MEDIA

PROPAGANDA

LABOR'S UNTOLD STORY

 

One night, John Swinton, then the preeminent New York journalist, was the guest of honour at a banquet given him by the leaders of his craft. Someone who knew neither the press nor Swinton, offered a toast to the independent press.

Swinton outraged his colleagues by replying: "There is no such thing, at this date of the world's history, in America, as an independent press. You know it and I know it. There is not one of you who dares to write your honest opinions, and if you did, you know beforehand that it would never appear in print. I am paid weekly for keeping my honest opinion out of the paper I am connected with. Others of you are paid similar salaries for similar things, and any of you who would be so foolish as to write honest opinions would be out on the streets looking for another job. If I allowed my honest opinions to appear in one issue of my paper, before twenty-four hours my occupation would be gone.

The business of the journalists is to destroy the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the feet of mammon, and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread.

You know it and I know it, and what folly is this toasting an independent press?

We are the tools and vassals of rich men behind the scenes. We are the jumping jacks, they pull the strings and we dance. Our talents, our possibilities and our lives are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes."

Source: Labor's Untold Story, by Richard O. Boyer and Herbert M. Morais, published by United Electrical, Radio & Machine Workers of America, NY, 1955/1979.

 

______________________

"The news and the truth are not the same thing."

 

Walter Lippmann

______________________

From Katherine The Great by Deborah Davis (New York: Sheridan Square Press, 1991):

"You could get a journalist cheaper than a good call

girl, for a couple hundred dollars a month."

CIA operative discussing the availability and prices of journalists willing to peddle
CIA propaganda and cover stories with Philip Graham, Editor of the Washington Post.

______________________

Mockingbirds

"As terrible as it is to live in a nation where the press is known to be controlled by the government, at least one has the advantage of knowing the bias is present, and to adjust for it. In the United States of America, we are taught from birth that our press is free from such government meddling. This is an insideous lie about the very nature of the news institution in this country. One that allows the government to lie to us while denying the very fact of the lie itself."

Operation Mockingbird - The Subversion of America's Free Press By the CIA

by Alex Constantine: http://www.rense.com/politics6/mockingbird.htm

"The Central Intelligence Agency owns everyone of any significance in the major media."   William Colby, former Director of the CIA

___________

"It is better to

have a newspaper

without a government

than a government

without a newspaper."

Thomas Jefferson

"If you don't read the newspaper, you are uninformed;

if you do read the newspaper, you are misinformed."

Attributed to

Mark Twain

(1835-1910)

___________

Conservative newspaper columnist and host of a nationally syndicated television program, Armstrong Williams, caught selling the Bush Administration's No Child Left Behind policy for just over $240,000:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armstrong_Williams

National Public Radio Report on Armstrong Williams Media Scandal (audio clip):
http://www.npr.org/dmg/dmg.php?prgCode=ATC&showDate=14-Jan-2005&segNum=17&NPRMediaPref=WM&getAd=1

Letter from Senators Arlen Specter and Tom Harkin, United States Senate Committee Chairmen, to Secretary of Department of Education, Rod Paige, regarding the $240,000 paid by public relations firm, Ketchum, to Armstrong Williams firm, Graham Williams Group, for his commitment to provide positive commentary on the No Child Left Behind Act and to allow... other department officials to promote the Act through his program.
http://www.npr.org/documents/2005/jan/harkin_specter_doe.pdf

Outfoxed- Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism (DVD, 2004)

Conservative pundit Armstrong Williams has been under fire recently following revelations that he was paid $240,000 to promote the Bush administration's No Child Left Behind law. However, it isn't the first time that his media interests have been used as a mouthpiece for hidden interests.

