Why are 'they' scaring us away from the news?

by **TroubleFunk** » Tue May 02, 2006 2:25 pm

Those CSI -type shows, wherein the prosecutors are constantly heroes and often step well out of bounds of the law, while also getting an hour to editorialize to the viewer - They're not about violence either, they're about power. I don't think it's setting us up for more violence, I think they're setting us up to unquestioningly accept authority on its own say-so, to go willingly with the authorities and "we'll work it out later". Because they're always on the side of right. Anyone who deviates or questions = "human scum", put 'em away!

by **johnny nemo** » Tue May 02, 2006 3:00 pm

I thought and thought about this, and I'm sorry, professor, but I think there's more going on than you're seeing. Recently I was browsing the PC video game selection at a very large electronics store. I was appalled to see nearly 50 different games in which the setting of the game is IRAQ and the goal is to kill as many insurgents as possible and fulfill the mission. Children today are being indoctrinated through their favorite games and law enforcement programs to be the button pushes of the weapons of mass destruction for tomorrow's world. 67 years ago, six million Americans became unwitting subjects in an experiment in psychological warfare. It was the night before Halloween, 1938. At 8 p.m. CST, the Mercury Radio on the Air began broadcasting Orson Welles' radio adaptation of H. G. Wells' War of the Worlds. As is now well known, the story was presented as if it were breaking news, with bulletins so realistic that an estimated one million people believed the world was actually under attack by Martians. Of that number, thousands succumbed to outright panic, not waiting to hear Welles' explanation at the end of the program that it had all been a Halloween prank, but fleeing into the night to escape the alien invaders. According to researcher Mack White ( <a href="http://www.mackwhite.com/),">www.mackwhite.com/),</a> "Psychologist Hadley Cantril conducted a study of the effects of the broadcast and published his findings in a book, The Invasion from Mars: A Study in the Psychology of Panic. This study explored the power of broadcast media, particularly as it relates to the suggestibility of human beings under the influence of fear. Cantril was affiliated with Princeton University's Radio Research Project, which was funded in 1937 by the Rockefeller Foundation. Also affiliated with the Project was Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) member and Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) executive Frank Stanton, whose network had broadcast the program. Stanton would later go on to head the news division of CBS, and in time would become president of the network, as well as chairman of the board of the RAND Corporation, the influential think tank which has done groundbreaking research on, among other things,mass brainwashing. Two years later, with Rockefeller Foundation money, Cantril established the Office of Public Opinion Research (OPOR), also at Princeton. Among the studies conducted by the OPOR was an analysis of the effectiveness of "psycho-political operations" (propaganda, in plain English) of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Then, during World War II, Cantril and Rockefeller money assisted CFR member and CBS reporter Edward R. Murrow in setting up the Princeton Listening Center, the purpose of which was to study Nazi radio propaganda with the object of applying Nazi techniques to OSS propaganda. Out of this project came a new government agency, the Foreign Broadcast Intelligence Service (FBIS). The FBIS eventually became the United States Information Agency (USIA), which is the propaganda arm of the National Security Council. Thus, by the end of the 1940s, the basic research had been done and the propaganda apparatus of the national security state had been set up--just in time for the Dawn of Television." Propaganda techniques were first codified and applied in a scientific manner by journalist Walter Lippman and psychologist Edward Bernays (nephew of Sigmund Freud) early in the 20th century. During World War I, Lippman and Bernays were hired by then United States President, Woodrow Wilson, to participate in the Creel Commission, the mission of which was to sway popular opinion in favor of entering the war, on the side of Britain. Edward Bernays said in his 1928 book Propaganda that, "The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country." According to David L Robb, Author of Operation Hollywood, "Hollywood and the Pentagon have a long history of making movies together. It's a tradition that stretches back to the early days of silent films, and extends right up until the present day. It's been a collaboration that works well for both sides. Hollywood producers get what they want - access to billions of dollars worth of military hardware and equipment - tanks, jet fighters, nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers - and the military gets what it wants - films that portray the military in a positive light; films that help the services in their recruiting efforts. The Pentagon is not merely a passive supporter of films, however. If the Pentagon doesn't like a script, it will usually suggest script changes that will allow the film to receive the military's support and approval. Sometimes these proposed changes are minor. But sometimes the changes are dramatic. Sometimes they change dialogue. Sometimes they change characters. Sometimes they even change history." They create something coined 'disinfotainment'. They mix disinformation with entertainment and call it disinfotainment.

by **professorpan** » Tue May 02, 2006 3:30 pm

<blockquote>Quote:<hr>According to David L Robb, Author of Operation Hollywood, "Hollywood and the Pentagon have a long history of making movies together. It's a tradition that stretches back to the early days of silent films, and extends right up until the present day. It's been a collaboration that works well for both sides. Hollywood producers get what they want - access to billions of dollars worth of military hardware and equipment - tanks, jet fighters, nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers - and the military gets what it wants - films that portray the military in a positive light; films that help the services in their recruiting efforts. The Pentagon is not merely a passive supporter of films, however. If the Pentagon doesn't like a script, it will usually suggest script changes that will allow the film to receive the military's support and approval. Sometimes these proposed changes are minor. But sometimes the changes are dramatic. Sometimes they change dialogue. Sometimes they change characters. Sometimes they even change history."<hr></blockquote> Of course. The military influencing the content of films for propaganda purposes is nothing new. But it's not ubiquitous -- that's what I'm trying to explain. Greencrow, and others, have asserted that there is some kind of group or entity controlling television content, making sure the programs are more violent in a coordinated attempt to create good soldiers for the Pentagon. There's not an iota of evidence that is true. And it is contradicted by mounds of evidence. For instance, what about TV shows and films that are critical of government? V for Vendetta and Syriana are obvious cinematic examples. But TV shows like Boston Legal, West Wing, and others have been mouthpieces for opposition to the status quo/conservative criminals. Are those shows not subject to the same cabal of content enforcers? Show me one piece of evidence -- aside from an inference or "feeling" or guess -- that television programming is directed by some hidden group to soften up people to violence and turn them into Pentagon cannon fodder. That was the original assertion, and no one yet has offered a shred of evidence. My thinking is evidence based, not "feeling" based. And I'm growing weary of the unsubstantiated, paranoiac "they rule everything and control everything" garbage that gets tossed around here. Speculation is fine, but it should be understood as such. So... got evidence? If not, why should your opinion be valued as anything more than an opinion?

