Who Controls the Media?

[cd@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]

this ought to be very good reading and brings back to mind a logo i had
on my sweatshirt years ago 'Fuck the Media'. I am more convinced than
ever that Walter Wells, senior editor of the International Herald
Tribune, is CIA. He has never signed an article as far as i know, and
considers anything against his will 'treason'. nice guy whose sponsor's
his wife's cook book career...


ds

> 
>                              Tales from the Crypt
> 
>                        The Depraved Spies and Moguls
> 
>                      of the CIA's Operation MOCKINGBIRD
> 
>                             by Alex Constantine
> 
> Who Controls the Media?
> 
> Soulless corporations do, of course. Corporations with grinning,
> double-breasted executives, interlocking directorates, labor squabbles and
> flying capital. Dow. General Electric. Coca-Cola. Disney. Newspapers
> should have mastheads that mirror the world: The Westinghouse Evening
> Scimitar, The Atlantic-Richfield Intelligentser . It is beginning to dawn
> on a growing number of armchair ombudsmen that the public print reports
> news from a parallel universe - one that has never heard of
> politically-motivated assassinations, CIA-Mafia banking thefts, mind
> control, death squads or even federal agencies with secret budgets
> fattened by cocaine sales - a place overrun by lone gunmen, where the CIA
> and Mafia are usually on their best behavior. In this idyllic land, the
> most serious infraction an official can commit __is a the employment of a
> domestic servant with (shudder) no residency status.
> 
> This unlikely land of enchantment is the creation of MOCKINGBIRD.
> 
> It was conceived in the late 1940s, the most frigid period of the cold
> war, when the CIA began a systematic infiltration of the corporate media,
> a process that often included direct takeover of major news outlets.
> 
> In this period, the American intelligence services competed with communist
> activists abroad to influence European labor unions. With or without the
> cooperation of local governments, Frank Wisner, an undercover State
> Department official assigned to the Foreign Service, rounded up students
> abroad to enter the cold war underground of covert operations on behalf of
> his Office of Policy Coordination. Philip Graham, a graduate of the Army
> Intelligence School in Harrisburg, PA, then publisher of the Washington
> Post., was taken under Wisner's wing to direct the program code-named
> Operation MOCKINGBIRD.
> 
> "By the early 1950s," writes formerVillage Voice reporter Deborah Davis in
> Katharine the Great, "Wisner 'owned' respected members of the New York
> Times, Newsweek, CBS and other communications vehicles, plus stringers,
> four to six hundred in all, according to a former CIA analyst." The
> network was overseen by Allen Dulles, a templar for German and American
> corporations who wanted their points of view represented in the public
> print. Early MOCKINGBIRD influenced 25 newspapers and wire agencies
> consenting to act as organs of CIA propaganda. Many of these were already
> run by men with reactionary views, among them William Paley (CBS), C.D.
> Jackson (Fortune), Henry Luce (Time) and Arthur Hays Sulzberger (N.Y.
> Times).
> 
> Activists curious about the workings of MOCKINGBIRD have since been
> appalled to find in FOIA documents that agents boasting in CIA office
> memos of their pride in having placed "important assets" inside every
> major news publication in the country. It was not until 1982 that the
> Agency openly admitted that reporters on the CIA payroll have acted as
> case officers to agents in the field.
> 
> "World War III has begun," Henry's Luce's Life declared in March, 1947.
> "It is in the opening skirmish stage already." The issue featured an
> excerpt of a book by James Burnham, who called for the creation of an
> "American Empire,"  "world-dominating in political power, set up at least
> in part through coercion (probably including war, but certainly the threat
> of war) and in which one group of people ... would hold more than its
> equal share of power."
> 
> George Seldes, the famed anti-fascist media critic, drew down on Luce in
> 1947, explaining that "although avoiding typical Hitlerian phrases, the
> same doctrine of a superior people taking over the world and ruling it,
> began to appear in the press, whereas the organs of Wall Street were much
> more honest in favoring a doctrine inevitably leading to war if it brought
> greater commercial markets under the American flag."
> 
> On the domestic front, an abiding relationship was struck between the CIA
> and William Paley, a wartime colonel and the founder of CBS. A firm
> believer in "all forms of propaganda" to foster loyalty to the Pentagon,
> Paley hired CIA agents to work undercover at the behest of his close
> friend, the busy grey eminence of the nation's media, Allen Dulles.
> Paley's designated go-between in his dealings with the CIA was Sig
> Mickelson, president of CBS News from 1954 to 1961.