Flacking for Big Tobacco: The Other Armstrong Williams Scandal by Bob Burton:
http://www.counterpunch.org/burton01152005.html

Two Journalists petition FCC to challenge Fox-13 license renewal asserting it deliberately broadcast false and distorted news reports (See Jane Akre below):
http://tampabay.bizjournals.com/tampabay/stories/2005/01/03/daily9.html?t=printable

 

 --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

Ilene PRoctor

International Public Relations

Press Contact: 310 858 6643

email:proctor@artnet.net

 

 

http://www.opednews.com/maxwrite/linkframe.php?linkid=53930

Glenn Greenwald

Saturday March 8, 2008 06:41 EST

Tucker Carlson unintentionally reveals

the role of the American press

(updated below - Update II)

The most interesting part of the controversy over Obama advisor Samantha Power's referring to Hillary Clinton as a "monster" -- one might say the only interesting part -- is that immediately after Power said it, she tried to proclaim that it was "off the record." Here was Power's exact quote:

She is a monster, too –- that is off the record –- she is stooping to anything.

But the reporter who was interviewing her, Britain's Gerri Peev of The Scotsman, printed the comment anyway -- as she should have, because Peev had never agreed that any parts of the interview would be "off the record," and nobody has the right to demand unilaterally, and after the fact, that journalists keep their embarrassing remarks a secret.

It's extremely likely, though, that had Power been speaking to a typical reporter from the American establishment media, her request to keep her comments a secret would have been honored. In one of the ultimate paradoxes, for American journalists -- whose role in theory is to expose the secrets of the powerful -- secrecy is actually their central religious tenet, especially when it comes to dealing with the most powerful. Protecting, rather than exposing, the secrets of the powerful is the fuel of American journalism. That's how they maintain their access to and good relations with those in power.

Illustrating that point as vividly as anything I can recall, MSNBC's Tucker Carlson had Peev on his show last night and angrily criticized her publication of Power's remarks. Carlson upbraided Peev for her lack of deference to someone as important as Power, and Peev retorted by pointing out exactly what that attitude reflects about Carlson and the American press generally (via LEXIS; h/t Mike Stark):

CARLSON: What -- she wanted it off the record. Typically, the arrangement is if someone you're interviewing wants a quote off the record, you give it to them off the record. Why didn't you do that?

PEEV: Are you really that acquiescent in the United States? In the United Kingdom, journalists believe that on or off the record is a principle that's decided ahead of the interview. If a figure in public life.

CARLSON: Right.

PEEV: Someone who's ostensibly going to be an advisor to the man who could be the most powerful politician in the world, if she makes a comment and decides it's a bit too controversial and wants to withdraw it immediately after, unfortunately if the interview is on the record, it has to go ahead.

CARLSON: Right. Well, it's a little.

PEEV: I didn't set out in any way, shape.

CARLSON: Right. But I mean, since journalistic standards in Great Britain are so much dramatically lower than they are here, it's a little much being lectured on journalistic ethics by a reporter from the "Scotsman," but I wonder if you could just explain what you think the effect is on the relationship between the press and the powerful. People don't talk to you when you go out of your way to hurt them as you did in this piece.

Don't you think that hurts the rest of us in our effort to get to the truth from the principals in these campaigns?

PEEV: If this is the first time that candid remarks have been published about what one campaign team thinks of the other candidate, then I would argue that your journalists aren't doing a very good job of getting to the truth.

Now I did not go out of my way in any way, shape or form to hurt Miss Power. I believe she's an intelligent and perfectly affable woman. In fact, she's -- she is incredibly intelligent so she -- who knows she may have known what she was doing.

She regretted it. She probably acted with integrity. It's not for me to decide one way or the other whether she did the right thing. But I did not go out and try to end her career.

Credit to Tucker Carlson for being so (unintentionally) candid about the lowly, subservient role of the American press with regard to "the relationship between the press and the powerful." A journalist should never do anything that "hurts" the powerful, otherwise the powerful won't give access to the press any longer. Presumably, the press should only do things that please the powerful so that the powerful keep talking to the press, so that the press in turn can keep pleasing the powerful, in an endless, symbiotic, mutually beneficial cycle. Rarely does someone who plays the role of a "journalist" on TV so candidly describe their real function.