by **johnny nemo** » Tue May 02, 2006 7:34 pm

Cantril was affiliated with Princeton University's Radio Research Project, which was funded in 1937 by the Rockefeller Foundation. Also affiliated with the Project was Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) member and Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) executive Frank Stanton, whose network had broadcast the program. Stanton would later go on to head the news division of CBS, and in time would become president of the network, as well as chairman of the board of the RAND Corporation, the influential think tank which has done groundbreaking research on, among other things,mass brainwashing. Here's a man who was in the CFR, became head of CBS and chairman of the board of RAND. That's as close as you're gonna get to secret societies influencing television programming. Or how about this? <a href="http://www.truthout.org/cgi-bin/artman/exec/view.cgi/37/9592">www.truthout.org/cgi-bin/...gi/37/9592</a> Under Bush, a New Age of Prepackaged Television News By David Barstow and Robin Stein The New York Times Sunday 13 March 2005 It is the kind of TV news coverage every president covets. "Thank you, Bush. Thank you, U.S.A.," a jubilant Iraqi-American told a camera crew in Kansas City for a segment about reaction to the fall of Baghdad. A second report told of "another success" in the Bush administration's "drive to strengthen aviation security"; the reporter called it "one of the most remarkable campaigns in aviation history." A third segment, broadcast in January, described the administration's determination to open markets for American farmers. To a viewer, each report looked like any other 90-second segment on the local news. In fact, the federal government produced all three. The report from Kansas City was made by the State Department. The "reporter" covering airport safety was actually a public relations professional working under a false name for the Transportation Security Administration. The farming segment was done by the Agriculture Department's office of communications. Under the Bush administration, the federal government has aggressively used a well-established tool of public relations: the prepackaged, ready-to-serve news report that major corporations have long distributed to TV stations to pitch everything from headache remedies to auto insurance. In all, at least 20 federal agencies, including the Defense Department and the Census Bureau, have made and distributed hundreds of television news segments in the past four years, records and interviews show. Many were subsequently broadcast on local stations across the country without any acknowledgement of the government's role in their production. This winter, Washington has been roiled by revelations that a handful of columnists wrote in support of administration policies without disclosing they had accepted payments from the government. But the administration's efforts to generate positive news coverage have been considerably more pervasive than previously known. At the same time, records and interviews suggest widespread complicity or negligence by television stations, given industry ethics standards that discourage the broadcast of prepackaged news segments from any outside group without revealing the source. Federal agencies are forthright with broadcasters about the origin of the news segments they distribute. The reports themselves, though, are designed to fit seamlessly into the typical local news broadcast. In most cases, the "reporters" are careful not to state in the segment that they work for the government. Their reports generally avoid overt ideological appeals. Instead, the government's news-making apparatus has produced a quiet drumbeat of broadcasts describing a vigilant and compassionate administration. Some reports were produced to support the administration's most cherished policy objectives, like regime change in Iraq or Medicare reform. Others focused on less prominent matters, like the administration's efforts to offer free after-school tutoring, its campaign to curb childhood obesity, its initiatives to preserve forests and wetlands, its plans to fight computer viruses, even its attempts to fight holiday drunken driving. They often feature "interviews" with senior administration officials in which questions are scripted and answers rehearsed. Critics, though, are excluded, as are any hints of mismanagement, waste or controversy. Some of the segments were broadcast in some of nation's largest television markets, including New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas and Atlanta. An examination of government-produced news reports offers a look inside a world where the traditional lines between public relations and journalism have become tangled, where local anchors introduce prepackaged segments with "suggested" lead-ins written by public relations experts. It is a world where government-produced reports disappear into a maze of satellite transmissions, Web portals, syndicated news programs and network feeds, only to emerge cleansed on the other side as "independent" journalism. It is also a world where all participants benefit. Local affiliates are spared the expense of digging up original material. Public relations firms secure government contracts worth millions of dollars. The major networks, which help distribute the releases, collect fees from the government agencies that produce segments and the affiliates that show them. The administration, meanwhile, gets out an unfiltered message, delivered in the guise of traditional reporting. The practice, which also occurred in the Clinton administration, is continuing despite President Bush's recent call for a clearer demarcation between journalism and government publicity efforts. "There needs to be a nice independent relationship between the White House and the press," Mr. Bush told reporters in January, explaining why his administration would no longer pay pundits to support his policies. In interviews, though, press officers for several federal agencies said the president's prohibition did not apply to government-made television news segments, also known as video news releases. They described the segments as factual, politically neutral and useful to viewers. They insisted that there was no similarity to the case of Armstrong Williams, a conservative columnist who promoted the administration's chief education initiative, the No Child Left Behind Act, without disclosing $240,000 in payments from the