The most successful journalists are rarely the best ones, as one very good journalist describes in his experience in Washington. “The people who succeeded and did well,” says Robert Parry, “were those who didn’t stand up, who didn’t write the big stories, who looked the other way when history was happening in front of them, and went along either consciously or just by cowardice with the deception of the American people.”
In the “Origins of the Overclass,” Steve Kangas who appears to have been murdered in 1999, describes the relaltionship between the CIA and the media. “Journalism is a perfect cover for CIA agents,” Kangas pointed out. “People talk freely to journalists, and few think suspiciously of a journalist aggressively searching for information. Journalists also have power, influence and clout. Not surprisingly, the CIA began a mission in the late 1940s to recruit American journalists on a wide scale, a mission it dubbed Operation MOCKINGBIRD. The agency wanted these journalists not only to relay any sensitive information they discovered, but also to write anti-communist, pro-capitalist propaganda when needed.”
Gary Webb – Robert Parry
Katherine Graham – Sam Smith
Graham, in a 1988 speech to senior CIA employees, said: “There are some things the general public does not need to know and shouldn’t. I believe democracy flourishes when the government can take legitimate steps to keep its secrets and when the press can decide whether to print what it knows.”
(In the 1950s, Graham’s husband, Philip, played an important role in Operation Mockingbird, a major and remarkably successful effort by the CIA to co-opt journalists. Some 25 major news organizations and 400 journalists were seconded by the agency for its purposes during this period, as admitted by the CIA itself during the Church committee hearings. As one agency operative put it, “You could get a journalist cheaper than a good call girl, for a couple hundred dollars a month.”)
Michael Parenti: “In sum, the news media’s daily performance under what is called “democratic capitalism” is not a failure but a skillfully evasive success. We often hear that the press “got it wrong” or “dropped the ball” on this or that story. In fact, the media do their job remarkably well. Media people have a trained incapacity for the whole truth. Their job is not to inform but disinform, not to advance democratic discourse but to dilute and mute it. Their task is to give every appearance of being conscientiously concerned about events of the day, saying so much while meaning so little, offering so many calories with so few nutrients. When we understand this, we move from a liberal complaint about the press’s sloppy performance to a radical analysis of how the media maintain the dominant paradigm with much craft and craftiness.”
In The Secret Life of Bill Clinton, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard expresses his dismay with the American media’s coverage of the Timothy McVeigh trial for the Oklahoma bombing. “The reaction of the press disturbed me deeply. I never imagined that the machinery of cover-up could be so oppressively efficient.” (p.8) Evans-Pritchard alleges that the investigation was “rotten from the foundations up” and that the U.S. government were determined to suppress information that indicated that the Oklahoma bombing was “a broad conspiracy involving several members of the neo-Nazi movement in Oklahoma.”
George Seldes, Lords of the Press: “it is possible to fool all the people all the time – when government and press cooperate.”
Notes
Sam Smith, “The Canonization of Katherine Graham,” http://www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/JohnJudge/PentaPap.html#CoKG
Daniel Brandt, “CIA and the Press: The Mighty Wurlitzer,” http://www.geocities.com/capitolhill/8425/CIAPRESS.HTM
Michael Parenti, “Monopoly Media Manipulation,” Michael Parenti Political Archive, May 2001,
http://www.michaelparenti.org/MonopolyMedia.html
Into the Buzzsaw: Leading Journalists Expose the Myth of a Free Press. ed. Kristina Borjesson, Prometheus Books, 2002
Steve Kangas, “The Origins of the Overclass,” Conspiracy Archive,
http://www.conspiracyarchive.com/NWO/Overclass.htm
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, The Secret Life of Bill Clinton: the unreported stories, 1997
Into the Buzzsaw
Robert Parry, “Fooling America,” A talk by Robert Parry given in Santa Monica on March 28, 1993
http://www.webcom.com/lpease/collections/conspiracies/parryspeech.htm