For anyone who wants to dismiss Carlson as some buffoon who is unrepresentative of journalists generally, I would refer them to the testimony at the Lewis Libby trial of the mighty, revered Tim Russert, Washington Bureau Chief for NBC News:

When I talk to senior government officials on the phone, it's my own policy -- our conversations are confidential. If I want to use anything from that conversation, then I will ask permission.

As The Washington Post's Dan Froomkin put it: "That's not reporting, that's enabling. That's how you treat your friends when you're having an innocent chat, not the people you're supposed to be holding accountable."

Unlike Carlson, Tim Russert is the Big Guy of the American press corps. He's the one they all look up to and admire, the one they invariably point to as proof that tough, adversarial journalism is alive and well in the U.S. Yet that's the same Tim Russert who admitted under oath that -- even with no "off the record" agreement -- all of his conversations with government officials are presumptively confidential, and he never reports anything unless they give him explicit permission in advance to do so.

It's the same exact subservient mindset Carlson expressed last night, just more formally and under oath. That's how the vast majority of them think and behave. As Peev asked in astonishment when Carlson insisted Power's comments should not have been published because doing "hurtful" things like that that makes the powerful dislike reporters: "Are you really that acquiescent in the United States?" See the Iraq War. Or the Bush administration. Or Tim Russert's operating rules.

I just had a very similar issue arise last week, and not for the first time. In response to media criticism I wrote, a well-known journalist emailed me out of the blue, unsolicited, with very petulant, whiny objections to what I had written. At the top of his email, he wrote "OFF THE RECORD," and he did the same with a subsequent exchange. I had never communicated with him before and never agreed to any such arrangement. But that's a common practice among journalists and many political figures; they think that they can unilaterally slap an "off the record" label on whatever they say and expect that it will be honored.

I ended up not publishing that exchange solely because the probative value was minimal and the primary effect from doing so would just have been to make him look foolish for being so petulant and thin-skinned. Publishing it would have been more vindictive and petty than instructive, so I didn't. But his unilateral "OFF THE RECORD" designation played no role in my decision.

I considered publishing it, and I am certain that had I done so, he would have accused me of acting improperly by publishing something he unilaterally decreed to be "OFF THE RECORD." Just as Russert and Carlson said, rampant secrecy is the coin of their realm, the fuel that greases their access. Nothing should ever be disclosed unless everyone agrees to disclosure and it doesn't "hurt" the person whose comments are being reported.

The number one rule of the standard establishment journalist is to avoid offending the powerful because the more offense they give, the fewer favors the powerful will do for the journalists. Conversely, and by logical necessity, the more journalists please the powerful, the more favors the powerful will do for them. As Carlson put it: "People don't talk to you when you go out of your way to hurt them as you did." I can't think of any single dynamic that better explains what has happened the last eight years than that one.

* * * * *

As for Carlson's snide, self-loving claim that "journalistic standards in Great Britain are so much dramatically lower than they are here," just watch this relentlessly probing, adversarial interview by the BBC's Jeremy Paxman of John Bolton regarding the Bush administration's invasion and occupation of Iraq, and ask yourself: how many American TV reporters would ever dare to conduct an interview of a high Bush official like this, especially when it's with a Serious Foreign Policy Expert regarding our being a Nation At War?

UPDATE: The video of Carlson's interview of Peev can be viewed here. After that interview, Carlson had on Clinton/Lieberman supporter and all-around establishment-worshiper Lanny Davis who, needless to say, agreed fully with Carlson that political figures should have the right unilaterally to declare their remarks "off the record" even after they make them:

Most reporters in the U.S. would give you a break. That reporter . . . didn't seem to understand that you lose sources if you burn someone like that.

Accurately reporting someone's comments during an on-the-record interview after they tell you not to is "burning" them," and the primary concern of the reporter should be to avoid angering political officials that way.

Carlson then added:

Unless you've had experience dealing with the press in the United Kingdom, as she called it, you really can't know just how low the standards there are. There are papers there that just makes things up . . . . It's almost unbelievable how different journalism is there from how it is here. I don't think most Americans get that.

