommittee Chairman Rangel's Letter- to-the-Editor of July 22, 1987. It was printed in the Congressional Record on August 6, 1987, p.E3296-7. 6a. Michael Kranish, "Kerry Says US Turned Blind Eye to Contra-Drug Trail", Boston Globe, April 10, 1988. 6b. Mary McGrory, "The Contra-Drug Stink", Washington Post, April 10, 1988, p.B1. 6c. Robert Parry with Rod Nordland, "Guns for Drugs? Senate Probers Trace an Old Contra Connection to George Bush's Office", Newsweek, May 23, 1988, p.22. 6d. Dennis Bernstein, "Iran-Contra The Coverup Continues", The Progressive, November 1988, p.24. 6e. "Drugs, Law Enforcement and Foreign Policy", A Report Prepared by the Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics, and International Operations of the Committee on Foreign Relations, United States Senate, December 1988. 7a. Mark Hosenball, "If It's October ... Then It's Time for an Iranian Conspiracy Theory", Washington Post, October 9, 1988, p.D1. 7b. Mark Hosenball, "October Surprise! Redux! The Latest Version of the 1980 'Hostage- Deal' Story Is Still Full of Holes", Washington Post, April 21, 1991,p.B2. 8a. Barbara Honegger, October Surprise, New York: Tudor, 1989. 8b. Gary Sick, October Surprise, New York: Times Books, Random House, 1991. 9a. Abbie Hoffman and Jonathan Silvers, "An Election Held Hostage", Playboy, October 1988, p.73. 9b. Robert Parry and Robert Ross, "The Election Held Hostage", FRONTLINE, WGBH-TV,April 16, 1991. 10a. Reuter, "Ex-Hostages Seek Probe By Congress", Washington Post, June 14,1991,p.A4. 10b. "An Election Held Hostage?", Conference, Dirksen Senate Office Building Auditorium, Washington DC, June 13, 1991; Sponsored by The Fund For New Priorities in America, 171 Madison Avenue, New York, NY, 10016. 11a. David Brown and Guy Gugliotta, "House Approves Inquiry Into 'OctoberSurprise'", Washington Post, February 6, 1992, p.A11. 11b. Jack Colhoun, "Lawmakers Lose Nerve on October Surprise", The Guardian, December 11, 1991, p.7. 11c. Jack Colhoun, "October Surprise Probe Taps BCCI Lawyer", The Guardian, February 26, 1992, p.3. 12. See note 5a, p.180-1. 13a. See note 4, p.229, 240-1. 13b. Report of the Congressional Committees Investigating the Iran-Contra Affair, Senate Report No. 100-216, House Report No. 100-433, November 1987, p.139-141. 14a. Letter to His Excellency Oscar Arias Sanchez, President of the Republic of Costa Rica; from Members of the U.S. Congress David Dreier, Lee Hamilton, Dave McCurdy, Dan Burton, Mary Rose Oakar, Jim Bunning, Frank McCloskey, Cass Ballenger, Peter Kostmayer, Jim Bates, Douglas Bosco, James Inhofe, Thomas Foglietta, Rod Chandler, Ike Skelton, Howard Wolpe, Gary Ackerman, Robert Lagomarsino, and Bob McEwen; January 26, 1989. 14b. Peter Brennan, "Costa Rica Considers Seeking Contra Backer in U.S. Indiana Native Wanted on Murder Charge in 1984 Bomb Attack in Nicaragua", WashingtonPost, February 1, 1990. 14c. "Costa Rica Seeks Extradition of Indiana Farmer", Scripps-Howard News Service,April 25, 1991. 15. Press Release from the Costa Rican Embassy, Washington DC, On the Case of the Imprisonment of Costa Rican Citizen John Hull", February 6, 1989. 16. Brian Glick, War at Home, Boston: South End Press, 1989. 17. John Stockwell, The Praetorian Guard The U.S. Role in the New World Order, Boston: South End Press, 1991, p.121. 18. Hearings Before the Committee on Patents, United States Senate, 77th Cong., 2nd Session (1942)., part I, as cited in Joseph Borkin, The Crime and Punishment of I.G. Farben, New York: The Free Press, Macmillan, 1978, p.93. 19. R. Jeffrey Smith, "Study of A-Plant Neighbors' Health Urged", Washington Post, July 13, 1990, p.A6. 20. Tom Horton, "A Cost Higher Than the Peace Dividend Price Tag Mounts to Clean Up Nuclear Weapons Sites", Baltimore Sun, February 23, 1992, p.1K. 21. "The Nuclear Industry's Secret PR Strategy", EXTRA!, March 1992, p.15. 22a. Samuel S. Epstein, MD et al, Losing the War Against Cancer: Need for PublicPolicy Reform", Congressional Record, April 2, 1992, p.E947-9. 22b. Samuel S. Epstein, "The Cancer Establishment", Washington Post, March 10, 1992. 23a. Hon. Henry B. Gonzalez, "Efforts to Thwart Investigation of the BNL Scandal", Congressional Record, March 30, 1992, p.H2005-2014. 23b. Hon. David E. Skaggs (CO)., White House Spin Control on Pre-War Iraq Policy", Congressional Record, April 2, 1992, p.H2285. 23c. Nicholas Rostow, Special Assistant to the President and Legal Adviser, Memorandum to Jeanne S. Archibald et al, "Meeting on congressional requests for information and documents", April 8, 1991; Congressional Record, April 2, 1992,p.H2285. 24a. Michio Kaku, "Operation Desert Lie: Pentagon Confesses", The Guardian, March11, 1992, p.4. 24b. J. Max Robins, "NBC's Unaired Iraq Tapes Not a Black and White Case", Variety Magazine, March 4, 1991, p.25. 25. Emory R. Searcy Jr., Clergy and Laity Concerned, Spring 1991 Letter to"Friends", p.1. 26. Jean Dimeo, "Selling Hispanics on Columbus Luis Vasquez-Ajmac Is Hired to Promote Smithsonian Project", Washington Post, November 18, 1991, p.Bus.8. 27. Hans Koning, "Teach the Truth About Columbus", Washington Post, September 3,1991, p.A19. 28a. James Kilpatrick, "Software-Piracy Case Emitting Big Stench", St. Louis Post/Dispatch, March 18, 1991, p.3B. Elliot L. Richardson, "A High-Tech Watergate", New York Times, October 21,1991. 29. "BCCI NBC Sunday Today", February 23, 1992, p.12; transcript prepared by Burrelle's Information Services. The quote is from New York District Attorney Robert Morgenthau who is running his own independent investigation of BCCI. 30. Norman Bailey, former Reagan White House intelligence analyst; from an interview with Mark Rosenthal of NBC News. See note 29, p.5. 31. Jack Colhoun, "BCCI Skeletons Haunting Bush's Closet", The Guardian, September 18, 1991, p.9. 32. Robert Morgenthau. See note 29, p.10. 33. Russell Mokhiber, Corporate Crime and Violence, San Francisco: Sierra ClubBooks, 1989 paperback edition, p.227. 34. See note 33, p.136-7. 35. Morton Mintz, At Any Cost: Corporate Greed, Women, and the Dalkon Shield, NewYork: Pantheon, 1985. As cited in Mokhiber, see note 33, p.157. 36. See note 33, p.164-171. 37. See note 33, p.172-180. 38. Michael Waldman, Who Robbed America?, New York: Random House, 1990. The quote is from Ralph Nader's Introduction, p.iii. 39. See note 33, p.217. 40. See note 33, p.235. 41. See note 33, p.277-288. 42. See note 33, p.323. 43. Katherine Hoyt Gonzalez, Nicaragua Network Education Fund Newsletter, March1992, p.1. 44. William Blum, The CIA A Forgotten History, London: Zed Books Ltd., 1986,p.232-243. 45a. John Stockwell, In Search of Enemies, New York: Norton, 1978. 45b. See note 44, p.284-291. 46. See note 17, p.18. 47a. Letter to President George Bush from The Ad Hoc Committee for Panama (James Abourezk et al)., January 10, 1990; published in The Nation, February 5, 1990, p.163. 47b. Philip E. Wheaton, Panama, Trenton NJ: Red Sea Press, 1992, p.145-7. 48a. Morton Mintz and Jerry S. Cohen, Power, Inc., New York: Bantam Books, 1977,p.521. 48b. "The International Oil Cartel", Federal Trade Commission, December 2, 1949. Cited in 48a, p.521. 49a. See note 44, p.67-76. 49b. See note 48a, p.530-1. 50. Ralph W. McGehee, Deadly Deceits, New York: Sheridan Square Publications, 1983,p.60. 51. HR-3385, "An Act to Provide Assistance for Free and Fair Elections in Nicaragua". Passed the U.S. House of Representatives on October 4, 1989 by avote of 263 to 136, and the Senate on October 17 by a vote of 64 to 35. 52. Jack Colhoun, "Gates Oozing Trail of Lies, Gets Top CIA Post", The Guardian,November 20, 1991, p.6. 53. Carl Bernstein, Time, February 24, 1992, Cover Story p.28-35. 54. "The U.S. and the Vatican on Birth Control", Time, February 24, 1992, p.35. 55. "Time's Missing Link: Poland to Latin America", National Catholic Reporter,February 28, 1992, p.24. 56a. Jim Lynn, "School of Americas Commander Hopes to Expand Mission", Benning Patriot, February 21, 1992, p.12. 56b. Vicky Imerman, "U.S. Army School of the Americas Plans Expansion", News Release from S.O.A. Watch, P.O. Bo 3330, Columbus, Georgia 31903. 57. 60 MINUTES, CBS, March 8, 1992. 58. Jack Colhoun, "Tricky Dick's Quick Election Fix", The Guardian, January 29,1992, p.18. 59a. Sean P. Murphy, "Several Probes May Have Ignored Evidence Against Police", Boston Globe, July 28, 1991, p.1. 59b. Christopher B. Daly, "Pattern of Police Abuses Reported in Boston Case", Washington Post, July 12, 1991, p.A3. 59c. Associated Press, "Dayton Police Probing Erasure of Arrest Video", WashingtonPost, May 26, 1991, p.A20. 59d. Gabriel Escobar, "Deaf Man's Death In Police Scuffle Called Homicide", Washington Post, May 18, 1991, p.B1. 59e. Jay Mathews, "L.A. Police Laughed at Beating", Washington Post, March 19, 1991, p.A1. 59f. David Maraniss, "One Cop's View of Police Violence", Washington Post, April 12,1991, p.A1. 59g. From News Services, "Police Abuse Detailed", Washington Post, February 8, 1992,p.A8. 60. Michael Dobbs, "Panhandling the Kremlin: How Gus Hall Got Millions", Washington Post, March 1, 1992, p.A1. 