> 
> The CIA's assimilation of old guard fascists was overseen by the
> Operations Coordination Board, directed by C.D. Jackson, formerly an
> executive of Time magazine and Eisenhower's Special Assistant for Cold War
> Strategy. In 1954 he was succeeded by Nelson Rockefeller, who quit a year
> later, disgusted at the administration's political infighting. Vice
> President Nixon succeeded Rockefeller as the key cold war strategist.
> 
> "Nixon," writes John Loftus, a former attorney for the Justice
> Department's Office of Special Investigations, took "a small boy's delight
> in the arcane tools of the intelligence craft - the hidden microphones,
> the 'black' propaganda." Nixon especially enjoyed his visit to a Virginia
> training camp to observe Nazis in the "special forces" drilling at covert
> operations.
> 
> One of the fugitives recruited by the American intelligence underground
> was heroin smuggler Hubert von Bl|cher, the son of A German ambassador.
> Hubert often bragged that that he was trained by the Abwehr, the German
> military intelligence division, while still a civilian in his twenties. He
> served in a recon unit of the German Army until forced out for medical
> reasons in 1944, according to his wartime records. He worked briefly as an
> assistant director for Berlin-Film on a movie entitled One Day ..., and
> finished out the war flying with the Luftwaffe, but not to engage the
> enemy - his mission was the smuggling of Nazi loot out of the country. His
> exploits were, in part, the subject of Sayer and Botting's Nazi Gold, an
> account of the knockover of the Reichsbank at the end of the war.
> 
> In 1948 he flew the coop to Argentina. Posing as a photographer named
> Huberto von Bleucher Corell, he immediately paid court to Eva Peron,
> presenting her with an invaluable Gobelin tapestry (a selection from the
> wealth of artifacts confiscated by the SS from Europe's Jews?). Hubert
> then met with Martin Bormann at the Hotel Plaza to deliver German marks
> worth $80 million.  The loot financed the birth of the National Socialist
> Party in Argentina, among other forms of Nazi revival.
> 
> In 1951, Hubert migrated northward and took a job at the Color
> Corporation of America in Hollywood. He eked out a living writing
> scripts for the booming movie industry. His voice can be heard on a film
> set in the Amazon, produced by Walt Disney. Nine years later he returned
> to Buenos Aires, then D|sseldorf, West Germany, and established a firm
> that developed not movie scripts, but anti-chemical warfare agents for
> the government. At the Industrie Club in D|sseldorf in 1982, von Bl|cher
> boasted to journalists, "I am chief shareholder of Pan American Airways.
> I am the best friend of Howard Hughes. The Beach Hotel in Las Vegas is
> 45 percent financed by me. I am thus the biggest financier ever to
> appear in the Arabian Nights tales dreamed up by these people over their
> second bottle of brandy."
> 
> Not really. Two the biggest financiers to stumble from the drunken dreams
> of world-moving affluence were, in their time, Moses Annenberg, publisher
> of The Philadelphia Inquirer, and his son Walter , the CIA/mob-anchored
> publisher of the TV Guide.  Like most American high-rollers, Annenberg
> lived a double life. Moses, his father, was a scion of the Capone mob.
> Both Moses and Walter were indicted in 1939 for tax evasions totalling
> many millions of dollars - the biggest case in the history of the Justice
> Department. Moses pled guilty and agreed to pay the government $8 million
> and settle $9 million in assorted tax claims, penalties and interest
> debts. Moses received a three-year sentence. He died in Lewisburg
> Penitentiary.
> 
> Walter Annenbeg, the TV Guide magnate, was a lofty Republican. On the
> campaign trail in April, 1988, George Bush flew into Los Angeles to woo
> Reagan's kitchen cabinet. "This is the topping on the cake," Bush's
> regional campaign director told the Los Angeles Times. The Bush team met
> at Annenberg's plush Rancho Mirage estate at Sunnylands, California. It
> was at the Annenberg mansion that Nixon's cabinet was chosen, and the
> state's social and contributor registers built over a quarter-century of
> state political dominance by Ronald Reagan, whose acting career was
> launched by Operation MOCKINGBIRD.
> 
> The commercialization of television, coinciding with Reagan's recruitment
> by the Crusade for Freedom, a CIA front, presented the intelligence world
> with unprecedented potential for sowing propaganda and even prying in the
> age of Big Brother. George Orwell glimpsed the possibilities when he
> installed omniscient video surveillance technology in 1948, a novel
> rechristened 1984 for the first edition published in the U.S. by Harcourt,
> Brace.  Operation Octopus, according to federal files, was in full swing
> by 1948, a surveillance program that turned any television set with tubes
> into a broadcast transmitter. Agents of Octopus could pick up audio and
> visual images with the equipment as far as 25 miles away.
> 
> Hale Boggs was investigating Operation Octopus at the time of his
> disappearance in the midst of the Watergate probe.
