50 Facts the World Needs to Know About Mainstream Media’s Relationship With the US Government
by Arjun Walia November 2, 2017 (collective-evolution.com)
• James F. Tracy is a PhD was fired from his tenured professorship at Florida Atlantic University for questioning official narratives of terror events. Now, his Blog has been taken down by WordPress with no clear explanation. He has been singled out due to his activism efforts.
• Since the end of WWII the CIA has been a major force in US and foreign news media, exerting considerable influence over what the public sees, hears and reads on a regular basis. This practice is at least as widespread today as it was at the height of the Cold War.
• In an era where information and communication technologies are ubiquitous, prompting many to harbor the illusion of being well-informed, US journalists routinely fail to question other deep events that have shaped America’s history over the past half century.
• Reasons for the almost universal failure of mainstream journalism, include newsroom sociology, advertising pressure, monopoly ownership, heavy reliance on “official” sources, journalists’ quest for career advancement, professional public relations maneuvers, and the CIA’s continued involvement in the news media to mold thought and opinion.
• After WWII, OSS/CIA head Frank Wisner tapped Marshall Plan funds to pay for his division’s early exploits, money his branch referred to as “candy.” “We couldn’t spend it all.” “There were no limits, and nobody had to account for it.”
• By the mid-to-late 1950s, the CIA sought to limit criticism directed against covert activity, and bypass congressional oversight or potential judicial interference, by infiltrating academia, the missionary corps, the editorial boards of influential journal and book publishers, and any other quarters where public attitudes could be effectively influenced.
• Since the early 1950s the CIA “has secretly bankrolled numerous foreign press services, periodicals and newspapers—both English and foreign language—which provided excellent cover for CIA operatives.”
• Director of CBS William Paley’s personal friendship with CIA Director Dulles is now known to have been one of the most influential and significant in the communications industry. Paley provided cover for CIA agents, supplied out-takes of news film, permitted the debriefing of reporters, allowed the agency to utilize network resources and personnel, and in many ways set the standard for the cooperation between the CIA and major broadcast companies which lasted until the mid-1970s.
• The CIA developed similar relationships with major media outlets including the NY Times, the Washington Post, the National Enquirer, Time magazine, Life magazine, Newsweek magazine, ABC, NBC, the Associated Press, UPI, Reuters, Hearst Newspapers, Scripps-Howard.
• James Angleton, who oversaw the CIA’s counterintelligence branch for 25 years, ran an entirely separate cadre of journalist-operatives who performed sensitive and frequently dangerous assignments. The CIA conducted a “formal training program” during the 1950s for the sole purpose of instructing its agents to function as newsmen.
• When NY Times reporter Tom Wicker reported that JFK was shot from the front in the throat, contradicting the subsequent “official” story, he and his article were chastised and smeared out of existence.
• News outlets praised the Warren Reports findings that lone gunman Oswald killed Kennedy, and heavily criticized and ridiculed Jim Garrison’s investigation of the assassination.
• When L. Fletcher Prouty wrote a book on the CIA’s black operations and espionage, a campaign was waged to remove the book from libraries, force the publishers to cancel publication, and to diminish book sales around the world.
• The CIA did a similar smear job on Gary Webb’s books chronicling the agency’s involvement in drug trafficking in the 1970’s and 80’s, even though the CIA inspector general upheld the findings of CIA involvement.
• German journalist Udo Ulfkotte related that the CIA’s pressure was so great that he published articles under his own name, but written by agents of the CIA and the German secret service.
• The CIA routinely influences movie directors and producers to give the CIA a favorable image.
• CNN anchor Anderson Cooper interned for the CIA while attending Yale as an undergraduate in the late 1980s.
• In 1999 the CIA established In-Q-Tel to establish financial relationships with internet platforms Americans use on a routine basis, including Google and Facebook.
• In the summer of 2014 a $600 million computing cloud was developed by Amazon Web Services on behalf of the CIA to service all 17 federal agencies comprising the American intelligence community.
James F. Tracy is a PhD from the University of Iowa. A former professor of communications at Boca Raton, Florida Atlantic University. He is one of many critical thinkers within the world of academia, and as result of presenting the following information that might spark some cognitive dissonance, he has been singled out due to his activism efforts.
For example, he was fired from his tenured professorship at Florida Atlantic University for questioning official narratives of terror events. Now, his Blog has been taken down by WordPress with no clear explanation.
Tracy is well researched, and now reports on several different matters of escalating importance. Below is an article he wrote in August of 2015, and is relevant today given all of the “fake news” campaigns that have been directed against alternative media.
Since the end of World War Two the Central Intelligence Agency has been a major force in US and foreign news media, exerting considerable influence over what the public sees, hears and reads on a regular basis. CIA publicists and journalists alike will assert they have few, if any, relationships, yet the seldom acknowledged history of their intimate collaboration indicates a far different story–indeed, one that media historians are reluctant to examine.
When seriously practiced, the journalistic profession involves gathering information concerning individuals, locales, events, and issues. In theory such information informs people about their world, thereby strengthening “democracy.” This is exactly the reason why news organizations and individual journalists are tapped as assets by intelligence agencies and, as the experiences of German journalist Udo Ulfkotte (entry 47 below) suggest, this practice is at least as widespread today as it was at the height of the Cold War.
Consider the coverups of election fraud in 2000 and 2004, the events of September 11, 2001, the invasions Afghanistan and Iraq, the destabilization of Syria, and the creation of “ISIS.” These are among the most significant events in recent world history, and yet they are also those much of the American public is wholly ignorant of. In an era where information and communication technologies are ubiquitous, prompting many to harbor the illusion of being well-informed, one must ask why this condition persists.
Further, why do prominent US journalists routinely fail to question other deep events that shape America’s tragic history over the past half century, such as the political assassinations of the 1960s, or the central role played by the CIA major role in international drug trafficking?
Popular and academic commentators have suggested various reasons for the almost universal failure of mainstream journalism in these areas, including newsroom sociology, advertising pressure, monopoly ownership, news organizations’ heavy reliance on “official” sources, and journalists’ simple quest for career advancement. There is also, no doubt, the influence of professional public relations maneuvers. Yet such a broad conspiracy of silence suggests another province of deception examined far too infrequently—specifically the CIA and similar intelligence agencies’ continued involvement in the news media to mold thought and opinion in ways scarcely imagined by the lay public.
The following historical and contemporary facts–by no means exhaustive–provides a glimpse of how the power such entities possess to influence if not determine popular memory and what respectable institutions deem to be the historical record.
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CIA, fake news, mainstream media