61. David Streitfeld, "Secret Consortium To Publish Rushdie In Paperback", Washington Post, March 14, 1992, p.D1. 62a. See notes 48 and 49. 62b. See note 47b, p.63-76. 62c. "Fairness In Broadcasting Act of 1987", U.S. Senate Bill S742. 62d. "Now Let That 'Fairness' Bill Die", Editorial, Washington Post, June 24, 1987. The Post opposed the Fairness in Broadcasting Act. 63. David E. Scheim, Contract on America The Mafia Murder of President John F.Kennedy, New York: Shapolsky Publishers, 1988, p.viii. 64. See note 63, p.28. 65a. Chuck Conconi, "Out and About", Washington Post, February 26, 1991, p.B3. 65b. George Lardner Jr., "On the Set: Dallas in Wonderland", Washington Post, May19, 1991, p.D1. 65c. George Lardner, "...Or Just a Sloppy Mess", Washington Post, June 2, 1991,p.D3. 65d. Charles Krauthammer, "A Rash of Conspiracy Theories When Do We Dig Up BillCasey?", Washington Post, July 5, 1991, p.A19. 65e. Eric Brace, "Personalities", Washington Post, October 31, 1991, p.C3. 65f. Associated Press, "'JFK' Director Condemned Warren Commission Attorney Calls Stone Film 'A Big Lie'", Washington Post, December 16, 1991, p.D14. 65g. Gerald R. Ford and David W. Belin, "Kennedy Assassination: How About the Truth?", Washington Post, December 17, 1991, p.A21. 65h. Rita Kemply, "'JFK': History Through A Prism", Washington Post, December 20,1991, p.D1. 65i. George Lardner Jr., "The Way it Wasn't In 'JFK', Stone Assassinates the Truth", Washington Post, December 20, 1991, p.D2. 65j. Desson Howe, "Dallas Mystery: Who Shot JFK?", Washington Post, December 20,1991, p.55. 65k. Phil McCombs, "Oliver Stone, Returning the Fire In Defending His 'JFK' Conspiracy Film, the Director Reveals His Rage and Reasoning", Washington Post, December 21, 1991, p.F1. 65l. George F. Will, "'JFK': Paranoid History", Washington Post, December 26, 1991,p.A23. 65m. "On Screen", 'JFK' movie review, Washington Post, Weekend, December 27, 1991. 65n. Stephen S. Rosenfeld, "Shadow Play", Washington Post, December 27, 1991, p.A21. 65o. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, "The Paranoid Style", Washington Post, December 29,1991, p.C7. 65p. Michael Isikoff, "H-e-e-e-e-r-e's Conspiracy! Why Did Oliver Stone Omit (Or Suppress!). the Role of Johnny Carson?", Washington Post, December 29, 1991,p.C2. 65q. Robert O'Harrow Jr., "Conspiracy Theory Wins Converts Moviegoers Say 'JFK' Nourishes Doubts That Oswald Acted Alone", Washington Post, January 2, 1992, p.B1. 65r. Michael R. Beschloss, "Assassination and Obsession", Washington Post, January 5, 1992, p.C1. 65s. Charles Krauthammer, "'JFK': A Lie, But Harmless", Washington Post, January 10,1992, p.A19. 65t. Art Buchwald, "Bugged: The Flu Conspiracy", Washington Post, January 14, 1992,p.E1. 65u. Ken Ringle, "The Fallacy of Conspiracy Theories Good on Film, But the Motivation Is All Wrong", Washington Post, January 19, 1992, p.G1. 65v. Charles Paul Freund, "If History Is a Lie America's Resort to Conspiracy Thinking", Washington Post, January 19, 1992, p.C1. 65w. Richard Cohen, "Oliver's Twist", Washington Post Magazine, January 19, 1992, p.5. 65. Michael Isikoff, "Seeking JFK's Missing Brain", Washington Post, January 21,1992, p.A17. 65y. Don Oldenburg, "The Plots Thicken Conspiracy Theorists Are Everywhere", Washington Post, January 28, 1992, p.E5. 65z. Joel Achenbach, "JFK Conspiracy: Myth vs. the Facts", Washington Post, February 28, 1992, p.C5. 65A. List of books on the best-seller list: On the Trail of the Assassins is characterized as "conspiracy plot theories", Washington Post, March 8, 1992,Bookworld, p.12 66. See notes 65n, 65w, 65l, 65b, 65c, and 65i. 67a. Peter Dale Scott, "Vietnamization and the Drama of the Pentagon Papers". Published in The Senator Gravel Edition of The Pentagon Papers, Volume V,p.211-247. 67b. Peter Dale Scott, The War Conspiracy The Secret Road to the Second Indochina War, Indianapolis/New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1972, p. 215-224. 67c. L. Fletcher Prouty, The Secret Team, Copyright 1973. New printing, Costa Mesa CA: Institute for Historical Review, 1990, p.402-416. 67d. See note 63, p.58, 183, 187, 194, 273-4. 67e. John M. Newman, JFK and Vietnam, New York: Warner Books, 1992. 67f. Peter Dale Scott, Letter to the Editor, The Nation, March 9, 1992, p.290. 68a. See note 65b. 68b. Oliver Stone, "The Post, George Lardner, and My Version of the JFK Assassination", Washington Post, June 2, 1991, p.D3. 69. See note 65b. 70. Jim Garrison, On the Trail of The Assassins, New York: Warner Books, 1988, 315/318. 71. Associated Press, "Garrison, 2 Others, Found Not Guilty Of Bribery Charge", Washington Post, September 28, 1973, p.A3. 72. See note 65c. 73. See note 65i. 74. See note 67e, p.438-450. 75. John G. Leyden, "Historians, Buffs, and Crackpots", Washington Post, Bookworld, January 26, 1992, p.8. 76a. Tad Szulc, "New Doubts, Fears in JFK Assassination Probe", Washington Star,September 19, 1975, p.A1. 76b. Tad Szulc, "Warren Commission's Self-Doubts Grew Day by Day 'This Bullet Business Leaves Me Confused'", Washington Star, September 20, 1975, p.A1. 76c. Tad Szulc, "Urgent and Secret Meeting of the Warren Commission Dulles Proposed that the Minutes be Destroyed", Washington Star, September 21, 1975,p.A1. 77. "Cable Sought to Discredit Critics of Warren Report", New York Times, December 26, 1977, p.A37. 78. Deborah Davis, Katharine The Great, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979,p.141-2. 79a. Eve Pell, "Private Censorship Killing 'Katharine The Great'", The Nation, November 12, 1983. 79b. Deborah Davis, Katharine The Great, Bethesda MD: National Press, 1987. Davis says, "...corporate documents that became available during my subsequent lawsuit against him [Harcourt Brace Jovanovich chairman, William Jovanovich] showed that 20,000 copies [of Katharine the Great] had been "processed and converted into waste paper"". 79c. Daniel Brandt, "All the Publisher's Men A Suppressed Book About Washington Post Publisher Katharine Graham Is On Sale Again" National Reporter, Fall 1987, p.60. 79d. Deborah Davis, Katharine The Great, New York: Sheridan Square Press, 1991. "...publishers who don't give a shit", p.iv-v; bullying HBJ into recalling the book, p.iv-vi; lawsuit and settlement, p.. 80. Benjamin C. Bradlee, Letter to Deborah Davis, April 1, 1987. See note 79d, p.304. 81. See note 79d, p.119-132. 82. Carl Bernstein, "The CIA and the Media How America's Most Powerful News Media Worked Hand in Glove with the Central Intelligence Agency and Why the Church Committee Covered It Up", Rolling Stone, October 20, 1977, p.63. 83a. Daniel Brandt, Letter to Richard L. Harwood of The Washington Post, September 15, 1988. The letter asks for the Post's rationale for its policy of protecting government covert actions, and whether this policy is still in effect. 83b. Daniel Brandt, "Little Magazines May Come and Go", The National Reporter, Fall 1988, p.4. Notes the Post's protection of the identity of CIA agent Joseph F.Fernandez. Brandt says, "America needs to confront its own recent history as well as protect the interests of its citizens, and both can be accomplished by outlawing peacetime covert activity. This would contribute more to thesecurity of Americans than all the counterterrorist proposals and elite strike forces that ever found their way onto Pentagon wish-lists." 83c. Richard L. Harwood, Letter to Daniel Brandt, September 28, 1988. Harwood's two- sentence letter reads, "We have a long-standing policy of not naming covert agents of the C.I.A., except in unusual circumstances. We applied that policy to Fernandez." 84. See note 79d, p.131. 85. Katharine Graham, "Safeguarding Our Freedoms As We Cover Terrorist Acts", Washington Post, April 20, 1986, p.C1. 86. "conspire", ß4ßRandom House Dictionary of the English Language, Second Edition Unabridged, 1987. 87. Howard Kurtz, "Media Notes", Washington Post, June 18, 1991, p.D1. 88. See note 65y. 89. See note 65n. 90. See note 65d. 91. William Casey, Private Communications with JCH, March 1992. Richard Harwood, "What Conspiracy?", Washington Post, March 1, 1992, p.C6. 93. p. 29-32. 94a. Washington Post Electronic Data Base, Dialog Information Services Inc., April 25, 1992. In 1991 and 1992, the name Bill Clinton appeared in 878 Washington Post stories, columns, letters, or editorials; "Jerry" Brown in 485, Pat Buchanan in 303, and Larry Agran in 28. In those 28, Agran's name appeared 76 times, Clinton's 151, and Brown 105. In only 1 of those 28 did Agran's name appear in a headline. 94b. Colman McCarthy, "What's 'Minor' About This Candidate?", Washington Post, February 1, 1992. Washington Post columnist McCarthy tells how television and party officials have kept presidential candidate Larry Agran out of sight. The Post's own daily news-blackout of Agran is not discussed. 94c. Scot Lehigh, "Larry Agran: 'Winner' in Debate With Little Chance For the Big Prize", Boston Globe, February 25, 1992. 