Suppression/Propaganda in Media

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Re: Suppression/Propaganda in Media

Postby stickdog99 » Sun Oct 03, 2021 2:54 pm

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Re: Suppression/Propaganda in Media

Postby Harvey » Sun Oct 03, 2021 3:00 pm

Point made.
And while we spoke of many things, fools and kings
This he said to me
"The greatest thing
You'll ever learn
Is just to love
And be loved
In return"


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Re: Suppression/Propaganda in Media

Postby drstrangelove » Sun Oct 03, 2021 10:55 pm

Lynn forester (Rothschild) was involved in the licensing deals that conglomerated those cable news channels in the above video behind the scenes. This is when she worked at Metro media and before she married into 'that' family most have been convinced are an unfairly persecuted bloodline.

Hence why the Epstein cover up in the media was so easy to handle, regardless of how uncoverupable it was.
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Re: Suppression/Propaganda in Media

Postby stickdog99 » Thu Oct 21, 2021 6:29 pm

https://consortiumnews.com/2021/10/18/p ... ce-psyops/

The Deep State’s imperative to colonize independent media is now before us.

By Patrick Lawrence

Watch and listen, O you with open eyes and ears. The national security state’s long, very long campaign to control our press and broadcasters has taken a new turn of late. If independent media are what keep alive hope for a vigorous, authentic Fourth Estate, as argued severally in this space, independent media are now subject to an insidious, profoundly anti-democratic effort to undermine them.

The Independent Consortium of Investigative Journalists, Frances Haugen, Maria Ressa: Let us consider this institution and these people. They are all frauds, if by fraudulent we mean they are not what and who they tell us they are and their claim to independence from power is bogus.

The Deep State — and at this point it is mere pretense to object to this term — long ago made it a priority to turn the mainstream press and broadcasters to its purposes — to make a free press unfree. This has gone on since the earliest Cold War decades and is well and responsibly documented. (Alas, if Americans read the many excellent books and exposés on this topic, assertions such as the one just made would not arrive as in the slightest outré.)

But several new realities are now very evident. Chief among them, the Deep State’s colonization of corporate media is now more or less complete. CNN, filling its airtime with spooks, generals, and a variety of official and formerly official liars, can be counted a total takeover. The New York Times is prima facie government-supervised, as it confesses in its pages from time to time. The Washington Post, owned by a man with multimillion-dollar CIA contracts, has turned itself into a comic book.

For reasons I will never entirely fathom, corporate media have not merely surrendered their legitimacy: They have actively, enthusiastically abandoned what frayed claim they may have had to credibility. The national-security state incorporates mainstream media into its apparatus, and then people stop believing the mainstream media: The thrill is gone, let’s say.

Accumulating Credibility

In consequence of these two factors, independent media have begun to rise as … independent media. They accumulate audiences. A little at a time, they acquire the very habits of professionalism the mainstream press and broadcasters have let decay. Gradually, they accumulate the credibility the mainstream has lost.

Certain phenomena engendered by independent media prove popular. There are whistleblowers. People inside Deep State institutions start to leak, and they turn to independent media, most famously WikiLeaks, to get information out. While the Deep State’s clerks in mainstream media keep their heads down, and their mouths closed while cashing their checks, independent media take principled stands in favor of free expression, and people admire these stands. They are, after all admirable.

Those populating the national-security state’s sprawling apparatus are not stupid. They can figure out the logical response to these developments as well as anyone else. The new imperative is now before us: It is to colonize independent media just as they had the mainstream in previous decades.

There are some hopelessly clumsy cases. I urge all colleagues to stop bothering with The Young Turks in any capacity. Those running it, creatures of those who generously fund it, are simply infra-dig. As Matt Taibbi pointed out over the weekend in a piece wonderfully headed, “Yes, Virginia, There Is a Deep State,” they’ve now got some clod named Ben Carollo proclaiming the CIA as an accountable force for good, savior of democracy — this in a video appearing under the rubric “Rebel HQ.”

As an East European émigré friend used to say, “Gimme break.”

Democracy Now! is a subtler instance of colonization. The once-admirable Amy Goodman drank the Russiagate Kool-Aid, which I counted the first sign of covert intervention of one or another kind. Then she caved to the orthodoxy on the chemical-weapons scam during the Syrian crisis, and lately — you have to watch to believe — Goodman has begun broadcasting CNN “investigative” reports with unalloyed approval.

It seems that Democracy Now!’s donors may have threatened to delay their checks.

The three recent phenomena suggested above are indications of the Deep State’s latest tactics in its assault on independent media and the culture that arises among them. It behooves us to understand this.

International Consortium of Investigative Journalists

Two weeks ago, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists published “The Pandora Papers,” a “leak” of 12 million electronic documents revealing the tax-fiddling, money-hiding doings of 300–odd political figures around the world. “The Pandora Papers” followed publication of “The Panama Papers” in 2016 and “The Paradise Papers” a year later. There are many useful revelations in these various releases, but we ought not be fooled as to the nature of the project.