Education Department. What is more, these officials argued, it is the responsibility of television news directors to inform viewers that a segment about the government was in fact written by the government. "Talk to the television stations that ran it without attribution," said William A. Pierce, spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services. "This is not our problem. We can't be held responsible for their actions." Yet in three separate opinions in the past year, the Government Accountability Office, an investigative arm of Congress that studies the federal government and its expenditures, has held that government-made news segments may constitute improper "covert propaganda" even if their origin is made clear to the television stations. The point, the office said, is whether viewers know the origin. Last month, in its most recent finding, the G.A.O. said federal agencies may not produce prepackaged news reports "that conceal or do not clearly identify for the television viewing audience that the agency was the source of those materials." It is not certain, though, whether the office's pronouncements will have much practical effect. Although a few federal agencies have stopped making television news segments, others continue. And on Friday, the Justice Department and the Office of Management and Budget circulated a memorandum instructing all executive branch agencies to ignore the G.A.O. findings. The memorandum said the G.A.O. failed to distinguish between covert propaganda and "purely informational" news segments made by the government. Such informational segments are legal, the memorandum said, whether or not an agency's role in producing them is disclosed to viewers. Even if agencies do disclose their role, those efforts can easily be undone in a broadcaster's editing room. Some news organizations, for example, simply identify the government's "reporter" as one of their own and then edit out any phrase suggesting the segment was not of their making. So in a recent segment produced by the Agriculture Department, the agency's narrator ended the report by saying "In Princess Anne, Maryland, I'm Pat O'Leary reporting for the U.S. Department of Agriculture." Yet AgDay, a syndicated farm news program that is shown on some 160 stations, simply introduced the segment as being by "AgDay's Pat O'Leary." The final sentence was then trimmed to "In Princess Anne, Maryland, I'm Pat O'Leary reporting." Brian Conrady, executive producer of AgDay, defended the changes. "We can clip 'Department of Agriculture' at our choosing," he said. "The material we get from the U.S.D.A., if we choose to air it and how we choose to air it is our choice." Spreading the Word: Government Efforts and One Woman's Role Karen Ryan cringes at the phrase "covert propaganda." These are words for dictators and spies, and yet they have attached themselves to her like a pair of handcuffs. Not long ago, Ms. Ryan was a much sought-after "reporter" for news segments produced by the federal government. A journalist at ABC and PBS who became a public relations consultant, Ms. Ryan worked on about a dozen reports for seven federal agencies in 2003 and early 2004. Her segments for the Department of Health and Human Services and the Office of National Drug Control Policy were a subject of the accountability office's recent inquiries. The G.A.O. concluded that the two agencies "designed and executed" their segments "to be indistinguishable from news stories produced by private sector television news organizations." A significant part of that execution, the office found, was Ms. Ryan's expert narration, including her typical sign-off - "In Washington, I'm Karen Ryan reporting" - delivered in a tone and cadence familiar to television reporters everywhere. Last March, when The New York Times first described her role in a segment about new prescription drug benefits for Medicare patients, reaction was harsh. In Cleveland, The Plain Dealer ran an editorial under the headline "Karen Ryan, You're a Phony," and she was the object of late-night jokes by Jon Stewart and received hate mail. "I'm like the Marlboro man," she said in a recent interview. In fact, Ms. Ryan was a bit player who made less than $5,000 for her work on government reports. She was also playing an accepted role in a lucrative art form, the video news release. "I just don't feel I did anything wrong," she said. "I just did what everyone else in the industry was doing." It is a sizable industry. One of its largest players, Medialink Worldwide Inc., has about 200 employees, with offices in New York and London. It produces and distributes about 1,000 video news releases a year, most commissioned by major corporations. The Public Relations Society of America even gives an award, the Bronze Anvil, for the year's best video news release.  Several major television networks play crucial intermediary roles in the business. Fox, for example, has an arrangement with Medialink to distribute video news releases to 130 affiliates through its video feed service, Fox News Edge. CNN distributes releases to 750 stations in the United States and Canada through a similar feed service, CNN Newsource. Associated Press Television News does the same thing worldwide with its Global Video Wire. "We look at them and determine whether we want them to be on the feed," David M. Winstrom, director of Fox News Edge, said of video news releases. "If I got one that said tobacco cures cancer or something like that, I would kill it." In essence, video news releases seek to exploit a growing vulnerability of television news: Even as news staffs at the major networks are shrinking, many local stations are expanding their hours of news coverage without adding reporters. "No TV news organization has the resources in labor, time or funds to cover every worthy story," one video news release company, TVA Productions, said in a sales pitch to potential clients, adding that "90 percent of TV newsrooms now rely on video news releases." Federal agencies have been commissioning video news releases since at least the first Clinton administration. An increasing number of state agencies are producing television news reports, too; the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department alone has produced some 500 video news releases since 1993. Under the Bush administration, federal agencies appear to be producing more releases, and on a broader array of topics. A definitive accounting is nearly impossible. There is no comprehensive archive of local television news reports, as there is in print journalism, so there is no easy way to determine what has been broadcast, and when and where.  