94d. Joshua Meyrowitz, "The Press Rejects a Candidate", Columbia Journalism Review,March/April, 1992. 95. Ben H. Bagdikian, The Effete Conspiracy And Other Crimes By The Press, NewYork: Harper and Row, 1972, p.36-7. 96a. 28 USC Section 455. "Any justice, judge, or magistrate of the United States shall disqualify himself in any proceeding in which his impartiality might reasonably be questioned." [emphasis added] 96b. Alpo Petfoods, Inc. v. Ralston Purina Co., 913 F2d 958 (CA DC 1990).. 96c. Monroe Freedman, "Thomas' Ethics and the Court Nominee 'Unfit to Sit' For Failing to Recuse In Ralston Purina Case", Legal Times, August 26, 1991. 96d. Paul D. Wilcher, "Opposition to the Confirmation of Judge Clarence Thomas to become a Justice on the U.S. Supreme Court on the grounds of his JUDICIAL MISCONDUCT", Letter to U.S. Senator Joseph R. Biden, October 15, 1991. 97. Al Kamen and Michael Isikoff, "'A Distressing Turn', Activists - Decry What Process Has Become", Washington Post, October 12, 1991, p.A1. 98. January 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 12, 1992, p.A1 each day. 99. See note 86. 100. Thomas W. Lippman, "Energy Lobby Fights Unseen 'Killers'", Washington Post,April 1, 1992, p.A21. This article explains that "representatives of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers and the coal, oil, natural gas, offshore drilling and nuclear power industries, whose interests often conflict, pledged to work together to oppose amendments limiting offshore oil drilling, nuclear power and carbon dioxide emissions soon to be offered by key House members". 101. "cartel", Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary, 1977.
Last August, NPR (National Public Radio) profiled a Harvard-led experiment to help low-income families find housing in wealthier neighborhoods, giving their children access to better schools and an opportunity to "break the cycle of poverty."
According to researchers cited in the article, these children could see $183,000 greater earnings over their lifetimes - a striking forecast for a housing program still in its experimental stage.
If you squint as you read the story, you'll notice that every quoted expert is connected to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which helps fund the project.
And if you're really paying attention, you'll also see the editor's note at the end of the story, which reveals that NPR itself receives funding from Gates.
NPR's funding from Gates,
"was not a factor in why or how we did the story," reporter Pam Fessler says, adding that her reporting went beyond the voices quoted in her article.
The story, nevertheless, is one of hundreds NPR has reported about the Gates Foundation or the work it funds, including myriad favorable pieces written from the perspective of Gates or its grantees.
And that speaks to a larger trend - and ethical issue - with billionaire philanthropists' bankrolling the news.
The Broad Foundation, whose philanthropic agenda includes promoting charter schools, at one point funded part of the LA Times' reporting on education.
Charles Koch has made charitable donations to journalistic institutions such as the Poynter Institute, as well as to news organizations such as the Daily Caller News Foundation, that support his conservative politics.
As philanthropists increasingly fill in the funding gaps at news organizations - a role that is almost certain to expand in the media downturn following the coronavirus pandemic - an underexamined worry is how this will affect the ways newsrooms report on their benefactors.
Nowhere does this concern loom larger than with the Gates Foundation, a leading donor to newsrooms and a frequent subject of favorable news coverage.
I recently examined nearly twenty thousand charitable grants the Gates Foundation had made through the end of June and found more than $250 million going toward journalism.
Recipients included,
news operations like the BBC, NBC, Al Jazeera, ProPublica, National Journal, The Guardian, Univision, Medium, the Financial Times, TheAtlantic, the Texas Tribune, Gannett, Washington Monthly, Le Monde, and the Center for Investigative Reporting
charitable organizations affiliated with news outlets, like BBC Media Action and the New York Times' Neediest Cases Fund
media companies such as Participant, whose documentary Waiting for "Superman" supports Gates's agenda on charter schools
journalistic organizations such as the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, the National Press Foundation, and the International Center for Journalists
a variety of other groups creating news content or working on journalism, such as the Leo Burnett Company, an ad agency that Gates commissioned to create a "news site" to promote the success of aid groups
In some cases, recipients say they distributed part of the funding as subgrants to other journalistic organizations - which makes it difficult to see the full picture of Gates's funding into the fourth estate.
The foundation even helped fund a 2016 report from the American Press Institute that was used to develop guidelines on how newsrooms can maintain editorial independence from philanthropic funders.
A top-level finding:
"There is little evidence that funders insist on or have any editorial review."
Notably, the study's underlying survey data showed that nearly a third of funders reported having seen at least some content they funded before publication.
Gates's generosity appears to have helped foster an increasingly friendly media environment for the world's most visible charity.
Twenty years ago, journalists scrutinized Bill Gates's initial foray into philanthropy as a vehicle to enrich his software company, or a PR exercise to salvage his battered reputation following Microsoft's bruising antitrust battle with the Department of Justice.
Today, the foundation is most often the subject of soft profiles and glowing editorials describing its 'good' works.
During the pandemic, news outlets have widely looked to Bill Gates as a public health 'expert' on covid - even though Gates has no medical training and is not a public official.
PolitiFact and USA Today (run by the Poynter Institute and Gannett, respectively - both of which have received funds from the Gates Foundation) have even used their fact-checking platforms to defend Gates from "false conspiracy theories" and "misinformation," like the idea that the foundation has financial investments in companies developing covid vaccines and therapies.
In fact, the foundation's website and most recent tax forms clearly show investments in such companies, including Gilead and CureVac.
In the same way that the news media has given Gates an outsize voice in the pandemic, the foundation has long used its charitable giving to shape the public discourse on everything from global health to education to agriculture - a level of influence that has landed Bill Gates on Forbes's list of the most powerful people in the world.
The Gates Foundation can point to important charitable accomplishments over the past two decades - like helping drive down polio and putting new funds into fighting malaria - but even these efforts have drawn expert detractors who say that Gates may actually be introducing harm, or distracting us from more important, lifesaving public health projects.
From virtually any of Gates's good deeds, reporters can also find problems with the foundation's outsize power, if they choose to look.
But readers don't hear these critical voices in the news as often or as loudly as Bill and Melinda's.
News about Gates these days is often filtered through the perspectives of the many academics, nonprofits, and think tanks that Gates funds.
Sometimes it is delivered to readers by newsrooms with financial ties to the foundation.
The Gates Foundation declined multiple interview requests for this story and would not provide its own accounting of how much money it has put toward journalism...
In response to questions sent via email, a spokesperson for the foundation said that a,
"guiding principle" of its journalism funding is "ensuring creative and editorial independence."
The spokesperson also noted that, because of financial pressures in journalism, many of the issues the foundation works on,
"do not get the in-depth, consistent media coverage they once did... When well-respected media outlets have an opportunity to produce coverage of under-researched and under-reported issues, they have the power to educate the public and encourage the adoption and implementation of evidence-based policies in both the public and private sectors."
As CJRwas finalizing its fact check of this article, the Gates Foundation offered a more pointed response:
"Recipients of foundation journalism grants have been and continue to be some of the most respected journalism outlets in the world... The line of questioning for this story implies that these organizations have compromised their integrity and independence by reporting on global health, development, and education with foundation funding. We strongly dispute this notion."
