If you are over 50, you may have noticed big changes in the language used by corporate news shows over the last several decades. The reporters no longer use the words “alleged” or “accused of” when discussing the guilt or innocence of people or organizations in the news who have not been convicted of any crime or wrongdoing. This extends to foreign leaders, and indeed entire foreign countries. Journalism 101 courses clearly emphasize the need to use phrases like “accused of” or “implicated in” when persons or entities have not yet been found guilty of a crime or misdeed. You may have noticed other changes in language use as well. For example, torture referred to as “enhanced interrogation”, presidents elected with large majorities in democratic countries referred to as “dictators” and military coups described as color revolutions or democratic uprisings. Obviously, none of this language use is accidental.
These shifts in language use by so-called journalists should raise alarms, but of course, it is the news media’s job to raise alarms, indicating that the public has a deep, systemic journalism crisis that we need to address. It has long been quite clear that the products of Corporate Owned News (CON) outlets can no longer be considered “journalism” in any sense of the word. CON outlets omit critical facts that are needed to put events in perspective while amplifying unsourced claims from unnamed government officials. In any rationale evaluation, that would be called state-sponsored propaganda, not journalism. You know; the kind of state-sponsored propaganda that CON outlets so loudly denounce overseas in places like Russia.
If you spend your career as an actor, reading from a teleprompter, you are not a journalist. Journalists are investigators. Journalists look into the facts surrounding events and try to put them into a broader perspective. Actors, on the other hand, play a part. You read a script with emotion.
If the part you are playing is to advance a military/corporate agenda for a globe-spanning hegemonic system that is harmful to most people, then you are an Agent of Empire. If you are pushing The Blob’s narrative for profit, you are a member of the Ministry of Truth.
The corporate owned news has always been highly biased in favor of capital and conflict. War is celebrated, peace is appeasement. Greed is good, ethics are for losers. But the current war propaganda tours de force going on in the US is unprecedented. The government is now using the national media to push total fabrications on the public, and the more dangerous issue is that many members of congress, the courts and the administration are just as subject to being propagandized as the general public is.
Indeed, the need for the government to lie to the public and to congress began in earnest when President Truman signed NSC 10/2, which authorized the national security apparatus to commit international crimes with plausible deniability for the government. From that point on it became a matter of national policy that an unaccountable division of the government was free to make policy for the US government, because informing the government of their illegal activities would put the government on the hook if the crime was discovered. In other words, “plausible deniability” is carte blanch for elements of The Blob to do anything they want without the intervention or knowledge of nuisances like the President of the United States.
The CON trend away from journalism and toward a perverse mix of propaganda and entertainment has actually been going on behind the scenes since before the Reagan administration. The CIA director during the Reagan administration was William Casey. During the first meeting of Reagan’s cabinet, Casey allegedly (there’s that word!) told the president and other cabinet officials: “We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false.”
If you have been paying attention since then, you will have noticed that their plan has played out pretty much as they had hoped.
CON outlets now routinely conflate anonymous innuendo with fact, and clear facts with Russian propaganda. The examples are so numerous and well-known that they barely need be mentioned again. One of the most blatant was the vast trove of false “intelligence” on WMD used to justify the Iraq invasion, which saturated US CON outlets in 2002 and 2003. Reporters at the time knew that there was a vast trove of exculpatory information (for example, many detailed weapon’s inspector reports), but chose to ignore that information completely. This is error by intentional omission, in the extreme. Rather, it is error by targeted omission in the extreme. More recent examples of CON outlets conning the American people include the evidence-free claims that Russia “hacked our democracy” with a few Facebook ads in 2016, or that Syrian president Assad’s military used chlorine gas on civilians in Duma, and that president Morales of Venezuela is a “dictator” (as opposed, perhaps, to an “alleged dictator” or even better, a democratically elected president). To take the example of Morales, the real reason that he is repeatedly labeled a dictator in the US CON is because wealthy people in the oil and gas industry and their friends in the government want unfettered US corporate access to Venezuela’s resources, which Morales has failed to put up for auction. Hence, in the minds of rich oil executives, he is a dictator because he has denied them their whims. This same mental exercise can be done with any of the cases where the US CON are deliberately lying because someone in the CIA, State Dept., White House or big business tells them to. In fact, they don’t need to be told what to do or say, CON “reporters” are whole-hog in on the game. They know what The Blob wants to hear, and what it doesn’t want to hear coming over the airwaves and netwaves. They no longer have any journalistic functions whatsoever, they now act as “information warriors” on the front lines of the narrative management wars.
In the 1970s a scandal broke over a CIA program known as Operation Mockingbird. The CIA operation had been ongoing since the 1950s when Alan Dulles (of “The Devils’ Chessboard” fame) was director of the CIA. The purpose of the program was to get CIA generated material into newsrooms around the US and the world. This was done by infiltrating some news outlets, and by passing material to unwitting reporters in other news organizations. This would then be picked up by additional news outlets, and amplified. Congressional investigations instituted after Watergate in the 1970s supposedly ended these practices. However, it is pretty clear that a new and improved version of Operation Mockingbird is currently in full effect and it is much more pervasive and harmful than the original.