Where did the ICIJ get the documents in “The Pandora Papers,” and how? Explaining provenance, authenticity, and so forth is essential to any investigative undertaking, but ICIJ has nothing to say on this point.

Why, of all the people “The Pandora Papers” exposes, is there not one American on its list? As Moon of Alabama notes in an analysis of this release, it amounts to a list of “people the U.S. doesn’t like.”

The ICIJ vigorously insists on its independence. But on close inspection this turns out not to be so by any serious understanding of the term. Among its donors are the Ford Foundation, whose longtime ties to the CIA are well-documented, and the Open Societies Foundation, the (in)famous George Soros operation dedicated to cultivating coups in nations that fall outside the fence posts of neoliberalism.

The group was founded in 1997 as a project of the Center for Public Integrity, another institution dedicated to “inspiring change using investigative reporting,” as the center describes itself. Among its sponsors are Ford, once again, and the Democracy Fund, which was founded by Pierre Omidyar, bankroller of The Intercept (another compromised “independent” medium). Omidyar is, like Soros, a sponsor of subversion ops in other countries masquerading as “civil society” projects.

ICIJ’s other sponsors (and for that matter the Democracy Fund’s) are comprised of the sorts of foundations that support NPR, PBS, and other such media. Anyone who assumes media institutions taking money from such sponsors are authentically independent does not understand philanthropy as a well-established conduit through which orthodoxies are enforced.

What are we looking at here? Not what we are supposed to think we are looking at, certainly. I will return to this question.

Maria Ressa

There is the case of Maria Ressa, the supposedly courageous, speak-truth-to-power co-winner of the Nobel Peace Prize this year, a Filipina journalist who founded The Rappler, a web publication in Manila. The Nobel committee cited Ressa for her “fight for freedom of expression.” Who is Maria Ressa, then, and what is The Rappler?

I grow tired of writing this sentence: She and her publication are not what we are supposed to think they are.

Ressa and The Rappler, each insisting on independence just as the ICIJ does, are straight-out lying on this point. The Rappler recently received a grant of $180,000 from the National Endowment for Democracy, a CIA front — this according to an NED financial report issued earlier this year. None other than Pierre Omidyar and a group called North Base Media own nonvoting shares in the publication. Among North Base’s partners is the Media Development Investment Fund, which was founded by George Soros to do what George Soros likes to do in other countries.

Does a picture begin to emerge? Read the names together and one will. You have to figure they all party together.

Nobel in hand, Maria Ressa has already declared that Julian Assange is not a journalist and that independent media need new regulations, as in censorship. Henry Kissinger got a Nobel as a peacemaker: Ressa gets one as a defender of free expression. It’s a fit.


Frances Haugen

This brings us to the case of Frances Haugen, the former Facebook exec who recently appeared before Congress waving lots of documents she seems to have secreted out of Facebook’s offices to argue for — what else at this point? —increased government regulation of social media, as in censorship. Frances Haugen, you see, is a courageous, speak-truth-to-power whistleblower. Never mind that her appearance on Capitol Hill was carefully choreographed by Democratic Party operatives.

It is hard to say who is more courageous, I find — the ICIJ, Maria Ressa, or Frances Haugen. Where would we be without them?

The culture of independent media as it has germinated and developed over the past decade or so gave us WikiLeaks, and its effectiveness cannot be overstated. It gave us all manner of gutsy journalists standing for the principles of a genuinely free press, and people listened. It gave us whistleblowers who are admired even as the Deep State condemns them.

And now the national-security state gives us a secret-disclosing crew of mainstream hacks, a faux- independent journalist elevated to the highest honors, and a whistleblower who was handed her whistle — three crowd-pleasers, three simulacra. These are three frauds. They are to independent journalism what McDonald’s is to food.

There is only one defense against this assault on truth and integrity, but it is a very good one. It is awareness. CNN, Democracy Now!, the ICIJ, Maria Ressa, Frances Haugen—none of these and many other media and people are properly labeled. But the labels can be written with modest efforts. Awareness and scrutiny, watching and listening, will prove enough.
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Re: Suppression/Propaganda in Media

Postby Harvey » Thu Oct 21, 2021 6:57 pm

Never mind that her appearance on Capitol Hill was carefully choreographed by Democratic Party operatives.


But Trump.
And while we spoke of many things, fools and kings
This he said to me
"The greatest thing
You'll ever learn
Is just to love
And be loved
In return"


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Re: Suppression/Propaganda in Media

Postby conniption » Sun Oct 24, 2021 8:04 am

The Julian Assange case

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDI8Ro4Ba5c
(25:00 min)
RT
• Oct 23, 2021 •

On the show, Chris Hedges talks to documentary filmmaker and investigative journalist John Pilger about the upcoming appeals hearing in London for the Julian Assange case.