The foundation's response also volunteered other ties it has to the news media, including,
The full scope of Gates's giving to the news media remains unknown because the foundation only publicly discloses money awarded through charitable grants, not through contracts.
In response to questions, Gates only disclosed one contract - Vox's - but did describe how some of this contract money is spent:
producing sponsored content, and occasionally funding,
"non-media nonprofit entities to support efforts such as journalist trainings, media convenings, and attendance at events."
In the same way that the news media has given Gates an outsize voice in the pandemic, the foundation has long used its charitable giving to shape the public discourse on everything from global health to education to agriculture.
Over the years, reporters have investigated the apparent blind spots in how the news media covers the Gates Foundation, though such reflective reporting has waned in recent years.
In 2015, Vox ran an article examining the widespread uncritical journalistic coverage surrounding the foundation - coverage that comes even as many experts and scholars raise red flags.
Vox didn't cite Gates's charitable giving to newsrooms as a contributing factor, nor did it address Bill Gates's month-long stint as guest editor for The Verge, a Vox subsidiary, earlier that year.
Still, the news outlet did raise critical questions about journalists' tendency to cover the Gates Foundation as a dispassionate charity instead of a structure of power.
Five years earlier, in 2010, CJR published a two-part series that examined, in part, the millions of dollars going toward PBS NewsHour, which it found to reliably avoid critical reporting on Gates.
In 2011, the Seattle Times detailed concerns over the ways in which Gates Foundation funding might hamper independent reporting:
To garner attention for the issues it cares about, the foundation has invested millions in training programs for journalists. It funds research on the most effective ways to craft media messages. Gates-backed think tanks turn out media fact sheets and newspaper opinion pieces. Magazines and scientific journals get Gates money to publish research and articles. Experts coached in Gates-funded programs write columns that appear in media outlets from The New York Times to The Huffington Post, while digital portals blur the line between journalism and spin.
Two years after the story appeared, the Seattle Times accepted substantial funding from the Gates Foundation for an education reporting project.
These stories offered compelling evidence of Gates's editorial influence, but they didn't attempt to investigate the full scope of the foundation's financial reach into the fourth estate. (For perspective, $250 million is the same amount that Jeff Bezos paid for the Washington Post.)
When Gates gives money to newsrooms, it restricts how the money is used - often for topics, like global health and education, on which the foundation works - which can help elevate its agenda in the news media.
For example, in 2015 Gates gave $383,000 to the Poynter Institute, a widely cited authority on journalism ethics (and an occasional partner of CJR's), earmarking the funds,
"to improve the accuracy in worldwide media of claims related to global health and development."
Poynter senior vice president Kelly McBride said Gates's money was passed on to media fact-checking sites, including Africa Check, and noted that,
she is "absolutely confident" that no bias or blind spots emerged from the work, though she acknowledged that she has not reviewed it herself.
I found sixteen examples of Africa Check examining media claims related to Gates.
This body of work overwhelmingly seems to support or defend Bill and Melinda Gates and their foundation, which has spent billions of dollars on development efforts in Africa.
The only example I found of Africa Check even remotely challenging its patron was when a foundation employee tweeted an incorrect statistic - that a child dies of malaria every 60 seconds, instead of every 108.
Africa Check says it went on to receive an additional $1.5 million from Gates in 2017 and 2019.
"Our funders or supporters have no influence over the claims we fact-check… and the conclusions we reach in our reports," said Noko Makgato, executive director of Africa Check, in a statement to CJR. "With all fact-checks involving our funders, we include a disclosure note to inform the reader."
Earlier this year, McBride added NPR public editor to her list of duties, as part of a contract between NPR and Poynter.
Since 2000, the Gates Foundation has given NPR $17.5 million through ten charitable grants - all of them earmarked for coverage of global health and education, specific issues on which Gates works.
NPR covers the Gates Foundation extensively.
By the end of 2019, a spokesperson said, NPR had mentioned the foundation more than 560 times in its reporting, including 95 times on Goats and Soda, the outlet's "global health and development blog," which Gates helps fund.
"Funding from corporate sponsors and philanthropic donors is separate from the editorial decision-making process in NPR's newsroom," the spokesperson noted.
NPR does occasionally hold a critical lens to the Gates Foundation.
Last September, it covered a decision by the foundation to give a humanitarian award to Indian prime minister Narendra Modi, despite Modi's dismal record on human rights and freedom of expression.
(That story was widely covered by news outlets - a rare bad news cycle for Gates.)
On the same day, the foundation appeared in another NPR headline:
"Gates Foundation Says World Not on Track to Meet Goal of Ending Poverty by 2030."
That story cites only two sources:
the Gates Foundation
a representative from the Center for Global Development, a Gates-funded NGO...
The lack of independent perspectives is hard to miss.
Bill Gates is the second-richest man in the world and might reasonably be viewed as a totem of economic inequality, but NPR has transformed him into a 'moral' authority on poverty.
Given Gates's large funding role at NPR, one could imagine editors insisting that reporters seek out financially independent voices or include sources who can offer critical perspectives.
The "tough questions" NPR posed in this Q&A were mostly based on a list curated by Gates himself, which he previously answered in a letter posted to his foundation's website.
With no irony at all, reporter Ari Shapiro asked,
"How do you… encourage people to be frank with you, even at risk of perhaps alienating their funder?"
In the interview, Gates said that critics are voicing their concerns and the foundation is listening.
In 2007, the LA Timespublished one of the only critical investigative series on the Gates Foundation, part of which examined the foundation's endowment holdings in companies that hurt those people the foundation claimed to help, like chocolate companies linked to child labor...
Charles Piller, the lead reporter on the series, says he made strenuous efforts to get responses from the Gates Foundation during the investigation.
"For the most part they were unwilling to engage with me. They were unwilling to answer questions and pretty much refused to respond in any sort of way, except in the most minimal way, for most of my stories," Piller said. "That's very, very typical of big companies, government agencies - to try to hope that whatever controversial issues have been raised in reporting will have limited shelf life, and they'll be able to go back to business as usual."
Asked about the dearth of hard reporting on Gates, Piller says the foundation's funding may prompt newsrooms to find other targets.
"I think they would be kidding themselves to suggest that those donations to their organizations have no impact on editorial decisions," he says. "It's just the way of the world."
Two journalists who have investigated Gates more recently cite what appear to be more explicit efforts by the foundation to exercise editorial influence.
Writing in De Correspondent, freelance journalists Robert Fortner and Alex Park examined the limitations and inadvertent consequences of the Gates Foundation's relentless efforts to eradicate polio.
In HuffPost, the two journalists showed how Gates's outsize funding of global health initiatives has steered the world's aid agenda toward the foundation's own goals (like polio eradication) and away from issues such as emergency preparedness to respond to disease outbreaks, like the Ebola crisis.
(This narrative has been lost in the current covid-19 news cycle, as outlets from the LA Times to PBS to STAT have portrayed Gates as a 'visionary' leader on pandemics...)
During the course of Fortner and Park's reporting these two stories, the foundation went over their heads to seek an audience with their editors.
Editors at both publications say this raised questions about Gates attempting to influence editorial direction on the stories.
"They've dodged our questions and sought to undermine our coverage," says Park.
During Park and Fortner's investigation for De Correspondent, the head of Gates's polio communications team, Rachel Lonsdale, made an unusual offer to the duo's editor, writing,
"We typically like to have a phone conversation with the editor of a publication employing freelancers we are engaging with, both to fully understand how we can help you with the specific project and to form a longer term relationship that could transcend the freelance assignment."
The news outlet said it rejected the proposition because of its potential to compromise the independence and integrity of its journalistic work.
In a statement, the foundation said Lonsdale,
"was conducting normal media relations work as part of her role as a senior program officer. As we wrote to Tim in December 2019,
'As with many organizations, the foundation has an in-house media relations team that cultivates relationships with journalists and editors in order to serve as a resource for information gathering and to help facilitate thorough and accurate coverage of our issues'."
Park says his editors stood behind his work on both stories, but he doesn't discount the foundation's efforts to put,
"a wedge between us and the publication…if not to assert influence outright, to give themselves a channel through which they could assert influence later."
Fortner, meanwhile, says he mostly avoids pitching articles to Gates-funded news outlets because of the conflict of interest this presents.
"Gates funding, for me, makes a good-faith pitching process impossible," he says.
Fortner, who authored CJR's 2010 story on Gates's journalism funding, self-published a follow-up in 2016 that examined how Gates funding is not always disclosed in news articles, including fifty-nine news stories the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting funded in part with Gates's money.
The center also declined to tell Fortner which fifty-nine articles had Gates's funding.
If critical reporting about the Gates Foundation is rare, it is largely beside the point in "solutions journalism," a new-ish brand of reporting that focuses on solutions to problems, not just the problems themselves.
That more upbeat orientation has drawn the patronage of the Gates Foundation, which directed $6.3 million to the Solutions Journalism Network (SJN) to train journalists and fund reporting projects.
Gates is the largest donor to SJN - supplying around one-fifth of the organization's lifetime funding. SJN says more than half of this money has been distributed as subgrants, including to Education Lab, its partnership with the Seattle Times.
"that there are potential conflicts of interest inherent" in taking philanthropic funding to produce solutions journalism, which SJN cofounder David Bornstein elaborated on in an interview. "If you are covering global health or education and you are writing about interesting models," Bornstein said, "the chances that an organization [you are covering] is getting money from the Gates Foundation are very high because they basically blanket the whole world with their funding, and they're the major funder in those two areas."