Still, several large agencies, including the Defense Department, the State Department and the Department of Health and Human Services, acknowledge expanded efforts to produce news segments. Many members of Mr. Bush's first-term cabinet appeared in such segments.  A recent study by Congressional Democrats offers another rough indicator: the Bush administration spent $254 million in its first term on public relations contracts, nearly double what the last Clinton administration spent. Karen Ryan was part of this push - a "paid shill for the Bush administration," as she self-mockingly puts it. It is, she acknowledges, an uncomfortable title. Ms. Ryan, 48, describes herself as not especially political, and certainly no Bush die-hard. She had hoped for a long career in journalism. But over time, she said, she grew dismayed by what she saw as the decline of television news - too many cut corners, too many ratings stunts. In the end, she said, the jump to video news releases from journalism was not as far as one might expect. "It's almost the same thing," she said. There are differences, though. When she went to interview Tommy G. Thompson, then the health and human services secretary, about the new Medicare drug benefit, it was not the usual reporter-source exchange. First, she said, he already knew the questions, and she was there mostly to help him give better, snappier answers. And second, she said, everyone involved is aware of a segment's potential political benefits. Her Medicare report, for example, was distributed in January 2004, not long before Mr. Bush hit the campaign trail and cited the drug benefit as one of his major accomplishments. The script suggested that local anchors lead into the report with this line: "In December, President Bush signed into law the first-ever prescription drug benefit for people with Medicare." In the segment, Mr. Bush is shown signing the legislation as Ms. Ryan describes the new benefits and reports that "all people with Medicare will be able to get coverage that will lower their prescription drug spending." The segment made no mention of the many critics who decry the law as an expensive gift to the pharmaceutical industry. The G.A.O. found that the segment was "not strictly factual," that it contained "notable omissions" and that it amounted to "a favorable report" about a controversial program. And yet this news segment, like several others narrated by Ms. Ryan, reached an audience of millions. According to the accountability office, at least 40 stations ran some part of the Medicare report. Video news releases distributed by the Office of National Drug Control Policy, including one narrated by Ms. Ryan, were shown on 300 stations and reached 22 million households. According to Video Monitoring Services of America, a company that tracks news programs in major cities, Ms. Ryan's segments on behalf of the government were broadcast a total of at least 64 times in the 40 largest television markets. Even these measures, though, do not fully capture the reach of her work. Consider the case of News 10 Now, a cable station in Syracuse owned by Time Warner. In February 2004, days after the government distributed its Medicare segment, News 10 Now broadcast a virtually identical report, including the suggested anchor lead-in. The News 10 Now segment, however, was not narrated by Ms. Ryan. Instead, the station edited out the original narration and had one of its reporters repeat the script almost word for word. The station's news director, Sean McNamara, wrote in an e-mail message, "Our policy on provided video is to clearly identify the source of that video." In the case of the Medicare report, he said, the station believed it was produced and distributed by a major network and did not know that it had originally come from the government. Ms. Ryan said she was surprised by the number of stations willing to run her government segments without any editing or acknowledgement of origin. As proud as she says she is of her work, she did not hesitate, even for a second, when asked if she would have broadcast one of her government reports if she were a local news director. "Absolutely not." Little Oversight: TV's Code of Ethics, With Uncertain Weight "Clearly disclose the origin of information and label all material provided by outsiders." Those words are from the code of ethics of the Radio-Television News Directors Association, the main professional society for broadcast news directors in the United States. Some stations go further, all but forbidding the use of any outside material, especially entire reports. And spurred by embarrassing publicity last year about Karen Ryan, the news directors association is close to proposing a stricter rule, said its executive director, Barbara Cochran. Whether a stricter ethics code will have much effect is unclear; it is not hard to find broadcasters who are not adhering to the existing code, and the association has no enforcement powers. The Federal Communications Commission does, but it has never disciplined a station for showing government-made news segments without disclosing their origin, a spokesman said. Could it? Several lawyers experienced with F.C.C. rules say yes. They point to a 2000 decision by the agency, which stated, "Listeners and viewers are entitled to know by whom they are being persuaded." In interviews, more than a dozen station news directors endorsed this view without hesitation. Several expressed disdain for the prepackaged segments they received daily from government agencies, corporations and special interest groups who wanted to use their airtime and credibility to sell or influence. But when told that their stations showed government-made reports without attribution, most reacted with indignation. Their stations, they insisted, would never allow their news programs to be co-opted by segments fed from any outside party, let alone the government. "They're inherently one-sided, and they don't offer the possibility for follow-up questions - or any questions at all," said Kathy Lehmann Francis, until recently the news director at WDRB, the Fox affiliate in Louisville, Ky. Yet records from Video Monitoring Services of America indicate that WDRB has broadcast at least seven Karen Ryan segments, including one for the government, without disclosing their origin to viewers. Mike