005 CIA’s Mockingbird News Network

 

The monolithic mainstream media does a fairly good job covering weather, sports and local news, however, the cable news stations and big three networks are increasingly viewed as pathetic propagandists whether you line up on the left or right of the carefully constructed divide and conquer working–class–Americans line. But when it comes to national and international politics and policy, the media as propaganda promulgators continually follow the Hegelian Dialectic script that has worked so well for so long. The official terminology is thesis, creates antithesis, resulting in syntheses, in laymen’s terms, problem, reaction, solution.

Controlling the media has long been understood as tantamount to controlling public perception and hence, profitable policies. Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman co–wrote the illuminating book Manufacturing Consent way back in 1988 that exposed the mechanisms of the manipulative, mendacious media. Don’t take my word for it, check out the plethora of reviews on Amazon, including their own review.

An absolutely brilliant analysis of the ways in which individuals and organizations of the media are influenced to shape the social agendas of knowledge and, therefore, belief. Contrary to the popular conception of members of the press as hard-bitten realists doggedly pursuing unpopular truths, Herman and Chomsky prove conclusively that the free-market economics model of media leads inevitably to normative and narrow reporting. Whether or not you’ve seen the eye-opening movie, buy this book, and you will be a far more knowledgeable person and much less prone to having your beliefs manipulated as easily as the press.

Noam Chomsky

— The whole educational and professional training system is a very elaborate filter, which just weeds out people who are too independent, and who think for themselves, and who don’t know how to be submissive, and so on–because they’re dysfunctional to the institutions.  ― Noam Chomsky

–Either you repeat the same conventional doctrines everybody is saying, or else you say something true, and it will sound like it’s from Neptune. ― Noam Chomsky

 

The media has been the sharp point of empire and conquest for centuries. Native Americans were branded as heathens and savages by the East Coast media back in the days when Robber Barons pushed the train tracks ever westward on occupied land, killing anyone in their way and wiping out the Native’s primary source of protein, the vast bison herds of the plains and foothills of the Rockies.

Problem––Natives in the way; reaction––brand Natives as Godless heathens; solution––kill them, imprison them, take what you want by bloody force.

Today it’s only slightly more sophisticated. The public has been endeared to trust the intelligence agencies and even see the CIA in an adventurous, romantic perspective, courtesy of the Hollywood productions such as Mission Impossible, Jason Bourne and James Bond for example. They provide visceral images of nearly invincible secret agents working for the overall good of civilization.

The CIA and other intelligence agencies work at the direction of the international banksters and their various corporate holdings, fomenting regime change in various regions and for various reasons, usually resource exploitation favorable to members of interlocked corporate clientele, like the membership of the US and US–Azerbaijan Chambers of Commerce, for instance, or the CFR, and so on. The ramp up to gaining public approval for war, “manufactured consent” goes something like this. The financial interests target an area in the world where they want to extract resources and sell on the world market to the highest bidder, no qualifications to worry about. They try to negotiate, manipulate, bribe, intimidate, and overtake but each stage requires a public relations overlay. In stubborn situations, the CIA stirs up shit, reports back that the Natives are restless and are exceptionally dangerous, so it’s better to do something or be seen as irresponsible and soft on terror. The CIA provides “intelligence” from which POTUS, his cabinet and Congress deliberate over, ahem.

All this is leaked to the media and the media sounds a much amplified alarm, doing the responsible thing, scaring the hell out of people; then the media conducts interviews with retired Generals now working as consultants, the congress critters compete in patriotic posturing, the enemy will be routed, and so on. The people are poled by the same media and respond to fear marketing just as they have been conditioned to respond. Now the chicken hawks in Congress recite the polling numbers, use graphs to prove public consent for intervention, and in a few years after instigating war they take up a nice position as consultant to one of the Fortune 500/CFR war profiteering firms for an annual seven digit salary. The media always makes a killing on war, people are glued to the flat screens most all day during intense battles. Ads are near priceless. The formula for war is proven, the fear pieces are put in place ensuring the public is now convinced a military intervention is needed to preserve freedoms and democracy, the public finances the incursion, the uncooperative foreign government is overthrown, a puppet is put in place, resources start flowing, i.e., Iraq. Problem, Reaction, Solution.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SxlLO2zMYKQ

Proof that media follows a script

The video supports my observations that there just might be a grand poobah central news director (The Wizard of Oz, perhaps), overseeing content for all networks and cable stations. The stories they pick to air almost always mimic each other until the closing moments where each station is apparently allowed to freelance their own feel good finale. Of course the other side of the coin to this is that they also use up their allotted time slot airing preapproved stories, thereby eliminating any possibility and responsibility for not airing other stories, stories that you and I might find a tad more relevant. Maybe most people don’t see this because they have sampled a bit too many of the pharmaceuticals the nightly news stations hustle ad nauseam.