Asked if he could provide examples of any critical reporting about Gates emerging from SJN, David Bornstein took issue with the question.
"Most of the stories that we fund are stories that look at efforts to solve problems, so they tend to be not as critical as traditional journalism," he said.
That is also the case for the journalism Bornstein and fellow SJN cofounder Tina Rosenberg produce for the New York Times.
As contract writers for the "Fixes" opinion column, the two have favorably profiled Gates-funded education, agriculture, and global health programs over the years - without disclosing that they work for an organization that receives millions of dollars from Gates.
Twice in 2019, for example, Rosenberg's columns exalted the World Mosquito Project, whose sponsor page lands on a picture of Bill Gates.
"We do disclose our relationship with SJN in every column, and SJN's funders are listed on our website. But you are correct that when we write about projects that get Gates funding, we should specifically say that SJN receives Gates funding as well," Rosenberg noted in an email. "Our policy going forward with the NY Times will be clearer and will ensure disclosures."
My cursory review of the Fixes column turned up fifteen installments where the writers explicitly mention Bill and Melinda Gates, their foundation, or Gates-funded organizations.
Bornstein and Rosenberg said they asked their editors at the Times to belatedly add financial disclosures to several of these columns, but they also cited six they thought did not need disclosure.
Rosenberg's 2016 profile of Bridge International Academies, for example, notes that Bill Gates personally helps fund the project.
The writers argue that SJN's ties are to the Gates Foundation, not to Bill Gates himself, so no disclosure is needed.
"This is a significant distinction," Rosenberg and Bornstein stated in an email.
Months after Bornstein and Rosenberg say they asked their editors to add financial disclosures to their columns, those pieces remain uncorrected.
Marc Charney, a senior editor at the Times, said he wasn't sure if or when the paper would add the disclosures, citing technical difficulties and other newsroom priorities.
Likewise, NPR said it would add a financial disclosure to a 2012 story it published on the Gates Foundation, but did not follow through. (In the vast majority of articles about Gates, NPR makes disclosures.)
Even perfect disclosure of Gates funding doesn't mean the money can't still introduce bias.
At the same time, Gates funding, alone, doesn't fully explain why so much of the news about the foundation is positive. Even news outlets with no obvious financial ties to Gates - the foundation isn't required to publicly report all of the money it gives to journalism, making the full extent of its giving unknown - tend to report favorably on the foundation.
That may be because Gates's expansive giving over the decades has helped influence a larger media narrative about its work. And it may also be because the news media is always, and especially right now, looking for 'heroes'...
A larger worry is the precedent the prevailing coverage of Gates sets for how we report on the next generation of tech billionaires-turned-philanthropists, including Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg.
Bill Gates has shown how seamlessly the most controversial industry captain can transform his public image from techvillain to 'benevolent' philanthropist.
Insofar as journalists are supposed to scrutinize wealth and power, Gates should probably be one of the most investigated people on earth - not the most admired...
They claim that they are merely trying to 'fill in the funding gaps at struggling news organizations' - especially in the wake of the coronavirus 'pandemic.'
By far, the biggest player in this network is the Gates Foundation.
In short, Gates has long used his foundation's 'charitable' veneer to steer and shape the public discourse on global health.
In the case of COVID and vaccines, it is believed that Gates is using his billions to parlay both access and favorable news coverage.
A recent below investigation, conducted by the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) reveals a number of disturbing findings which point to a multibillion dollar network of information control and narrative management - with Bill Gates squarely at the center.
"Gates's 'generosity' appears to have helped foster an increasingly friendly media environment for the world's most visible charity."
BBC, NBC, Al Jazeera, ProPublica, National Journal, The Guardian, Univision, Medium, Financial Times, The Atlantic, Gannett News and Le Monde,
...to name only a few.
Many other mainstream outlets are pocketing money for 'contracts' they have with the Gates Foundation, including Vox.
These mainstream outlets claim there are no strings attached to this 'free money' from Gates, but upon closer examination, this relationship appears to be fraught with influence peddling and obvious conflicts of interest.
When one considers how intimately involved the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is with multiple global stakeholders in the much-hyped impending roll-out COVID vaccines,
namely, through GAVI, and partnering with transnational pharmaceutical giants like AstraZeneca, Sanofi, Pfizer, Merck, J&J, Eli Lilly, Novartis, and others.
This is in addition to Gates funding of key 'global health' policy players like,
...as well as various government agencies - the likelihood of conflicts of interest is enormous.
Not least of all is the fact that many of these same pharmaceutical firms are also the top advertising buyers on all of the major mainstream media outlets globally.
It's also been revealed how Gates is funding the supposed 'fact checkers' currently being used by Facebook and other social media firms - which are aggressively censoring any information on their platforms which is critical of Gates and pharmaceutical firms, particularly in relation to COVID and vaccines.
Incredibly, Gates even funded a 2016 report from the American Press Institute which was then used to develop reporting guidelines which supposedly tells newsrooms how maintain,
'editorial independence from philanthropic funders.'
Indeed, Gates has certainly covered all his bases.
The following below investigative findings by one of America's leading journalism review bodies should give cause for concern to news consumers all over the world.
A Warning to The Media Barons About H1N1 and Other Bio-Weapons
by Benjamin Fulford on July 01, 2009, from BenjaminFulford Website
How can it be that when a well trained science journalist presents 173 pages of evidence of planned genocide and lays criminal charges against the UN, the WHO, major drug companies and world leaders the corporate media refuses to report it and instead reports things like “Obama interrupted by phone that quacks?”
Jane Burgermeister, who has written for Nature and other publications has proved that, for example, Baxter AG sent 72 kilograms of bird flu virus to 16 laboratories. She is not alone; the evidence is for planned genocide by use of bio-weapons is overwhelming.
If the corporate media does not report this ASAP the owners of the major media corporations, including Rupert Murdoch, will be labeled as enemies of humanity.
Journalist Files Charges Against WHO and UN for Bioterrorism and Intent to Commit Mass Murder
As the anticipated July release date for Baxter's A/H1N1 flu pandemic vaccine approaches, an Austrian investigative journalist is warning the world that the greatest crime in the history of humanity is underway.
These actions follow her charges filed in April against Baxter AG and Avir Green Hills Biotechnology of Austria for producing contaminated bird flu vaccine, alleging this was a deliberate act to cause and profit from a pandemic.
“Worldwide, the number of deaths is small… we do not expect to see a sudden and dramatic jump in the number of severe or fatal infections,” said WHO’s Director-General, Harvard-trained Dr Margaret Chan.
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Summary of claims and allegations filed with FBI in Austria on June 10, 2009
In her charges, Burgermeister presents evidence of acts of bioterrorism that is in violation of U.S. law by a group operating within the U.S. under the direction of international bankers who control the Federal Reserve, as well as WHO, UN and NATO.
This bioterrorism is for the purpose of carrying out a mass genocide against the U.S. population by use of a genetically engineered flu pandemic virus with the intent of causing death.
This group has annexed high government offices in the U.S.
Specifically, evidence is presented that the defendants,
Alois Stoger, Austrian Health Minister, among others,
...are part of this international corporate criminal syndicate which has developed, produced, stockpiled and employed biological weapons to eliminate the population of the U.S. and other countries for financial and political gain.
The charges contend that these defendants conspired with each other and others to devise, fund and participate in the final phase of the implementation of a covert international bioweapons program involving the pharmaceutical companies Baxter and Novartis.
They did this by bioengineering and then releasing lethal biological agents, specifically the "bird flu" virus and the "swine flu virus" in order to have a pretext to implement a forced mass vaccination program which would be the means of administering a toxic biological agent to cause death and injury to the people of the U.S. This action is in direct violation of the Biological Weapons Anti-terrorism Act.
Burgermeister's charges include evidence that Baxter AG, Austrian subsidiary of Baxter International, deliberately sent out 72 kilos of live bird flu virus, supplied by the WHO in the winter of 2009 to 16 laboratories in four counties.
She claims this evidence offers clear proof that the pharmaceutical companies and international government agencies themselves are actively engaged in producing, developing, manufacturing and distributing biological agents classified as the most deadly bioweapons on earth in order to trigger a pandemic and cause mass death.
In her April charges, she noted that Baxter's lab in Austria, one of the supposedly most secure biosecurity labs in the world, did not adhere to the most basic and essential steps to keep 72 kilos of a pathogen classified as a bioweapon secure and separate from all other substances under stringent biosecurity level regulations, but it allowed it to be mixed with the ordinary human flu virus and sent from its facilities in Orth in the Donau.
In February, when a staff member at BioTest in the Czech Republic tested the material meant for candidate vaccines on ferrets, the ferrets died. This incident was not followed up by any investigation from the WHO, EU, or Austrian health authorities. There was no investigation of the content of the virus material, and there is no data on the genetic sequence of the virus released.
In answer to parliamentary questions on May 20th, the Austrian Health Minister, Alois Stoger, revealed that the incident had been handled not as a biosecurity lapse, as it should have been, but as an offence against the veterinary code. A veterinary doctor was sent to the lab for a brief inspection.