> 
> In 1952, at MCA, Actors' Guild president Ronald Reagan - a screen idol
> recruited by MOCKINGBIRD's Crusade for Freedom to raise funds for the
> resettlement of Nazis in the U.S., according to Loftus - signed a secret
> waiver of the conflict-of-interest rule with the mob-controlled studio, in
> effect granting it a labor monopoly on early television programming. In
> exchange, MCA made Reagan a part owner. Furthermore, historian C. Vann
> Woodward, writing in the New York Times, in 1987, reported that Reagan had
> "fed the names of suspect people in his organization to the FBI secretly
> and regularly enough to be assigned 'an informer's code number, T-10.' His
> FBI file indicates intense collaboration with producers to 'purge' the
> industry of subversives."
> 
> No one ever turned a suspicious eye on Walter Cronkite, a former
> intelligence officer and in the immediate postwar period UPI's Moscow
> correspondent.  Cronkite was lured to CBS by Operation MOCKINGBIRD's Phil
> Graham, according to Deborah Davis.
> 
> Another television conglomerate, Cap Cities, rose like a horror-film
> simian from CIA and Mafia heroin operations. Among other organized-crime
> Republicans, Thomas Dewey and his neighbor Lowell Thomas threw in to
> launch the infamous Resorts International, the corporate front for
> Lansky's branch of the federally-sponsored mob family and the corporate
> precursor to Cap Cities. Another of the investors was James Crosby, a Cap
> Cities executive who donated $100,000 to Nixon's 1968 presidential
> campaign. This was the year that Resorts bought into Atlantic City casino
> interests. Police in New jersey attempted, with no success, to spike the
> issuance of a gambling license to the company, citing Mafia ties.
> 
> In 1954, this same circle of investors, all Catholics, founded the
> broadcasting company notorious for overt propagandizing and general
> spookiness. The company's chief counsel was OSS veteran William Casey, who
> clung to his shares by concealing them in a blind trust even after he was
> appointed CIA director by Ronald Reagan in 1981.
> 
> "Black radio" was the phrase CIA critic David Wise coined in The Invisible
> Government to describe the agency's intertwining interests in the
> emergence of the transistor radio with the entrepreneurs who took to the
> airwaves.  "Daily, East and West beam hundreds of propaganda broadcasts at
> each other in an unrelenting babble of competition for the minds of their
> listeners.  The low-price transistor has given the hidden war a new
> importance,"  enthused one foreign correspondent.
> 
> A Hydra of private foundations sprang up to finance the propaganda push.
> One of them, Operations and Policy Research, Inc. (OPR), received
> hundreds of thousands of dollars from the CIA through private
> foundations and trusts. OPR research was the basis of a television
> series that aired in New York and Washington, D.C. in 1964, Of People
> and Politics, a "study" of the American political system in 21 weekly
> installments.
> 
> In Hollywood, the visual cortex of The Beast, the same CIA/Mafia
> combination that formed Cap Cities sank its claws into the film studios
> and labor unions.  Johnny Rosselli was pulled out of the Army during the
> war by a criminal investigation of Chicago mobsters in the film industry.
> Rosselli, a CIA asset probably assassinated by the CIA, played sidekick to
> Harry Cohn, the Columbia Pictures mogul who visited Italy's Benito
> Mussolini in 1933, and upon his return to Hollywood remodeled his office
> after the dictator's. The only honest job Rosselli ever had was assistant
> purchasing agent (and a secret investor) at Eagle Lion productions, run by
> Bryan Foy, a former producer for 20th Century Fox. Rosselli, Capone's
> representative on the West Coast, passed a small fortune in mafia
> investments to Cohn. Bugsy Seigel pooled gambling investments with Billy
> Wilkerson, publisher of the Hollywood Reporter.
> 
> In the 1950s, outlays for global propaganda climbed to a full third of
> the CIA's covert operations budget. Some 3, 000 salaried and contract
> CIA employees were eventually engaged in propaganda efforts. The cost of
> disinforming the world cost American taxpayers an estimated $265 million
> a year by 1978, a budget larger than the combined expenditures of
> Reuters, UPI and the AP news syndicates.
> 
> In 1977, the Copely News Service admitted that it worked closely with the
> intelligence services - in fact, 23 employees were full-time employees of
> the Agency.
> 
> Most consumers of the corporate media were - and are - unaware of the
> effect that the salting of public opinion has on their own beliefs. A
> network anchorman in time of national crisis is an instrument of
> psychological warfare in the MOCKINGBIRD media. He is a creature from the
> national security sector's chamber of horrors. For this reason consumers
> of the corporate press have reason to examine their basic beliefs about
> government and life in the parallel universe of these United States.