By Grant Lawrence
Before It’s News
You may think that US journalists are working for who they say they are working for. But then you never know.
Unfortunately many have been revealed to have been working for the CIA during the Cold War. Even more important, the CIA and other US intelligence agencies were able to control the news by having assets in positions of power in US newsrooms, such as newspaper editors and high level managers.
It is clear news is often edited so as not to upset the advertisers. The management of news is done in such a way that it almost always promotes the Military Industrial Complex. Corporate interests and the interests of the National Security State are nearly always the same because they are part of the same Complex. You might recognize this as fascism.
Did you ever wonder how nearly all of the major newspapers and TV and Radio news outlets throughout the country supported the war on Iraq?
The propagandists who facilitated the war should be asked who they work for. “Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Central Intelligence Agency?”
“On television the voices of dissent can’t be counted upon to match the studio drapes or serve as tasteful lead-ins to the advertisements for Pantene Pro-V and the U.S. Marine Corps. What we now know as the “news media” serve at the pleasure of the corporate sponsor, their purpose not to tell truth to the powerful but to transmit lies to the powerless.”
— Lewis Lapham
We call for a Truth Commission in the United States The people of South Africa did it, why can’t we? (Source: the new american dream)
There is a history to this goosestepping mentality that is promoted as news here in the US.
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…American journalists have long been bitterly opposed to the recruitment of reporters by U.S. intelligence agencies, and the fraudulent use of journalism credentials by intelligence operatives. Since the mid-1970s, journalists and others-including some of the nation’s top foreign policy-makers-believed that the CIA could no longer recruit reporters as spies. They shared a widespread but inaccurate assumption that the U.S. government had banned such objectionable practices as part of a package of reforms revamping codes of conduct for covert intelligence operations adopted in response to recommendations of the 1976 Church Committee report. In its investigation of U.S. foreign and military intelligence operations, the committee-the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, chaired by Senator Frank Church (D-Idaho)-found that more than 50 American journalists had worked clandestinely as CIA agents during the Cold War era. The committee’s final report strongly condemned this practice and unequivocally called on the intelligence community to “permit American journalists and news organizations to pursue their work without jeopardizing their credibility in the eyes of the world through covert use of them.”
…IN FEBRUARY 1996, an independent task force of the Council on Foreign Relations led by Richard Haass, a former senior director for Near East and South Asian Affairs of the National Security Council in the Bush administration, proposed taking a “fresh look…at limits on the use of non-official ‘covers’ for hiding and protecting those involved in clandestine activities.” Haass later publicly expanded on this point, challenging what he characterized as the prohibition on the use of journalists as undercover intelligence agents. The outcry among journalists-including many who are members of the Council of Foreign Relations-led council president Leslie Gelb to distance himself and the council from the task force and its recommendations….
….The reaction to the controversy among U.S. intelligence professionals, however, was quite different-and far more disturbing to journalists. John Deutch, director of Central Intelligence, appeared before Congress and said there was no need to change U.S. policy as Haass had advocated, since the CIA already had the power to use U.S. reporters as spies. Under the terms of the guidelines adopted after the Church Commission report, the CIA director retained the right to approve such recruitment if he judged it necessary, Deutch explained. Deutch received public support for his interpretation of the CIA’s prerogative from Stansfield Turner, the CIA chief in the Carter administration. Speaking to a gathering of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, Turner revealed that he had authorized the use of journalists in intelligence operations three times during his tenure as CIA director….(kate houghton–source: cpj.org)
For information available here: http://tinyurl.com/32f42et