Burgermeister's dossier reveals that the release of the virus was to be an essential step for triggering a pandemic that would allow the WHO to declare a Level 6 Pandemic. She lists the laws and decrees that would allow the UN and WHO to take over the United States in the event of pandemic. In addition, legislation requiring compliance with mandatory vaccinations would be put into force in the U.S. under conditions of pandemic declaration.
She charges that the entire "swine flu" pandemic business is premised on a massive lie that there is no natural virus out there that poses a threat to the population.
She presents evidence leading to the belief that the bird flu and swine flu viruses have, in fact, been bioengineered in laboratories using funding supplied by the WHO and other government agencies, among others.
This "swine flu" is a hybrid of part swine flu, part human flu and part bird flu, something that can only come from laboratories according to many experts.
WHO's claim that this "swine flu" is spreading and a pandemic must be declared ignores the fundamental causes. The viruses that were released were created and released with the help of WHO, and WHO is overwhelmingly responsible for the pandemic in the first place. In addition, the symptoms of the supposed "swine flu" are indistinguishable from regular flu or from the common cold.
The "swine flu" does not cause death anymore often than the regular flu causes death.
Burgermeister notes that the figures for deaths reported for the "swine flu" are inconsistent and there is no clarity as to how the number of "deaths" has been documented.
There is no pandemic potential unless mass vaccinations are carried out to weaponize the flu under the guise of protecting the population. There are reasonable grounds for believing that the mandatory vaccines will be purposely contaminated with diseases that are specifically designed to cause death.
Reference is made to a licensed Novartis bird flu vaccine that killed 21 homeless people in Poland in the summer of 2008 and had as its "primary outcome measure" an "adverse events rate", thereby meeting the U.S. government's own definition of a bioweapon (a biological agent designed to cause an adverse events rate, i.e. death or injury) with a delivery system (injection).
She alleges that the same complex of international pharmaceutical companies and international government agencies that have developed and released pandemic material have positioned themselves to profit from triggering the pandemic with contracts to supply vaccines.
Media controlled by the group that is engineering the "swine flu" agenda is spreading misinformation to lull the people of the U.S. into taking the dangerous vaccine.
The people of the U.S. will suffer substantial and irreparable harm and injury if they are forced to take this unproven vaccine without their consent in accordance with the:
In the U.S. since 2008, Burgermeister charges that those named in her allegations have implemented new and/or accelerated the implementation of laws and regulations designed to strip the citizens of the U.S. of their lawful constitutional rights to refuse an injection.
These people have created or allowed provisions to remain in place that make it a criminal act to refuse to take an injection against pandemic viruses. They have imposed other excessive and cruel penalties such as imprisonment and/or quarantine in FEMA camps while barring the citizens of the U.S. from claiming compensation from injury or death from the forced injections. This is in violation of the laws governing federal corruption and the abuse of office as well as of the Constitution and Bill of Rights.
Through these actions, the named defendants have laid the groundwork for mass genocide.
Using the "swine flu" as a pretext, the defendants have preplanned the mass murder of the U.S. population by means of forced vaccination. They have installed an extensive network of FEMA concentration camps and identified mass grave sites, and they have been involved in devising and implementing a scheme to hand power over the U.S. to an international crime syndicate that uses the UN and WHO as a front for illegal racketeering influenced organized crime activities, in violation of the laws that govern treason.
She further charges that the complex of pharmaceutical companies consisting of Baxter, Novartis and Sanofi Aventis are part of a foreign-based dual purpose bioweapons program, financed by this international criminal syndicate and designed to implement mass murder to reduce the world's population by more than 5 billion people in the next ten years.
Their plan is to spread terror to justify forcing people to give up their rights, and to force mass quarantine in FEMA camps. The houses, companies and farms and lands of those who are killed will be up for grabs by this syndicate.
By eliminating the population of North America, the international elite gain access to the region's natural resources such as water and undeveloped oil lands.
And by eliminating the U.S. and its democratic constitution by subsuming it under a North American Union, the international crime group will have total control over North America.
Highlights from the complete dossier
The complete dossier of the June 10th action is a 69 page document presenting evidence to substantiate all charges.
This includes:
Factual background that delineates time lines and facts that establish probable cause, UN and WHO definitions and roles, and history and incidents from the April, 2009 "swine flu" outbreak.
Evidence the "swine flu" vaccines are defined as bioweapons as delineates in government agencies and regulations classifying and restricting vaccines, and the fear of foreign countries that "swine flu" vaccines will be used for biological warfare.
Scientific evidence the "swine flu" virus is an artificial (genetic) virus.
Scientific evidence the "swine flu" was bioengineered to resemble the Spanish flu virus of 1918 including quotes from Swine Flu 2009 is Weaponized 1918 Spanish Flu by A. True Ott, Ph.D., N.D., and a Science Magazine report from Dr. Jeffrey Taubenberger et.al.
The genome sequence of the "swine flu"
Evidence of the deliberate release of the "swine flu" in Mexico
Evidence as to the involvement of President Obama that delineates his trip to Mexico which coincided with the recent "swine flu" outbreak and the death of several officials involved in his trip. Contention is made that the President was never tested for "swine flu" because he had been previously vaccinated.
Evidence as to the role of Baxter and WHO in producing and releasing pandemic virus material in Austria includes a statement from a Baxter official stating the accidentally distributed H5N1 in the Czech Republic was received from a WHO reference center. This includes delineation of evidence and allegations from Burgermeister's charges filed in April in Austria that are currently under investigation.
Evidence Baxter is an element in a covert bioweapons network
Evidence Baxter has deliberately contaminated vaccine material.
Evidence Novartis is using vaccines as bioweapons
Evidence as to WHO's role in the bioweapons program
Evidence as to WHO's manipulation of disease data in order to justify declaring a Pandemic Level 6 in order to seize control of the USA.
Evidence as to the FDA's role in covering up the bioweapons program
Evidence as to Canada's National Microbiology Lab's role in the bioweapons program.
Evidence of the involvement of scientists working for the UK's NIBSC, and the CDC in engineering the "swine flu".
Evidence vaccinations caused the Spanish killer flu of 1918 including belief of Dr. Jerry Tennant that the widespread use of aspirin during the winter that followed the end of World War I could have been a key factor contributing to the earlier pandemic by suppressing the immune system and lowering body temperatures, allowing the flu virus to multiply. Tamiflu and Relenza also lower body temperatures, and therefore can also be expected to contribute to the spread of a pandemic.
Evidence as to manipulation of the legal framework to allow mass murder with impunity.
Constitutional issues: the legality vs. illegality of jeopardizing the life, health and public good by mass vaccinations.
The issue of immunity and compensation as evidence of intent to commit a crime.
Evidence as to the existence of an international corporate crime syndicate.
Evidence as to the depopulation agenda of the Illuminati/Bilderbergs and their involvement in the engineering and release of the artificial "swine flu" virus.
Evidence that weaponized flu was discussed at the annual Bilderberg meeting in Athens from May 14-17, 2009, as part of their agenda of genocide, including a list of attendees who, according to a statement once made by Pierre Trudeau, view themselves as genetically superior to the rest of humanity.
Media is keeping Americans clueless about the threat they are under
Jane Burgermeister is a dual Irish/Austrian who has written for Nature, the British Medical Journal, and American Prospect. She is the European Correspondent of the Renewable Energy World website. She has written extensively about climate change, biotechnology, and the ecology.
In addition to the charges currently under investigation that she filed against Baxter AG and Avir Green Hills Biotechnology in April, she has filed charges against WHO and Baxter among others concerning a case of exploding "swine flu" vials meant for a research lab on a busy IC train in Switzerland.
In her view, control of the media by the ruling elite has allowed the world crime syndicate to further its agenda unabated while the rest of the people remain in the dark about what is really going on. Her charges are an attempt to get around this media control and bring the truth to light.
Her greatest concern is that,
"in spite of the fact Baxter has been caught red handed nearly triggering pandemic, they are also moving ahead, together with allied pharma companies, with supplying the vaccine for pandemics."
Baxter is hurrying to get this vaccine to market some time in July
Noam Chomsky - Top 10 Media Manipulation Strategies
Renowned critic and always MIT linguist Noam Chomsky, one of the classic voices of intellectual dissent in the last decade, has compiled a list of the ten most common and effective strategies resorted to by the agendas "hidden" to establish a manipulationof the population through the media.
Historically the media have proven highly efficient to mold public opinion.
Thanks to the media paraphernalia and propaganda, have been created or destroyed social movements, justified wars, tempered financial crisis, spurred on some other ideological currents, and even given the phenomenon of media as producers of reality within the collective psyche.
But how to detect the most common strategies for understanding these psychosocial tools which, surely, we participate?
Fortunately Chomsky has been given the task of synthesizing and expose these practices, some more obvious and more sophisticated, but apparently all equally effective and, from a certain point of view, demeaning.
Encourage stupidity, promote a sense of guilt, promote distraction, or construct artificial problems and then magically, solve them, are just some of these tactics.
The strategy of distraction
The primary element of social control is the strategy of distraction which is to divert public attention from important issues and changes determined by the political and economic elites, by the technique of flood or flooding continuous distractions and insignificant information.
Distraction strategy is also essential to prevent the public interest in the essential knowledge in the area of the science, economics, psychology, neurobiology and cybernetics.
"Maintaining public attention diverted away from the real social problems, captivated by matters of no real importance. Keep the public busy, busy, busy, no time to think, back to farm and other animals."
This method is also called "problem -reaction- solution."
