Officially Sanctioned Pimps: Mainstream Media’s Subservience to Special Interests
Richard Gale and Gary Null PhD
April 16, 2020
For the vast majority of Americans, their knowledge of the nation’s domestic and foreign affairs takes a back seat to their responsibilities with their families and careers. Consequently, with fingers crossed, they must rely upon the media in the hope they will receive objective and accurate news and commentaries. It is natural for us to gravitate towards news personalities and sources that align with our own biased political, religious and ideological beliefs. Most people turn to the mainstream media, such as the New York Times, Washington Post and network and cable television. Individuals such as Rush Limbaugh, Rachel Maddow, Sean Hannity, Lawrence O’Donnell, Tucker Carlson, Anderson Cooper, Laura Ingraham and Glen Beck succeed in attracting huge daily audiences. These people are trusted because viewers build a report with them and believe they have insights into issues that are not readily accessible to the general public. For many others, who in disgust reject mainstream media, it is ideologically driven internet sites written either by amateur writers or disgruntled citizens who distort and spin facts to conform with their personal illusions. Hence the epidemic rise of fake news on both the left and right.
Before the advent of Fox News in 1996 to create an alternative voice to the dominant media’s complacency favoring Bill Clinton’s presidency, there still remained a veneer of independent integrity among mainstream television programs. For example, Edward R Morrow … who was a thorn in the establishment’s side and Walter Cronkite. However this assumption is also false. In 1975, the Congressional Church Committee commenced investigations into illegal and unconstitutional activities within the CIA, FBI, the National Security Agency and the IRS. The Committee’s findings shocked the nation and included assassination plots to knock off foreign political leaders that might appear as accidents, suicides or heart attacks, the CIA’s covert operations in Chile in support of the brutal dictator Pinochet, and MKULTRA’s mind-control experiments. But perhaps one of the most shocking discoveries, which received too little attention, was the NSA’s Operation Shamrock that worked directly with the heads of the major telecommunications companies to intercept and share information in order to create a “watch list”. This operation started in 1945 and continued completely unbeknownst to the American public. The final report entitled “Foreign and Military Intelligence” states, “The CIA currently maintains a network of several hundred foreign individuals around the world who provide intelligence for the CIA and at times attempt to influence opinion through the use of covert propaganda…. These individuals provide the CIA with direct access to a large number of newspapers and periodicals, scores of press services, news agencies, radio and television stations, commercial book publishers…” This also includes Hollywood and the entertainment industry. Uncovering the government’s largest covert surveillance program eventually resulted in President Carter signing the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act — an important effort that has been categorically ignored or co-opted every since.
Although the Act was intended to put a halt on intelligence influence over the media airwaves and publications, it has not only continued but worsened. For example during the past two decades it was exposed that CNN employed military and psyop specialists in its southeast TV bureau. They have also infiltrated NPR. According to Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein, “the CIA’s use of the American news media has been much more extensive than agency officials have acknowledged publicly or in closed sessions with members of Congress.” Even Pulitzer Prize recipients, Bernstein revealed, were on the CIA’s payroll writing fake stories.
Among some of the incidences of the CIA’s control over the media are:
- In 1977, Daniel Short wrote about CBS being infiltrated by the CIA.
- Career CIA officers recruited out of the press corp, such as former CIA director Richard Helms who ran the United Press’ Berlin bureau
- Henry Luce, founder of Time and Life magazines, was a close associate with CIA director Allen Dulles and permitted CIA operatives to work in his news facilities
- Radio Free Europe was primarily a CIA operation run by former Wall Street attorney Frank Wisner, who “owned” executives in the New York Times, Washington Post, Newsweek, CBS among others.
- It is estimated there are 53 international media entities named as CIA fronts.
- For decades the CIA has worked closely with Hollywood and employs liaison officers. Some films such as Argo and Zero Dark Thirty were scripted by CIA writers.
- In 1999, the CIA founded In Q Tel, a venture capital firm that develops information technology used by companies such as Facebook and Google.
