Guest Post by Paul Craig Roberts
As I have reported on many occasions, the presstitutes constitute not a free press but a Ministry of Propaganda for the government and ruling oligarchic interests. Ben Norton explains that the New York Times gets permission from Washington before it prints a story:
The New York Times has publicly acknowledged that it sends some of its stories to the US government for approval from “national security officials” before publication.
He explains that CIA control and manipulation of the media has a long tradition, a tradition exposed by journalists who know:
Legendary journalist Carl Bernstein, a former Washington Post reporter who helped uncover the Watergate scandal, published a major cover story for Rolling Stone in 1977 titled “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.”
Bernstein obtained CIA documents that revealed that more than 400 American journalists in the previous 25 years had “secretly carried out assignments for the Central Intelligence Agency.”
Bernstein wrote:
“Some of these journalists’ relationships with the Agency were tacit; some were explicit. There was cooperation, accommodation and overlap. Journalists provided a full range of clandestine services—from simple intelligence gathering to serving as go‑betweens with spies in Communist countries. Reporters shared their notebooks with the CIA. Editors shared their staffs. Some of the journalists were Pulitzer Prize winners, distinguished reporters who considered themselves ambassadors without‑portfolio for their country. Most were less exalted: foreign correspondents who found that their association with the Agency helped their work; stringers and freelancers who were as interested in the derring‑do of the spy business as in filing articles; and, the smallest category, full‑time CIA employees masquerading as journalists abroad. In many instances, CIA documents show, journalists were engaged to perform tasks for the CIA with the consent of the managements of America’s leading news organizations.”
Virtually all major US media outlets cooperated with the CIA, Bernstein revealed, including ABC, NBC, the AP, UPI, Reuters, Newsweek, Hearst newspapers, the Miami Herald, the Saturday Evening Post, and the New York Herald‑Tribune.
However, he added, “By far the most valuable of these associations, according to CIA officials, have been with the New York Times, CBS and Time Inc.”
These layers of state manipulation, censorship, and even direct crafting of the news media show that, as much as they claim to be independent, The New York Times and other outlets effectively serve as de facto spokespeople for the government — or at least for the US national security state.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/51828.htm
Udo Ulfkotte, an editor of the German newspaper, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Explained in his book, Gekaufte Journalisten (Bought Journalism), that no significant journalist in Europe is free of CIA influence. The English language edition, Journalists For Hire: How The CIA Buys The News, has been suppressed. A few copies managed to escape destruction. Two are currently available on Amazon, one for $910.99 and one for $1,994.99.
As I have often reported, in the “Western democracies” truth is suppressed and controlled explanations are put in its place. Western peoples are largely unaware of the agendas of the national security state and ruling elites. People in all walks of life serve these agendas without knowing it. Those who try to inform them are usually dismissed as “conspiracy theorists.” Obviously, there can be no democracy when the electorate is kept in the dark.
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The mainstream media has always been dishonest. From the “yellow journalism” of the late 1800s and early 1900s to today’s “fake news”, journalism has shown its true (communist) roots.
From the lies about the Spanish-American war to the New York Times’ walter duranty hiding the truth about and denying the artificially engineered and forced communist “famine” in the Ukraine, to the lies about the 1968 Viet Nam communist Tet offensive (a military victory for the South Vietnamese and American troops) reported by walter cronkite as a military defeat, cronkite and his ilk were successful in prolonging the Viet Nam war for years, giving “aid and comfort” to the enemy, who bragged about being supported by the U S media.
Look at NBCs doctoring of GMC truck gas tanks, rigging them to explode, and the deliberate mischaracterization of George Zimmerman’s conversation withe the 911 dispatcher, deleting a key phrase, as well as showing Trayvon Martin as a 12-year-old cherub rather than his more recent “thug” facebook picture.
The media has become a “fifth column” of the government and is not to be trusted. The CIA has had its hooks in the media since the 1950s. In fact, Hollywood script writers were paid to insert anti-drug messages in their scripts during the “drug hysteria” period of the 1980s through 2000s. Today, we have “crisis actors” embedded in our government and media, the same “crisis actors” who keep showing up, being used in every (fake) “crisis”. The mainstream media keeps parroting these impostors, thinking that we are stupid, not being able to see through their lies and deceptions.
To our advantage, we now have the internet, which gives the ordinary citizen the ability to see through the deceptions and lies, and the capability to be real “journalists”, quite often getting and reporting the story TRUTHFULLY before the mainstream media.
In fact, there are calls by “mainstream media” to “license” journalists, in an attempt to keep these “citizen journalists” out…twenty years ago, any journalist suggesting such a scheme would have been thrown out, but nowadays…who knows?
for those of you who are anti war,justin raimondo of antiwar.com died yesterday of cancer–
https://mailchi.mp/tomwoods/raimondo?e=2efc15cfe7