Thursday, March 3, 2011

Why Am I No Longer Reading the Newspaper?

Maybe this is the reason:

"As Carl Bernstein documented decades ago, the CIA "ran a formal training program in the 1950s to teach its agents to be journalists. Intelligence officers were 'taught how to make noises like reporters,' explained a high CIA official, and were then placed in major news organizations with help from management. 'These were the guys who went through the ranks and were told, 'You're going to be a journalist,' the CIA official said. Relatively few of the 400-some [media] relationships described in Agency files followed that pattern, however; most involved persons who were already bona fide journalists when they began undertaking tasks for the Agency."

By way of an initiative called "Operation Mockingbird," the CIA built a large seraglio of paid media courtesans. This was carried out through the Office of Policy Coordination, which was created by Allen Dulles and Frank Wisner  – the latter being the official who went on to organize coups (and the attendant propaganda campaigns) against governments in Iran and Guatemala. (Wisner's son and namesake, incidentally, was a vice chairman at AIG – the CIA's favorite global insurance conglomerate – until 2009; more recently he was tapped by the Obama administration to serve as a back-channel contact with Hosni Mubarak and Omar Suleiman.)

The tendrils of "Operation Mockingbird" extended through every significant national media organ, from the Washington Post and Newsweek to the Time-Life conglomerate, from the New York Times to CBS. As a result, according to former CIA analyst Ray McGovern, the Fourth Estate "has been captured by government and corporations, the military-industrial complex, the intelligence apparatus." It is, in everything but name, an appendage of the Regime. This is clearly seen every time the Regime decides the time has come to mount another campaign of humanitarian bloodshed abroad. 

Having "learned nothing from the horrors that they cheer-led like excitable teenage girls over the past 15 years, these bohemian bombers, these latte-sipping lieutenants, these iPad imperialists are back," sighs a wearily disgusted Brendan O'Neill in the London Telegraph.  "This time they're demanding the invasion of Libya." 

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Also see Operation Mockingbird

Six Jewish Companies Own 96% of the World's Media

Declassified: Massive Israeli manipulation of US media exposed

Also might have something to do with it.