It creates a problem, a "situation" referred to cause some reaction in the audience, so this is the principal of the steps that you want to accept.
For example: let it unfold and intensify urban violence, or arrange for bloody attacks in order that the public is the applicant’s security laws and policies to the detriment of freedom.
Or create an economic crisis to accept as a necessary evil retreat of social rights and the dismantling of public services.
The gradual strategy
Acceptance to an unacceptable degree, just apply it gradually, dropper, for consecutive years.
That is how they radically new socioeconomic conditions (neoliberalism) were imposed during the 1980s and 1990s:
the minimal state
privatization
precariousness
flexibility
massive unemployment
wages
do not guarantee a decent income,
...so many changes that have brought about a revolution if they had been applied once.
The strategy of deferring
Another way to accept an unpopular decision is to present it as "painful and necessary", gaining public acceptance, at the time for future application.
It is easier to accept that a future sacrifice of immediate slaughter.
First, because the effort is not used immediately
Then, because the public, masses, is always the tendency to expect naively that "everything will be better tomorrow" and that the sacrifice required may be avoided
This gives the public more time to get used to the idea of change and accept it with resignation when the time comes.
Go to the public as a little child
Most of the advertising to the general public uses speech, argument, people and particularly children’s intonation, often close to the weakness, as if the viewer were a little child or a mentally deficient.
The harder one tries to deceive the viewer look, the more it tends to adopt a tone infantilizing.
Why?
"If one goes to a person as if she had the age of 12 years or less, then, because of suggestion, she tends with a certain probability that a response or reaction also devoid of a critical sense as a person 12 years or younger."
Making use of the emotional aspect is a classic technique for causing a short circuit on rational analysis, and finally to the critical sense of the individual.
Furthermore, the use of emotional register to open the door to the unconscious for implantation or grafting ideas , desires, fears and anxieties , compulsions, or induce behaviors...
Keep the public in ignorance and mediocrity
Making the public incapable of understanding the technologies and methods used to control and enslavement.
"The quality of education given to the lower social classes must be the poor and mediocre as possible so that the gap of ignorance it plans among the lower classes and upper classes is and remains impossible to attain for the lower classes
To encourage the public to be complacent with mediocrity
Promote the public to believe that the fact is fashionable to be stupid, vulgar and uneducated…
Self-blame Strengthen
To let individual blame for their misfortune, because of the failure of their intelligence, their abilities, or their efforts.
So, instead of rebelling against the economic system, the individual auto-devaluate and guilt himself, which creates a depression, one of whose effects is to inhibit its action.
And, without action, there is no revolution!
Getting to know the individuals better than they know themselves
Over the past 50 years, advances of accelerated science has generated a growing gap between public knowledge and those owned and operated by dominant elites.
Thanks to biology, neurobiology and applied psychology, the "system" has enjoyed a sophisticated understanding of human beings, both physically and psychologically.
The system has gotten better acquainted with the common man more than he knows himself.
This means that, in most cases, the system exerts greater control and great power over individuals, greater than that of individuals about themselves.
Empire examines the symbiotic relationship between the movie industry and the military-industrial complex.
War is hell, but for Hollywood it has been a Godsend, providing the perfect dramatic setting against which courageous heroes win the hearts and minds of the movie going public.
The Pentagon recognizes the power of these celluloid dreams and encourages Hollywood to create heroic myths; to rewrite history to suit its own strategy and as a recruiting tool to provide a steady flow of willing young patriots for its wars.
What does Hollywood get out of this ‘deal with the devil’?
Access to billions of dollars worth of military kit, from helicopters to aircraft carriers, enabling filmmakers to make bigger and more spectacular battle scenes, which in turn generate more box office revenue. Providing they accept the Pentagon’s advice, even toe the party line and show the US military in a positive light.
So is it a case of art imitating life, or a sinister force using art to influence life and death - and the public perception of both?
Empire will examine Hollywood, the Pentagon, and war.
This documentary was only broadcast once in five US states in March of 1995, then it was shelved and never broadcast again. This version is the complete uncut feature, recorded to VHS video when it was first broadcast on celestial TV.It was converted to HD as the quality was very poor,and VHS tape degrades very quickly. One must question the motivation behind Disney releasing what basically boils down to a disclosure video and why most of the populationhas not seen this video.
UNITED STATES
Several years ago, the Disney company aired a major one-hour television special, with no advance notice, on stations in only 5 US cities. Thanks to a few viewers who were able to roll their VCRs and capture it, we have a record of the startling quotes and statements it contained.
In light of the current, purported 'rift' between Disney and NASA over the content of Disney's new film, "Mission To Mars", I thought it pertinent to revisit those quotes.
My thanks to my colleague Michael Lindemann of CNI News for his file containing the many arresting and downright shocking statements in that Disney special... which appears now, as it did then, to have been a definite probe to measure public reaction to news of the reality of visitation and interaction with various forms of non-human intelligent life.
Remember, the quotes you are about to read were delivered by Disney CEO Michael Eisner and program narrator Robert Urich with straight, matter-of-fact, totally serious cadence and inflection. Script excerpts from "Alien Encounters: From New Tomorrowland".
All quotes were spoken by host/narrator Robert Urich unless otherwise noted.
Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky demolish one of the central tenets of our political culture, the idea of the "liberal media."
Instead, utilizing a systematic model based on massive empirical research, they reveal the manner in which the news media are so subordinated to corporate and conservative interests that their function can only be described as that of "elite propaganda."
David Halpin gives a presentation on 'The Zionist agenda, Dr. David Kelly, The propaganda of the BBC'.
He talks about the roots of Zionism, the injustices forced upon the peoples of Palestine, the assassination of Dr. David Kelly and the propaganda arm of the government, the BBC.
Filmed by BBC5.tv at the Totnes Truth Festival, 2nd of May 2010.
Does this make you wonder how much footage from prominent world events is fake?
How much fake news are we fed?
Dictators, terrorists, riots, revolution beamed into our living rooms as part of on-going psychological warfare against the masses?
Is this a conventional war of tanks and guns and bombs in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya or is it really all part of a sustained psychological war on the minds of every single person on the planet?
A fascinating film which provides a rare window into the international perception of the Iraq War, courtesy of Al Jazeera, the Arab world's most popular news outlet.
Roundly criticized by Cabinet members and Pentagon officials for reporting with a pro-Iraqi bias, and strongly condemned for frequently airing civilian causalities as well as footage of American POWs, the station has revealed (and continues to show the world) everything about the Iraq War that the Bush administration did not want it to see.
Freedom of Speech - Stories from the Edge of Free Speech
This documentary film look at the changing interpretations of the first amendment of the U.S. Constitution - laws and court cases that have alternatively broadened and narrowed the amendment’s protection of free speech and assembly.
The film’s thesis is that post 9/11 the government has seized unprecedented license to:
surveil
intimidate
arrest
detain citizens and foreigners alike
The film also looks back to the Pentagon Papers’ case and compares it to cases since 9/11 dealing with high school students’ speech and protesters marching in New York City during the 2004 Republican convention.
This eye opening long documentary film elaborates on the discovery of American media lies by comparing how news are delivered to the US population and to other countries around the world.
The film provides a striking comparison of U.S. and international media coverage of the crisis in the Middle East zeroing in on how structural distortions in U.S. coverage have reinforced false perceptions of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for example.
This pivotal documentary exposes how the foreign policy interests of American political elites - oil, and a need to have a secure military base in the region, among others - work in combination with Israeli public relations strategies to exercise a powerful influence over how news from the region are reported.
Through the voices of scholars, media critics, peace activists, religious figures, and Middle East experts, the documentary carefully analyzes and explains how - through the use of language, framing and context - the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza remains hidden in the news media, and Israeli colonization of the occupied territories appears to be a defensive move rather than an offensive one.
The documentary also explores the ways that U.S. journalists, for reasons ranging from intimidation to a lack of thorough investigation, have become complicit in carrying out Israel's PR campaign.
At its core, the documentary raises questions about the ethics and role of journalism, and the relationship between media and politics.
KONY 2012 is a film and campaign by Invisible Children that aims to make Joseph Kony famous, not to celebrate him, but to raise support for his arrest and set a precedent for international justice.
The divide between hard news and propaganda has become murkier than ever in recent years.
Audiences from both sides of the aisle have observed an insidious media bias at play whether they consume their news online, in the morning papers or on the nightly networks.
The presentation of alternative facts has inspired a palpable sense of disillusionment and mistrust among viewership.
The documentary London Calling, based on the popular book of the same name by author G.A. Ponsonby, recounts one of the egregious examples of bias as it targets the BBC and their role in defeating the 2014 referendum for Scotland's independence.
The 'Yes' campaign for independence was rightfully viewed as an underdog, but public support was growing. In the lead up to the vote, however, much of the media seemed chilly to their movement.
This was definitely the case with the BBC, a large and long-respected organization that many credit with propelling the downfall of the movement.
Key figures within the campaign, media insiders and ordinary voters give voice to the frustrations of the 'Yes' campaigners who experienced defeat both in the voting booth and in the promise of an impartial media.
Do they have a point? The evidence points to much more than just sour grapes.
The film is littered with instances of bias committed by the BBC. Opponents cite a series of deceitful headlines, cheap tactics that provoked fear in the outcome of a yes vote, and coverage that failed to find a balance between both sides of the issue.