Robert McChesney at the University of Illinois’ Institute of Communications Research has been a long-time critic of network media and how it compromises democracy by controlling and manipulating knowledge to fuel and govern public ignorance. This includes its methods of politicizing society, the globalizing of capitalism’s predatory agenda, and its relationship with foreign policy, militarism and imperialism. According to McChesney, American journalism today is “deplorable.” And the primary victim has been truth which no longer exists in the mainstream media outlets.
Unfortunately, since the Church report, the media has increasingly been further compromised and corrupted. Major corporations, investors and federal agencies use the airwaves and publishing houses as a psychological weapon against public critical thought. At no time has it been held accountable for misleading the nation. With all of the different crises Americans and the rest of the global community now face — a likely international economic collapse, climate change, failing healthcare and the present coronavirus pandemic — the average citizen rarely reflects upon those who have exceeded their power of judgment and who are paid to conduct in-depth research on our behalf.
There still remain genuine journalists and investigative reporters who are not compromised and refuse to lie to the American people. In the past there was Sinclair Lewis, IF Stone and Jack Anderson. Today there is Seymour Hersh, Chris Hedges, Abby Martin, Max Blumenthal, John Pilger and Greg Palast. But all of these voices are essentially silenced today and excluded from social platforms such as Facebook and Google. They are pillared and libeled on Wikipedia, and you will never see them invited to testify on truth’s behalf before Congress. Yet repeatedly these individuals have been correct on all the major issues while the full spectrum of corporate media has been habitually wrong.
In a speech commemorating the 50th anniversary of the CIA, President Clinton made one of his rare truthful statements: “By necessity, the American people will never know the full story of your courage.” Therefore we might briefly glance back on the media’s past history of fabrications that fall in line with the intelligence agenda and acknowledge their consistent deceit and lies over the decades. Sadly these misdeeds culminate in enormous human suffering and rampant environmental degradation.
- Back in 1964, the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution gave the president the authority to wage war without a formal declaration from Congress. It has been a precedent misused by every president ever since who have desired to initiate an armed conflict.
- While Syria’s Assad has been categorically blamed by the media for using chemical weapons on its citizens, it was Seymour Hersh who procured from a high ranking US official that the Turks carried out the attacks so the US could condemn the Assad government to advance regime change.
- And when has the media ever covered crimes committed by the FBI accurately? Examples: efforts to attempt to force Martin Luther King to commit suicide; the creation of faux planning attacks by terrorists after 911; the planned attack on fuel lines at JFK airport; planting of dummy bombs in the subways of New York City and Washington DC; generating schemes to bomb synagogues and shoot stinger missiles at military aircraft by men recruited in Newburgh, New York. All of these were staged in order to entrap people.
- Bush’s Patriot Act that gave government sweeping powers to spy on virtually every American and violate the public’s right to privacy.
- And we must not forget Obama’s long litany of policies favoring the Deep State and private interests that the liberal media simply kowtowed along with: TARP and the big bank bail outs, deregulation of Wall Street as part of financial reform, silence on repealing Citizen’s United to prevent the elite from influencing politics, increasing military aggression in Syria, Libya, Yemen, Honduras, Somalia and Ukraine, huge private contracts to keep Americans under surveillance, pushing nuclear power and hydrofracking, and of course Obamacare to keep private insurers’ coffers overflowing.
- Obama’s Dark Act received no media attention but removes state rights to protect their populations by informing them whether foods contain genetically modified ingredients or not.
- The changes in the 5th amendment in 1996 permits civil asset forfeitures. Increasingly police departments impose asset forfeitures in the hundreds of millions of dollars from motorists not charged with crimes and without search warrants. These are all signs for a successful police state.
In the meantime, Americans’ critical thinking skills rapidly decay. A once literate society with the world’s best universities is now functionally illiterate. Support for privatized charter schools, which removes funds from public education, is furthering the class divide. We have an overly medicated society where ADHD is so rampant that children wear the diagnosis as a badge of honor for acceptance among their peers. The list is endless and the Trump White House is adding to it exponentially. And where is the mainstream media in all of this? Pimping for the deep state and special interests.