Further evidence that the CIA is at the whims of the international financial masters and corporate conglomerates is found at their very inception. From Information Clearing House, on February 21, 2012 titled. The CIA’s links to Wall Street by Mark Gaffney. More of this in Youtopia.

One of the most successful frauds ever perpetrated upon the American people is the notion that the CIA exists to provide intelligence to the president. In fact, the CIA’s intimate links to Wall Street strongly suggest that the CIA was created to serve the perceived interests of investment bankers. The well documented links to Wall Street can be traced to the founding of the agency.

According to former CIA director Richard Helms, when Allen Dulles was tasked in 1946 to “draft proposals for the shape and organization of what was to become the Central Intelligence Agency,” he recruited an advisory group of six men made up almost exclusively of Wall Street investment bankers and lawyers. Dulles himself was an attorney at the prominent Wall Street law firm, Sullivan and Cromwell. Two years later, Dulles became the chairman of a three-man committee which reviewed the young agency’s performance. The other two members of the committee were also New York lawyers. For nearly a year, the committee met in the offices of J.H. Whitney, a Wall Street investment firm.

According to Peter Dale Scott, over the next twenty years, all seven deputy directors of the agency were drawn from the Wall Street financial aristocracy; and six were listed in the New York social register. So we see that from the beginning the CIA was an exclusive Wall Street club. Allen Dulles himself became the first civilian Director of Central Intelligence in early 1953. (You may remember Kennedy fired Allen Dulles and threatened to splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces, Dulles was later the controlling director on the Warren Commission).

Allen and John Foster Dulles, brothers Grimm.

Many people have heard about the CIA’s Operation Paperclip, where escaping Nazi scientist were brought to the U.S.A. and filled prominent positions in academics, rocket science, mind control and so on. Far fewer have heard of Operation Mockingbird, taking Wikipedia’s word for it:

Operation Mockingbird is a secret campaign by the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to influence media. Begun in the 1950s, it was initially organized by Cord Meyer and Allen W. Dulles, and was later led by Frank Wisner after Dulles became the head of the CIA. The organization recruited leading American journalists into a network to help present the CIA’s views, and funded some student and cultural organizations, and magazines as fronts. As it developed, it also worked to influence foreign media and political campaigns, in addition to activities by other operating units of the CIA.

The more reticent half of All the President’s Men Woodward and Bernstein, Carl Bernstein wrote about the dubious relationship between media and CIA in Rolling Stones Magazine in 1977.

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

Alsop is one of more than 400 American journalists who in the past twenty‑five years have secretly carried out assignments for the Central Intelligence Agency, according to documents on file at CIA headquarters. Some of these journalists’ relationships with the Agency were tacit; some were explicit. There was cooperation, accommodation and overlap. Journalists provided a full range of clandestine services—from simple intelligence gathering to serving as go‑betweens with spies in Communist countries. Reporters shared their notebooks with the CIA. Editors shared their staffs. Some of the journalists were Pulitzer Prize winners, distinguished reporters who considered themselves ambassadors without‑portfolio for their country. 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.

Among the executives who lent their cooperation to the Agency were Williarn Paley of the Columbia Broadcasting System, Henry Luce of Time Inc., Arthur Hays Sulzberger of the New York Times, Barry Bingham Sr. of the LouisviIle Courier‑Journal, and James Copley of the Copley News Service. Other organizations which cooperated with the CIA include the American Broadcasting Company, the National Broadcasting Company, the Associated Press, United Press International, Reuters, Hearst Newspapers, Scripps‑Howard, Newsweek magazine, the Mutual Broadcasting System, the Miami Herald and the old Saturday Evening Post and New York Herald‑Tribune.

By far the most valuable of these associations, according to CIA officials, have been with the New York Times, CBS and Time Inc.

All this and still so many people have far too much faith in mainstream media, so much in fact that most news stories, not emanating from mainstream media are automatically deemed suspicious at best, wacky conspiracy theory at worst.