Stutz, news director at KGTV, the ABC affiliate in San Diego, was equally opposed to putting government news segments on the air. "It amounts to propaganda, doesn't it?" he said. Again, though, records from Video Monitoring Services of America show that from 2001 to 2004 KGTV ran at least one government-made segment featuring Ms. Ryan, 5 others featuring her work on behalf of corporations, and 19 produced by corporations and other outside organizations. It does not appear that KGTV viewers were told the origin of these 25 segments. "I thought we were pretty solid," Mr. Stutz said, adding that they intend to take more precautions. Confronted with such evidence, most news directors were at a loss to explain how the segments made it on the air. Some said they were unable to find archive tapes that would help answer the question. Others promised to look into it, then stopped returning telephone messages. A few removed the segments from their Web sites, promised greater vigilance in the future or pleaded ignorance. Afghanistan to Memphis: An Agency's Report Ends Up on the Air On Sept. 11, 2002, WHBQ, the Fox affiliate in Memphis, marked the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks with an uplifting report on how assistance from the United States was helping to liberate the women of Afghanistan. Tish Clark, a reporter for WHBQ, described how Afghan women, once barred from schools and jobs, were at last emerging from their burkas, taking up jobs as seamstresses and bakers, sending daughters off to new schools, receiving decent medical care for the first time and even participating in a fledgling democracy. Her segment included an interview with an Afghan teacher who recounted how the Taliban only allowed boys to attend school. An Afghan doctor described how the Taliban refused to let male physicians treat women. In short, Ms. Clark's report seemed to corroborate, however modestly, a central argument of the Bush foreign policy, that forceful American intervention abroad was spreading freedom, improving lives and winning friends.  What the people of Memphis were not told, though, was that the interviews used by WHBQ were actually conducted by State Department contractors. The contractors also selected the quotes used from those interviews and shot the video that went with the narration. They also wrote the narration, much of which Ms. Clark repeated with only minor changes. As it happens, the viewers of WHBQ were not the only ones in the dark. Ms. Clark, now Tish Clark Dunning, said in an interview that she, too, had no idea the report originated at the State Department. "If that's true, I'm very shocked that anyone would false report on anything like that," she said. How a television reporter in Memphis unwittingly came to narrate a segment by the State Department reveals much about the extent to which government-produced news accounts have seeped into the broader new media landscape. The explanation begins inside the White House, where the president's communications advisers devised a strategy after Sept. 11, 2001, to encourage supportive news coverage of the fight against terrorism. The idea, they explained to reporters at the time, was to counter charges of American imperialism by generating accounts that emphasized American efforts to liberate and rebuild Afghanistan and Iraq. An important instrument of this strategy was the Office of Broadcasting Services, a State Department unit of 30 or so editors and technicians whose typical duties include distributing video from news conferences. But in early 2002, with close editorial direction from the White House, the unit began producing narrated feature reports, many of them promoting American achievements in Afghanistan and Iraq and reinforcing the administration's rationales for the invasions. These reports were then widely distributed in the United States and around the world for use by local television stations. In all, the State Department has produced 59 such segments. United States law contains provisions intended to prevent the domestic dissemination of government propaganda. The 1948 Smith-Mundt Act, for example, allows Voice of America to broadcast pro-government news to foreign audiences, but not at home. Yet State Department officials said that law does not apply to the Office of Broadcasting Services. In any event, said Richard A. Boucher, a State Department spokesman: "Our goal is to put out facts and the truth. We're not a propaganda agency." Even so, as a senior department official, Patricia Harrison, told Congress last year, the Bush administration has come to regard such "good news" segments as "powerful strategic tools" for influencing public opinion. And a review of the department's segments reveals a body of work in sync with the political objectives set forth by the White House communications team after 9/11. In June 2003, for example, the unit produced a segment that depicted American efforts to distribute food and water to the people of southern Iraq. "After living for decades in fear, they are now receiving assistance - and building trust - with their coalition liberators," the unidentified narrator concluded. Several segments focused on the liberation of Afghan women, which a White House memo from January 2003 singled out as a "prime example" of how "White House-led efforts could facilitate strategic, proactive communications in the war on terror." Tracking precisely how a "good news" report on Afghanistan could have migrated to Memphis from the State Department is far from easy. The State Department typically distributes its segments via satellite to international news organizations like Reuters and Associated Press Television News, which in turn distribute them to the major United States networks, which then transmit them to local affiliates. "Once these products leave our hands, we have no control," Robert A. Tappan, the State Department's deputy assistant secretary for public affairs, said in an interview. The department, he said, never intended its segments to be shown unedited and without attribution by local news programs. "We do our utmost to identify them as State Department-produced products." Representatives for the networks insist that government-produced reports are clearly labeled when they are distributed to affiliates. Yet with segments bouncing from satellite to satellite, passing from one news organization to another, it is easy to see the potential for confusion. Indeed, in response to questions from The Times, Associated