Even after the lead-up to Iraq War, eight years of the Bush administration, the Pat Tillman and Jessica Lynch fiascoes and an endless string of similar incidents, American "journalists" like Carlson are actually proud of the role the American media plays. Newsweek's Richard Wolffe, sitting and chatting with Tony Snow: "the press here does a fantastic job of adhering to journalistic standards and covering politics in general."

That's why it won't change and the only real hope is to develop alternatives to it. Serving the politically powerful, functioning as the PR arm of the political establishment, is what they want to do, what they believe they should be doing. The more they do that, the more respectful they are of the politically powerful, the more "standards" they think they have. The success of the American establishment journalist is measured by how many good friends they count among the politically powerful.

That's why they consider such disrespectful and uppity behavior like this to be a sign of "no standards" (h/t palindromebeta):

And:
VIDEO  http://www.opednews.com/maxwrite/linkframe.php?linkid=53930

And:
VIDEO  http://www.opednews.com/maxwrite/linkframe.php?linkid=53930

So rude and disrespectful. No journalistic standards at all in that country. That's not how you get political officials to like you.

UPDATE II: A reader emails to remind me of this 2004 interview to which George Bush was so wrongfully subjected by a reporter in Ireland for Irish TV. As the emailer said:

Bush also got blindsided in about 2004 by a determined interviewer on Irish TV, who was much less deferential than American journalists are. He's dumbfounded because it's not the model of journalism he's accustomed to.

Very much worth watching.

Bush is used to sitting next to a warm fireplace while Brit Hume and Chris Wallace gaze lovingly at him, and he plainly didn't know what to do when faced with an actual reporter who doesn't have the very high standards which govern American political reporters:

-- Glenn Greenwald

 

Peace,
Liz

Liz Rich
lizrich151@aol.com

 

"Everything faded into mist. The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became the truth." George Orwell in "1984"

MEDIA COVER-UP

Journalists Expose Major Cover-ups

by Media Corporations

This is a two-page summary of revealing accounts by 20 award-winning journalists from the book Into the Buzzsaw, compiled by Kristina Borjesson. All of these courageous writers were prevented by corporate media ownership from reporting major news stories. Some were even fired or laid off. These journalists have won numerous awards, including several Emmys and a Pulitzer. Join in building a better world. Spread this news across the land.

Into the Buzzsaw - Myth of a Free Press, Compiled by Kristina Borjesson. www.buzzflash.com

Jane Akre - Fox News. After our struggle to air an honest report [on hormones in milk], Fox fired the general manager [of our station]. The new GM said that if we didn't agree to changes that the lawyers were insisting upon, we'd be fired for insubordination in 48 hours. We pleaded with [him] to look at the facts we'd uncovered. His reply: We paid $3 billion dollars for these TV stations. We'll tell you what the news is. The news is what we say it is! [After we refused] Fox's general manager presented us an agreement that would give us a full year of salary, and benefits worth close to $200,000 in consulting jobs, but with strings attached: no mention of how Fox covered up the story and no opportunity to ever expose the facts. [After declining] we were fired. (pp. 213-219, click for more)

Dan Rather - CBS, Mulitple Emmy Awards. What's going on is a belief that you can manipulate communicable trust between the leadership and the led. The way you do that is you don't let the press in anywhere. Access to war is extremely limited. The fiercer the combat, the more the access is limited, [including] access to information. This is a direct contradiction of the stated policy of maximum access to information consistent with national security. There was a time in South Africa when people would put flaming tires around people's necks if they dissented. In some ways the fear [now in the U.S.] is that you will have a flaming tire of lack of patriotism put around your neck. That fear keeps journalists from asking the tough questions. I am humbled to say, I do not except myself from this criticism. (pp. 37-42, click for more)