The organization willfully evaded the lingering questions, scandals and controversies that marked the campaign to vote against the independence measure. Meanwhile, leaders in the 'Yes' campaign were tormented by manufactured character assassinations and a barrage of exaggerated negative reporting.
Pro-union interests who stood against the quest for independence were given a dominant role in programming while many Scots with a different point of view were given short shrift.
For their part, the BBC claims they adhered to the strictest ethical standards of impartiality in their reporting. But the damage seems to have already been done as more viewers consume their media with increasingly discerning eyes.
'London Calling' exposes the importance of an impartial press that is truly representative of the people, and the democratic catastrophes which can occur in its absence.
It's a scary potential that we all must struggle against.
Mind Programming, Brainwashing and Mass Hypnosis - David Icke
David Icke explains how the control system, control the mass of humanity, by programming there minds from an early age. Then using tel a vision programming and mass media, they implant false belief systems and a false reality of who we are and the nature of reality.
FOX NEWS Reporters (Reporters Steve Wilson & Jane Akre) uncover that most of the Milk in the USA and across some parts of the world is unfit to drink due to Monsanto Corporation's POSILAC ®, which has been proven to be a cancer-causing growth hormone (known in short as "BGH" "BST" or "rBGH" ), but they were fired for trying to tell people the truth.
Important note: After a long court battle, the Court dismissed the whistle blowers protection for the reporters because the Court stated that there was no law to force that the NEWS state the truth! Fact! Going on to say the NEWS was no different than other TV shows/reality shows!!
If you consumed or fed regular milk to your family today (8/21/08), there is more than a 90% chance that it was from a cow injected with BGH(Bovine somatotropin developed by using recombinant DNA technology).
You could be killing or harming your child every time you pour them a glass of milk, the same as pouring them a glass of slow acting poison. Please take action to ensure our children's safety, for they can not protect themselves.
What first alarmed farmers was the massive amount of PUS in the milk but Monsanto and the FDA still had no concerns by stating that the PUS was not harmful to be ingested by consumers!
If you have little children, at least feed them,
certified BGH free Milk
Organic Milk
Organic/BGM free milk equivalent like Organic soy milk
In the run-up to the 2008 election, millions of little plastic pieces of vile filth in the form of a DVD version of a deceitful and meticulously designed and professionally produced (in order to evoke a proper emotional response from certain credulous or otherwise mentally unstable fringe elements) propaganda film '"Obsession - Radical Islam's War Against the West" and sponsored by a well-funded, shadowy front group were mass distributed (28 million) in many of the nation's newspapers and specifically in swing states in advance of the coming election.
Using images from Arab TV, rarely seen in the West, Obsession reveals an ‘insider's view' of the hatred the Radicals are teaching, their incitement of global jihad, and their goal of world domination.
With the help of experts, including first-hand accounts from a former PLO terrorist, a Nazi youth commander, and the daughter of a martyred guerilla leader, the film shows, clearly, that the threat is real.
A peaceful religion is being hijacked by a dangerous foe, who seeks to destroy the shared values we stand for.
Director Robert Kane Pappas’ ORWELL ROLLS OVER IN HIS GRAVE is the consummate critical examination of the Fourth Estate, once the bastion of American democracy.
Asking whether America has entered an Orwellian world of doublespeak where outright lies can pass for the truth, Pappas explores what the media doesn’t like to talk about: itself.
Meticulously tracing the process by which media has distorted and often dismissed actual news events, Pappas presents a riveting and eloquent mix of media professionals and leading intellectual voices on the media.
Among the cast of characters in ORWELL ROLLS OVER IN HIS GRAVE are:
Charles Lewis, director of the Center for Public Integrity
Vincent Bugliosi, former L.A. prosecutor and legal scholar
film director and author Michael Moore
Rep. Bernie Sanders
Danny Schecter, author and former producer for ABC and CNN
Tony Benn, former member of the British Parliament
ORWELL ROLLS OVER IN HIS GRAVE provides a vital forum for ideas that will never be heard in mainstream media.
From Globalvision’s Danny Schecter:
“We falsely think of our country as a democracy when it has evolved into a mediacracy - where a media that is supposed to check political abuse is part of the political abuse.”
New York University media professor Mark Crispin Miller says,
“These commercial entities now vie with the government for control over our lives. They are not a healthy counterweight to government. Goebbels said that what you want in a media system - he meant the Nazi media system - is to present the ostensible diversity that conceals an actual uniformity.”
From the very size of the media monopolies and how they got that way to who decides what gets on the air and what doesn’t, ORWELL ROLLS OVER IN HIS GRAVE moves through a troubling list of questions and news stories that go unanswered and unreported in the mainstream media.
Are Americans being given the information a democracy needs to survive or have they been electronically lobotomized?
Has the frenzy for media consolidation led to a dangerous irony where in an era of more news sources the majority of the population has actually become less informed?
ORWELL ROLLS OVER IN HIS GRAVE reminds us that 1984 is no longer a date in the future
COMMENTS
The book "1984," written in 1949 by English writer George Orwell, was a book of a future in which the future was run by a dictatorship which successfully controlled the minds of its population.
This must see film explains the umbrella of all problems in the United States; the self-censorship of media.
It also explains why there is a need for websites like ours.
"Outfoxed" examines how media empires, led by Rupert Murdoch's Fox News, have been running a "race to the bottom" in television news. This film provides an in-depth look at Fox News and the dangers of ever-enlarging corporations taking control of the public's right to know.
The film explores Murdoch's burgeoning kingdom and the impact on society when a broad swath of media is controlled by one person.
Media experts, including,
Jeff Cohen (FAIR)
Bob McChesney (Free Press)
Chellie Pingree (Common Cause)
Jeff Chester (Center for Digital Democracy)
David Brock (Media Matters),
...provide context and guidance for the story of Fox News and its effect on society.
This documentary also reveals the secrets of Former Fox news producers, reporters, bookers and writers who expose what it's like to work for Fox News.
These former Fox employees talk about how they were forced to push a "right-wing" point of view or risk their jobs. Some have even chosen to remain anonymous in order to protect their current livelihoods.
As one employee said,
"There's no sense of integrity as far as having a line that can't be crossed."
This film explores the evolution of propaganda and public relations in the United States, with an emphasis on the elitist theory of democracy and the relationship between war, propaganda and class.
Includes original interviews with a number of dissident scholars including,
A deep, richly illustrated study of the nature and history of propaganda, featuring some of the world’s most insightful critics, "Psywar" exposes the propaganda system, providing crucial background and insight into the control of information and thought.
The pursuit for dominance is the primary propellant of history, always has been, always will be.
Those who don't identify this assumption are not excused in the grand chess game, but instead are displaced and exploited by forces they do not comprehend.
From the aspect of those who rule the board it is unmistakably desirable to have a populace of unaware pawns than it is to have a bunch of adversaries which can escalate an effective battle.
To that end it has always been preferable for the rulers to build up illusions which conceal the true nature of the game.
Walter Lippmann explained the "manufacture of consent" as an innovation in the usage of democracy.
Basically it's a method of domination, and he said this was beneficial and essential because the prevailing interests, the accepted concerns of the population elude the public. Lippmann wasn't theorizing, nor was he explaining anomaly that he had observed from far away, he was part of that particular class and he directly affected the evolution of this new method of control.
So what was this new method that Lippmann was alluding to? The answer to that inquiry takes us back to the dawn of World War I.
In 1917 Woodrow Wilson assembled the Committee on Public Information, also known as the CPI. It was a disinformation bureau and its goal was to boost war approval among the American people.
The CPI, controlled by a man named George Creel, was known for its vulgar approach, blatant overstatements and outright deceptions.
However one representative of the CPI, Edward Bernays, had a much more sophisticated approach.
Instead of using nonintellectual tactics Bernays analyzed the psychology of the American people, then according to his scrutiny he conceived a campaign to advocate the idea that America's function in the war was to:
Brian Springer is an American television director and producer, and new media artist born in 1959. Brian spent a year searching for footage grabbing back channel news feeds not intended for public consumption.
The result of his research was Spin.
This 1995 feature length documentary gives an insight into the perception of how television is used to try and control and distort the American public's view of reality.
Using the 1992 presidential election as his springboard, documentary filmmaker Brian Springer captures the behind-the-scenes maneuverings of politicians and newscasters in the early 1990s.
The Subversive Use of Sacred Symbolism in The Media - Symbol Literacy
Have you ever wondered whether the billion-dollar artifice of the media, and of the advertising conglomerates, has any lasting negative effect on your mind and behavior, or whether the young are particularly affected by the all-pervasive presence of ads?
Is it rational to expect large ad-corporations to jeopardize their vast monopolies by becoming more responsible in the future?
Can Madison Avenue agencies and other "Hidden-Persuaders" ever be held accountable, if it is discovered and proven that the glamorous creations of their industry do indeed have lasting negative effects on our minds and behavior?
Is the new designer disease of our age "Affluenza," and is the consumer the consumed, in these times of excess and chronic commercialism?
What The NWO Doesn't Want You to Know About - Kevin Trudeau on Alex Jones TV
Alex talks with Kevin Trudeau, the infomercial marketer ordered by a federal judge to pay more than $37 million for violating a 2004 stipulated order by allegedly misrepresenting the content of his book, The Weight Loss Cure They Don't Want You to Know About.