Press Television News acknowledged that they might have distributed at least one segment about Afghanistan to the major United States networks without identifying it as the product of the State Department. A spokesman said it could have "slipped through our net because of a sourcing error." Kenneth W. Jobe, vice president for news at WHBQ in Memphis, said he could not explain how his station came to broadcast the State Department's segment on Afghan women. "It's the same piece, there's no mistaking it," he said in an interview, insisting that it would not happen again. Mr. Jobe, who was not with WHBQ in 2002, said the station's script for the segment has no notes explaining its origin. But Tish Clark Dunning said it was her impression at the time that the Afghan segment was her station's version of one done first by network correspondents at either Fox News or CNN. It is not unusual, she said, for a local station to take network reports and then give them a hometown look. "I didn't actually go to Afghanistan," she said. "I took that story and reworked it. I had to do some research on my own. I remember looking on the Internet and finding out how it all started as far as women covering their faces and everything." At the State Department, Mr. Tappan said the broadcasting office is moving away from producing narrated feature segments. Instead, the department is increasingly supplying only the ingredients for reports - sound bites and raw video. Since the shift, he said, even more State Department material is making its way into news broadcasts. Meeting a Need: Rising Budget Pressures, Ready-to-Run Segments WCIA is a small station with a big job in central Illinois. Each weekday, WCIA's news department produces a three-hour morning program, a noon broadcast and three evening programs. There are plans to add a 9 p.m. broadcast. The staff, though, has been cut to 37 from 39. "We are doing more with the same," said Jim P. Gee, the news director. Farming is crucial in Mr. Gee's market, yet with so many demands, he said, "it is hard for us to justify having a reporter just focusing on agriculture." To fill the gap, WCIA turned to the Agriculture Department, which has assembled one of the most effective public relations operations inside the federal government. The department has a Broadcast Media and Technology Center with an annual budget of $3.2 million that each year produces some 90 "mission messages" for local stations - mostly feature segments about the good works of the Agriculture Department. "I don't want to use the word 'filler,' per se, but they meet a need we have," Mr. Gee said. The Agriculture Department's two full-time reporters, Bob Ellison and Pat O'Leary, travel the country filing reports, which are vetted by the department's office of communications before they are distributed via satellite and mail. Alisa Harrison, who oversees the communications office, said Mr. Ellison and Mr. O'Leary provide unbiased, balanced and accurate coverage. "They cover the secretary just like any other reporter," she said. Invariably, though, their segments offer critic-free accounts of the department's policies and programs. In one report, Mr. Ellison told of the agency's efforts to help Florida clean up after several hurricanes. "They've done a fantastic job," a grateful local official said in the segment. More recently, Mr. Ellison reported that Mike Johanns, the new agriculture secretary, and the White House were determined to reopen Japan to American beef products. Of his new boss, Mr. Ellison reported, "He called Bush the best envoy in the world." WCIA, based in Champaign, has run 26 segments made by the Agriculture Department over the past three months alone. Or put another way, WCIA has run 26 reports that did not cost it anything to produce. Mr. Gee, the news director, readily acknowledges that these accounts are not exactly independent, tough-minded journalism. But, he added: "We don't think they're propaganda. They meet our journalistic standards. They're informative. They're balanced." More than a year ago, WCIA asked the Agriculture Department to record a special sign-off that implies the segments are the work of WCIA reporters. So, for example, instead of closing his report with "I'm Bob Ellison, reporting for the U.S.D.A.," Mr. Ellison says, "With the U.S.D.A., I'm Bob Ellison, reporting for 'The Morning Show.' " Mr. Gee said the customized sign-off helped raise "awareness of the name of our station." Could it give viewers the idea that Mr. Ellison is reporting on location with the U.S.D.A. for WCIA? "We think viewers can make up their own minds," Mr. Gee said. Ms. Harrison, the Agriculture Department press secretary, said the WCIA sign-off was an exception. The general policy, she said, is to make clear in each segment that the reporter works for the department. In any event, she added, she did not think there was much potential for viewer confusion. "It's pretty clear to me," she said. The 'Good News' People: A Menu of Reports From Military Hot Spots The Defense Department is working hard to produce and distribute its own news segments for television audiences in the United States. The Pentagon Channel, available only inside the Defense Department last year, is now being offered to every cable and satellite operator in the United States. Army public affairs specialists, equipped with portable satellite transmitters, are roaming war zones in Afghanistan and Iraq, beaming news reports, raw video and interviews to TV stations in the United States. All a local news director has to do is log on to a military-financed Web site, www.dvidshub.net, browse a menu of segments and request a free satellite feed. Then there is the Army and Air Force Hometown News Service, a unit of 40 reporters and producers set up to send local stations news segments highlighting the accomplishments of military members. "We're the 'good news' people," said Larry W. Gilliam, the unit's deputy director. Each year, the unit films thousands of soldiers sending holiday greetings to their hometowns. Increasingly, the unit also produces news reports that reach large audiences. The 50 stories it filed last year were broadcast 236 times in all, reaching 41 million households in the United States. The news service makes it easy for local stations to run its segments unedited. Reporters, for example, are never identified by their military titles. "We know if we put a rank on there they're not going to put it on their air," Mr. Gilliam said.