Kristina Borjesson - CBS, Emmy award winner. Pierre Salinger announced to the world on Nov. 8, 1996, that he'd received documents proving that a US Navy missile had accidentally downed [TWA flight 800]. That same day, FBI's Jim Kallstrom called a press conference. A man raised his hand and asked why the Navy was involved in the recovery and investigation while a possible suspect. Remove him! [Kallstrom] yelled. Two men leapt over to the questioner and grabbed him by the arms. There was a momentary chill in the air after the guy had been dragged out of the room. Kallstrom and entourage acted as if nothing had happened. [Kallstrom was later hired by CBS.] (pp. 290-291, click for more)

Monika Jensen-Stevenson - Emmy-winning producer for 60 minutes. Robert R. Garwood - 14 years a prisoner of the Vietnamese - was found guilty in the longest court-martial in US history. At the end of the court-martial, there seemed no question that Garwood was a monstrous traitor. Several years later in 1985, Garwood was speaking publicly about something that had never made the news during his court-martial. He knew of other American prisoners in Vietnam long after the war was over. He was supported by Vietnam veterans whose war records were impeccable. My sources included outstanding experts like former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency General Tighe and returned POWs like Captain McDaniel, who held the Navy's top award for bravery. With such advocates, it was hard not to consider the possibility that prisoners (some 3,500) had in fact been kept by the Vietnamese as hostages to make sure the US would pay the more than $3 billion in war reparations. [After the war] American POWs had become worthless pawns. The US had not paid the promised monies and had no intention of paying in the future. (pp. 255-263, click for more)

Greg Palast - BBC. In the months leading up to the November [2000] balloting, Gov. Jeb Bush ordered elections supervisors to purge 58,000 voters on the grounds they were felons not entitled to vote. As it turns out, only a handful of these voters were felons. This extraordinary news ran on page one of the country's leading paper. Unfortunately, it was in the wrong country: Britain. In the USA, it was not covered. The office of the governor [also] illegally ordered the removal of felons from the voter rolls - real felons - but with the right to vote under Florida law. As a result, 50,000 of these voters could not vote. The fact that 90% of these voters were Democrats should have made it news as this alone more than accounted for Bush's victory. (pp. 195-197, click for more)

Michael Levine - 25-year veteran of DEA, writer for New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and USA Today. The Chang Mai factory that the CIA prevented me from destroying was the source of massive amounts of heroin being smuggled into the US in the bodies and body bags of GIs killed in Vietnam. Case after case was killed by CIA and State Department intervention and there wasn't a thing we could do about it. In 1980, CIA-recruited mercenaries and drug traffickers unseated Bolivia's democratically elected president. Bolivia [was] the source of virtually 100% of the cocaine entering the US. Immediately after the coup, cocaine production increased massively. This was the beginning of the crack plague. The CIA along with State and Justice Departments had to protect their drug-dealing assets by destroying a DEA investigation. How do I know? I was the inside source. I sat down at my desk in the American embassy and wrote evidence of my charges. I addressed it to Newsweek. Three weeks later DEA's internal security [called] to notify me that I was under investigation. The highlight of the 60 Minutes piece is when the administrator of the DEA, Federal Judge Robert Bonner, tells Mike Wallace, There is no other way to put it, Mike, [what the CIA did] is drug smuggling. It's illegal. (pp. 165-189, click for more)

Gary Webb - San Jose Mercury News, Pulitzer Prize winner. In 1996, I wrote a series of stories that began this way: For the better part of a decade, a Bay Area drug ring sold tons of cocaine to the Crips and Bloods gangs of LA and funneled millions in drug profits to a guerilla army run by the CIA. The cocaine that flooded in helped spark a crack explosion in urban America. The story was developing a momentum all of its own, despite a virtual news blackout from the major media. Ultimately, became the focus of their scrutiny. It was remarkable [Mercury News editor] Ceppos wrote, that the four Washington Post it was public pressure that forced the national newspapers into the fray. The Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times published stories, but spent little time exploring the CIA's activities. Instead, my reporting and I reporters assigned to debunk the series could not find a single significant factual error. A few months later, the Mercury News [due to intense CIA pressure] backed away from the story, publishing a long column by Ceppos apologizing for shortcomings in the series. The New York Times hailed Ceppos for setting a brave new standard, and splashed his apology on their front page, the first time the series had ever been mentioned there. I quit the Mercury News not long after that. Do we have a free press today? Sure. It's free to report all the sex scandals, all the stock market news, [and] every new health fad that comes down the pike. But when it comes to the real down and dirty stuff - such stories are not even open for discussion. (pp. 143-156, click for more)