The way CON outlets frame current news stories; there is little doubt that their reporting is heavily influenced by state sponsors (also known as “top unnamed government officials”). While there certainly are some examples involving actual infiltration of CON newsrooms by actors on the CIA payroll, in most cases it is much more likely that “access journalism” is to blame. Access journalism is a nice way of saying that the journalists are acting as Agents of Empire in the truest sense. They report what “top unnamed government officials” tell them to report, otherwise those officials will go to another CON outlet and find a more willing reporter. So, if you want first access to those juicy state-sponsored fabrications, you better just report what the “top unnamed government official” tells you to report. “Stenographers”, as Stephen Colbert so aptly put it at the White House correspondent’s dinner (before he became absorbed by The Blob).
Unless and until some very well-known CON journalists decide to go whistleblower on their masters, we may never know all the details of how the CIA and State Department get journalists to report the way they do now. But we have lots of details that may help fill in some of the blanks while we are waiting for the Edward Snowden of journalism to spill the beans on the whole rotten can of beans. We know, for example, that during the Bush the Younger administration, Dick Cheney was the most prevalent “top unnamed government official”. He would pass “anonymous” information (for example about Saddam Hussein’s WMD program) to a CON outlet like the New York Times. After the New York Times faithfully reported the unconfirmed rumors, Dick Cheney would go on the Sunday morning Talk shows and cite the New York Times as proof that what he was claiming was accurate. The entire time, the New York Times knew what was going on, and never told you, or even hinted that anything un-journalistic was happening. It is of course, far worse now with military and intelligence agents moving in and out of corporate boards and newsrooms at will.
The US press now act as Agents of Empire, fighting an information war with their perceived forces of evil.
An honest government does not need to lie, but for information warriors in the CON, lying is what they do for a living.
Pretty soon, even some denizens of The Blob can’t tell which lies are which.
The CON are also critical components of “color revolutions” also known as CIA-backed coups.
Much of the lying pumped out by the CON is directed at the people in congress, who must be fed a constant stream on nonsensical pro-Blob gibberish that they can use to justify the horrible policies pursued in Washington DC. While you might think that members of congress are more in the know than most Americans, they are often just as clueless and propagandized as the rest of the country.
This bring us to one question that must be answered before we can understand the depths of our dilemma, and that is to what extent does The Blob believe its own lies? The Blob is a heterogeneous amalgamation of disparate groups ranging from business elites to government agency personnel to media personalities. Keeping everyone on the same page takes a lot of effort at narrative management. Much of the propaganda spewed by The Blob comes from a relatively small, upper-tier contingent, and it is disseminated via the news media as fact. Everyone in the country who turns to the CON for news gets the same exact spiel, there is literally no deviation. This homogeneity leaves all the viewer-victims with the sense that it is all objectively true, otherwise they would certainly hear dissenting voices. The conclusion is that much of the power structure that underlies The Blob literally believes the lies, and further believes that anyone who differs is a Russian appeaser or apologist. This is designed to make debate impossible within The Blob’s sphere of influence.
The lingering question is what to do about it? I don’t think you could bring back some version of the Fairness Doctrine now, because it would be nearly impossible to implement in any meaningful way. Perhaps some modern version of it could be implemented, but if The Blob has anything to say about it, the result would be a psyop version where the humanitarian left is excluded entirely. We would only get to hear from conservative Democrats and extremely conservative Republicans, which together don’t even cover half of the full political spectrum in the US or the world.
I think a better option at our current moment in history would be to offer true competition, since that is what the CON outlets fear the most. They fear anything that looks more like real journalism than the propaganda-entertainment they pump out for profit and narrative management. So, I would propose that the Federal Government create a $50 billion trust fund that would be used in perpetuity to fund local and national news outlets that had complete journalistic independence from corporations and the government. The trust fund would be invested so that revenues would be continually generated for ongoing journalistic activities. The trust fund could never be rescinded or modified, and therefore the government would have no leverage over what was covered by the news outlets. CON outlets would have to compete against this unbiased source of news that was outside the reach of The Blob. The CON would still get plenty of viewers who want the red meat partisan sniping and fear mongering that the CON outlets are so good at, but this plan would offer Americans a real choice, which is something we haven’t had, ever.
One thing is clear; words matter, and public narratives matter. To have anything even resembling a democracy requires an honest national news media, and we do not have any such thing at the moment. We have a partisan, divided media that is driving further divisions among Americans. If the problem of CON journalism is not addressed by the American people, then we cannot possibly have a meaningful public discussion about anything. Without honest public discourse, you can’t have a democracy. Without democracy, the general public will have no say in the course of our country, and The Blob will rein free.
Allen Dulles, who ran the CIA "Operation Mockingbird", was a director of the liberal-fascist Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) for 40 years. Most of the CIA directors from Dulles to Burns, including Casey, have been CFR members. Dick Cheney and GHW Bush were CFR directors. The Clintons and Kerrys are members.
Then as now, many media barons were also CFR members including Paley (CBS), Sarnoff (NBC), Luce (Time/Life), Meyer/Graham (WashPost) and Sulzberger (NYTimes). See charts showing modern CFR/CIA media control: swprs.org/the-american-empire-and-its-media/
CFR members on the "Biden team" include the secretaries of State, Treasury, Defense, Commerce and 'Homeland Security'. Also the CIA director, Fed chairman, and dozens of deputies, advisors, etc.
Yes, we must do our own investigating if we want the truth. I have theories about the South China Sea. I've just published a very rough draft that connects many dots that of course lead to large corporation and familiar shareholders.
Very little of any mention about BRICS in msm or political Propaganda sites. What does that say? War in Ukraine just a distraction?
Mischief Reef.