by **johnny nemo** » Tue May 02, 2006 8:04 pm

G.I. Joe is an American cartoon soldier. The character was created by David Breger when he was asked to create a comic strip for United States military magazines during World War II. Breger came up with the title "G.I. Joe" from the military reference "Government issue". His strip debuted June 17, 1942 in the military's YANK magazine and Stars and Stripes newspaper. In 1945, United Artists released a movie titled The Story of G.I. Joe, directed by William Wellman and starring Burgess Meredith as acclaimed war correspondent Ernie Pyle. Later, writer Larry Hama wrote the comics, after appearing in an episode of MASH. After high school, Hama served in the United States Army Corps of Engineers from 1969 to 1971, during the Vietnam War, an experience that would inform his editing of the 1986-93 Marvel Comics series The 'Nam. Larry Hama is best known as the original writer of the popular 1980s comic book G.I. Joe. So...the government, specifically the military, creates a character to personify the "good" guy who fights for "The American Way". It evolves into a movie, action figures, a comic book, and a TV show, all aimed at influencing a generation of kids to yell "Yo Joe!" and then go kill the bad guys.

by **Wolfmoon Lady** » Tue May 02, 2006 10:39 pm

Also, let's not forget the American propaganda produced by much beloved film director/producer, Frank Capra: Why We Fight and Know Your Enemy: Japan (1945). <blockquote>Quote:<hr> FRANK CAPRA'S"WHY WE FIGHT" SERIES: This prestigious film series was made by Capra, at that time a major in the US Army Signal Corps, in answer to an order from the Army Chief of Staff, General George C. Marshall, commissioning a series of films to explain the Government's policy to America's hastily assembled armed troops. Besides getting the assistance of such industry names as Robert Flaherty, Carl Foreman, James Hilton, John and Walter Huston, Lloyd Nolan, George Stevens and William Wyler; composers Alfred Newman and Dmitri Tiomkin; newsmen Ben Henry and William Shirer, Capra also had the use and assistance of MGM, Paramount and Twentieth Century Fox facilities. Of special note are the animated map sequences created by Walt Disney and his staff. Put in complete control, Capra utilized the services of writers Robert Heller, Anatole Litvak, Leonard Spiegelglass and Tony Veiller to come up with seven motion pictures that not only fulfilled their original purpose, but were declared by many to have revolutionized the art of documentary filmmaking. In 1944, the"Why We Fight" series was presented with the New York Film Critics Award as the Best Documentary Series. The series was soon being shown to the public in theaters requested by our various allies, and prints were requested by Winston Churchill and the Soviet government. <hr></blockquote> <a href="http://www.ihffilm.com/francapwhyw.html">www.ihffilm.com/francapwhyw.html</a> See, also: <a href="http://ihffilm.com/56.html">ihffilm.com/56.html</a> I think it's disingenuous to insist on factual evidence that there is a powerful cabal running the world or else dismiss the possibility entirely. After all, it's not like people haven't tried to prove x,y, and z about "Them." Col Fletcher Prouty, for one. <a href="http://www.prouty.org/preface.html">www.prouty.org/preface.html</a> In the Marxist sense, the movers and shakers of the world would, necessarily, have to control the means of (media) production, in order to retain their power and influence, be it through film, TV, radio, or the Internet (wait and see). That said, I agree that many shows are purely market-driven, as Pan contends. Viewers want a slew of sex and violence, so they get it. Yet, a market-driven theory of how media is produced does not exclude historically documented tactics of overt and subliiminal manipulation of the viewing audience through images and themes. Why are they scaring us away (the original question)? If viewers avoid the news because it is so negative, which is what most average people give as the reason why they don't read the newspapers or watch political debates, *They* win. It takes an informed populace to make informed decisions. Good discussion, folks. <img src=http://www.ezboard.com/images/emoticons/smile.gif ALT=":)"> Morgan

by **anotherdrew** » Wed May 03, 2006 4:24 am

children are being indoctinated thru games? Look into the free game America's Army. MMORPG based on being a grunt. an army of first person shooters.... It's paid for by the miltiary and is an admitted recruiting tool. even runs on poor peoples PCs. over low bandwidth. "look out they're comming right at us"

by **rothbardian** » Wed May 03, 2006 5:08 am

There are a lot of strange things going on in the movies that would seem to be an indication that SOMETHING is moving and shaking behind the scenes. Is it "paranoid delusion" to notice "Fight Club" with it's remarkably pointed depiction of DID. Interestingly, two towers which bear close resemblance to the WTC, collapse (long before 9/11) while a DID victim watches. Nothing to see here? Move along? "Conspiracy Theory" -- here there is open display of the MK-Ultra mind control program, and Disney-style cartoons are used as programming tools. This raises no questions? This creates no curiosity (as to what is going on behind the scenes here)? "The Matrix" indicates absolutely nothing? We're safe to be completely dismissive of the fact that the Wachowski brothers have refused to utter one single peep about their movie? Shush...and move along please. By the way, during the movie, Morpheus gets drugged and shocked in order to get him to reveal info that he keeps stored in his brain "like a computer"...a dead-on description from surviving MK-ULTRA "couriers". But, again, we shouldn't interpret any of this to mean that there is a huge behind-the-scenes movement to gain power and control over the world. Right? "The Hulk" -- There is military-type drugging and radiation to develop 'super' powers in a human being. The central character dissociates and switches into another 'alter' while in his 'super' mode. The thing that is extremely ominous about movies such as The Hulk-- 1) There is obviously a body of knowledge out there...about these evil government mind control experiments but...2) in making a movies like these, they are clearly NOT 'outing' the evil....they're only making it 'entertaining'. What kind of psychopathy does it require...for someone to stumble across some info that there is widespread government-funded torture of children, but their first thought is to make some money from a movie? To immediately move to dismiss that kind of psychopathy, as merely 'routine greed'...is quite the 'rush to judgment'. I'd say there are enough indicators in these (and many, many other) movies, that anyone with even a little curiosity, would want to track this stuff down. To essentially say that "there's nothing to see here", and that we might as well "move along"...is a disconnect for me.

by **darkbeforedawn** » Wed May 03, 2006 8:53 pm

I think there is quite a bit of evidence here that a "conspiracy" to keep us in the dark and promote violent wars does exist: 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 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 former Village 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 Blücher, 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 Düsseldorf, West Germany, and established a firm that developed not movie scripts, but anti-chemical warfare agents for the government. At the Industrie Club in Düsseldorf in 1982, von Blücher 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. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------

by **professorpan** » Thu May 04, 2006 1:19 am

<blockquote>Quote:<hr>I'd say there are enough indicators in these (and many, many other) movies, that anyone with even a little curiosity, would want to track this stuff down. <hr></blockquote> "Chance favors the prepared mind," Louis Pasteur said. I'd take that further: Artists paint the future before it happens. As I stated on the main RI blog page (in response to a comment about the Lone Gunmen pilot being a deliberate media innoculation), synchronicity happens. Artists pick up on themes and memes bouncing around the noosphere -- that's what good artists do. The author of "Futility," written in 1898, depicted a massive ship named "The Titan" which hit an iceberg in the North Atlantic and sank. Fourteen years later, the Titanic hit an iceberg and sunk. Evidence that the author was part of the plot to discredit bloated passenger ship travel? Another example: did the rap group The Coup have insider knowledge about the 9/11 attacks? Take a look at their very prescient album cover: <a href="http://www.snopes.com/rumors/thecoup.htm">www.snopes.com/rumors/thecoup.htm</a> Sometimes art precedes reality. Those who require literal, Newtonian correspondences would say that The Coup were tipped off in advance, and were part of the NWO plot to stifle investigation into the real perps behind 9/11. Men in Black Suits visited their studio and convinced them to put the exploding WTC towers on their CD cover. It's all part of the plan. That, friends, is folly.