John Kelly - Author, ABC producer. ABC hired me to help produce a story about an investment firm that was heavily involved with the CIA. Part of the ABC report charged that the CIA had plotted to assassinate an American, Ron Rewald, the president of [the investment firm]. Scott Barnes said on camera that the CIA had asked him to kill Rewald. After the show aired, CIA officials met with ABC executive David Burke, [who] was sufficiently impressed by the vigor with which they made their case to order an on-air clarification. But that was not enough. [CIA Director] Casey called ABC Chairman Goldenson. [Thus] despite all the documented evidence presented in the program, despite ABC standing by the program in a second broadcast, Peter Jennings reported that ABC could no longer substantiate the charges. That same day, the CIA filed a formal complaint with the FCC charging that ABC had deliberately distorted the news. In the complaint, Casey asked that ABC be stripped of its TV and radio licenses. During this time, Capital Cities Communications was maneuvering to buy ABC. [CIA Director] Casey was one of the founders of Cap Cities. Cap Cities bought ABC. Within months, the entire investigative unit was dispersed. (pp. 130-133, click for more)

Robert McChesney - 500 radio & TV appearances. [There has been a] striking consolidation of the media from hundreds of firms to an industry dominated by less than ten enormous transnational conglomerates. The largest ten media firms own all US TV networks, most TV stations, all major film studios, all major music companies, nearly all cable TV channels, much of the book and magazine publishing [industry], and much, much more. Expensive investigative journalism - especially that which goes after national security or powerful corporate interests - is discouraged. Largely irrelevant human interest/tragedy stories get extensive coverage. A few weeks after the war began in Afghanistan, CNN president Isaacson authorized CNN to provide two different versions of the war: a more critical one for the global audience and a sugarcoated one for Americans. It is nearly impossible to conceive of a better world without some changes in the media status quo. We have no time to waste. (pp. 444-453, click for more)

______________________

This is a ten-page summary of revealing accounts by 20 award-winning

journalists from the book Into the Buzzsaw, compiled by Kristina Borjesson.

___________

___________

 

 

___________

___________

 

"American fascism will not be really dangerous until

there is a purposeful coalition among the cartelists,

the deliberate poisoners of public information..."

 

Vice President

Henry A. Wallace

___________

___________

The Liberty Bell with the Declaration of Independence

CORPORATE MEDIA IS CORPORATE AMERICA

SINCLAIR AND THE PUBLIC INTEREST

Radio's Big Bully; Dirty tricks and crappy programming: Welcome to the world of Clear Channel, the biggest station owner in America, by Eric Boehlert (Salon):
http://www.salon.com/ent/feature/2001/04/30/clear_channel/index.html

A full page of articles on Clear Channel, the media company that has been swallowing up hundreds of radio outlets, nationally, and which, at last look, owned more than 1200 of America's radio stations, nationwide:
http://www.guvwurld.org/cgi-bin/live.20040602.cgi?d=/Clear%20Channel

BIG MEDIA INTERLOCKS WITH CORPORATE AMERICA

AMERICAN NEWS INDUSTRY A FAR CRY FROM GENUINE JOURNALISM

DECLARATION OF JOURNALISTIC INDEPENDENCE

BOB WOODWARD COVER-UP

PROJECT CENSORED

DON'T LIKE THE NEWS? THEN BUY YOUR OWN!

THE GHOST OF VICE PRESIDENT WALLACE WARNS: IT CAN HAPPEN HERE (Media Manipulation for Political Purposes) By Thom Hartmann: http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0719-15.htm
See also: http://concernedhumanity.com/hidden_history.html / http://concernedhumanity.com/fascism_in_america.html