by **darkbeforedawn** » Thu May 04, 2006 9:43 am

Pan,but the article I posted above is filled with factual material about who owns and controls the media. What is your response?

by **chillin** » Thu May 04, 2006 11:10 am

I'm not 'scared' away from TV, I just don't watch it much because so of the content just seems like a waste of time to me. Sometimes I'll flip thru to see if there's something interesting, and generally it's: drama I'm not following, 'news', sports, 'reality' show, people fixing up their stuff, movie with too many commercials. There's lots of violence, but what I've noticed more is that every freakin show is about people WORKING. Cops at work, doctors, lawyers, athletes, mechanics, carpenters, etc... I think it's weird that people go to work all day, then go home and relax by watching a bunch of other people at work LOL.

by **professorpan** » Thu May 04, 2006 12:10 pm

<blockquote>Quote:<hr>Pan,but the article I posted above is filled with factual material about who owns and controls the media. What is your response?<hr></blockquote> I re-read the article you posted. It deals mostly with control of news programming, and I'd be the first to criticize the corporate control of the news media. I just have seen zero evidence that the GE, ABC, Disney, or whomever is directing or coercing the creative people who write and produce entertainment in order to create a society of soulless drones for military cannon fodder. And just because a corporate entity owns a media operation doesn't mean the bosses exert their philosophical control over every aspect of every program. As long as it's making money, they generally don't give a damn about the plotline.

by **rothbardian** » Sat May 06, 2006 4:39 am

Mr.P Pan--- Although I've never looked into the Titanic sinking from a conspiracy viewpoint, it is interesting to me that you apparently dismiss 'out of hand' the possibility that this "Titan" story, written (as you say) fourteen years before the Titanic...could have been connected to the actual event. Really? How many years was the WTC attack in the preparatory stages? I have seen somewhere (I don't have the links just now) reports from 'little people' who said this was spoken of, back in the eighties. Do you have some sort of guideline you adhere to, where it's OK if they planned for a couple of years to pull off the attack, but (all of a sudden) fourteen years of planning is "obviously ridiculous"? Where do you draw the line? Two years, four, eight..anything under fourteen? Also...I don't know about this 'rapper' thing that you mention. But again, I am unclear on what exactly your complaint is. Did no one know about the WTC attack before it happened...including the perpetrators? Oh...so they did know about it. OK, is it possible they wanted to have a little fun with some insider bragging (like when Babe Ruth pointed to the left field fence)? It would seem to go without saying that...there is NOTHING extraordinary about this CD cover if you understand that a good number of people knew about the attack before it happened. (I certainly don't think it would've required any great skill to manipulate of couple of young kids into putting that particular depiction on their cover, without their knowledge of the actual future attack.) Please understand-- I have no particular interest in ascertaining the 'story' behind this CD cover. It's just that the reasoning is falling short, for me.

by **Wolfmoon Lady** » Sat May 06, 2006 12:15 pm

I wonder if <a href="http://www.americanprogress.org/site/pp.asp?c=biJRJ8OVF&b=122948" target="top">Rupert Murdoch</a> would agree that he only cares about making money. Murdoch's media machine made Bush and legitimized the Iraq War. Period. What makes anyone think he would stop there? I don't disagree that artistic ideas are 'out there' and that synchronicity happens. However, to maintain the stance that it's all coincidental and that media moguls like Murdoch only care about the economic bottom line is, again, disingenuous. If we agree that propaganda exists in the media, and I think we all do, we must agree that someone behind the scenes is creating it - for ideological, rather than economic reasons. It is all about the power of PERSUASION, the means of which can get pretty sinister. By persistently excluding themes and topics that fairly represent the other side, Murdoch and his ilk influence the tide of politics, war, and everyday life in these United States. They don't have to act in such a way that they could be ever be accused of 'creating souless drones for cannon fodder.' Yet, the star-spangled, red-white-and-blue audience of FOX News is more likely than any other group to accept out of hand the connection between 9/11 and Iraq and that George W. Bush is our earthly savior in the cosmic battle between good and evil. Let me make this personal. My sister used to be a reasonably liberal person. After 9/11, she became a neo-con nutcase. She watches FOX exclusively - and let me tell you, she is not the same person. We cannot speak about politics because she starts frothing at the mouth. Her once-sharp critical thinking skills were dulled in the weeks and months after the Towers fell. She succumbed to the onslaught of FOX's high-level propaganda machine. I miss my sister, and I pray for her enlightenment. But as long as she watches FOX and believes everything they tell her (as too many Americans do), she will never wake up. Brainwashed by FOX. Am I arguing for a roomful of cigar-smoking bigwigs pulling the strings on our collective puppetry? Not exactly. I am, however, arguing that those in power keep their numbers small, and exclusive, in order to sustain their positions of power. They use the media to change the course of politics and history to suit their ideological bent by controlling the form and content of the programming they *allow* the masses to consume. It is what it is. Cheers, Morgan

Why are 'they' scaring us away from the news?

Those CSI shows

I see a mass conspiracy

Re: I see a mass conspiracy

I thought I had...

Or how about good ole G.I. Joe ?

Re: Good work, Nemo

Re: Good work, Nemo

Nothing to see? Move along?

Who owns the media? an interesting article

Re: Nothing to see? Move along?

that may be folly

TV's overall suckage factor

Re: that may be folly

The Titanic and the rappers

Re: that may be folly

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