On Sept. 26, Yahoo! News published “Kidnapping, assassination and a London shoot-out: Inside the CIA’s secret war plans against WikiLeaks.” The article detailed discussions within the CIA to kidnap or assassinate Julian Assange. The revelations came a month before a hearing in Britain’s High Court that will see the U.S. government appeal a decision that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange cannot be sent to the United States to face espionage charges. These revelations also coincided with the arrest of an Icelandic man who played a major role in the FBI’s case against Assange and who has now admitted he lied in his testimony about Assange to U.S. federal investigators. The most recent revelations, coupled with the numerous legal anomalies of the Assange case, including leaks that show that the Spanish security firm at the Ecuadoran Embassy in London where Assange sought refuge for seven years, turned over recordings of his meetings with his lawyers to the CIA, amply illustrate that the judicial pantomime carried out against Assange is a political persecution led by the U.S. government and the CIA because of embarrassing and damaging revelations about the inner workings of the US military, intelligence agencies and the political class repeatedly exposed by Assange and WikiLeaks. The goal of the U.S. government is to shut down WikiLeaks, and organizations like WikiLeaks, and to make an example of Assange, who if he is extradited to the United States faces 175 years in prison, to dissuade others who might consider replicating his courageous reporting. The upcoming appeals hearing is on October 27 and 28 at Britain’s High Court, London.


~~~

RT
Snowden tells The Belmarsh Tribunal: If you love truth, you're as much of a criminal as Assange and risk sharing his fate
23 Oct, 2021


https://www.rt.com/news/538241-belmarsh ... n-assange/
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Re: Suppression/Propaganda in Media

Postby stickdog99 » Sun Oct 24, 2021 10:42 pm

The Age (Australian newspaper) fired its political cartoonist of 30 years for daring to post this to his personal Instagram account.

Image
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Re: Suppression/Propaganda in Media

Postby stickdog99 » Thu Oct 28, 2021 3:13 pm

https://theintercept.com/2021/10/16/dan ... itol-riot/

A Florida Anarchist Will Spend Years in Prison for Online Posts Prompted by Jan. 6 Riot

Daniel Baker’s calls for armed defense against possible far-right attacks led to a much harsher sentence than that facing most insurrectionists.

ON TUESDAY, a Florida judge sentenced Daniel Baker, an anti-fascist activist, to 44 months in federal prison for social media posts that called for armed defense against possible far-right attacks on the state’s Capitol in the wake of the January 6 riots. Baker, a 34-year-old yoga teacher and emergency medical technician trainee, had no previous criminal convictions and has already been held for 10 months of harsh pretrial detention, including seven months in solitary confinement. He never brought a weapon near a government building; he amassed no armed anti-fascist forces; he made no threats on a single individual.

Baker will, nonetheless, face considerably more prison time than most January 6 defendants, including those who crossed state lines, small arsenals in tow, with the aim of overturning a presidential election.

It goes without saying that a United States federal court is no place to appeal to ethical grounds for militant anti-fascist resistance. Yet Baker, while prone to hyperbolic and sometimes paranoid rhetoric, was certainly not alone in fearing that there could be January 6-style events in statehouses nationwide ahead of Joe Biden’s inauguration and that local police could hardly be trusted as a bulwark. The Federal Bureau of Investigations warned of the potential for armed protests at state capitols. Florida is home to over 60 far-right, white supremacist, and neo-Nazi groups recognized by the Southern Poverty Law Center, and there are well-reported links between Florida police departments and far-right militiae.

If there are moral arguments for physically confronting fascists — and I believe there are — they would have been of scant relevance in Baker’s case: zero such confrontations took place or appeared on the horizon, and no far-right mobs amassed at the Florida Capitol around Biden’s inauguration. This should have been a straightforward First Amendment case, with Baker’s online speech, albeit bellicose, judged as constitutionally protected. Instead, the formerly unhoused veteran has been made a victim of government efforts to draw false equivalences between fascistic far-right forces and the anti-fascists who would see them opposed. ...
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Re: Suppression/Propaganda in Media

Postby stickdog99 » Mon Dec 20, 2021 5:13 pm

https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defe ... ony-fauci/

Part 1: CIA’s Extraordinary Role Influencing Liberal Media Outlets Daily Kos, The Daily Beast, Rolling Stone

Part 1 of a two-part series takes a deep dive into the history of the CIA’s central role in orchestrating news and editorial coverage in America’s most influential liberal national media outlets — and its continued hold today.

Ssocial media sites, including Instagram and YouTube, have banned Kennedy from pointing out flaws in the dominant narratives surrounding the COVID crisis.

As a longtime investigative journalist and author, I have spent a good portion of my career researching corruption within U.S. intelligence agencies. I was nevertheless surprised to learn about the Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) central role in crafting the militarized governmental response to the COVID-19 pandemic, which Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. documents in the final chapters of his new runaway best-seller, “The Real Anthony Fauci.”

I’ve known Kennedy for more than two decades. I have interviewed him and collaborated with him on environmental articles and several books, including “Climate In Crisis.” I have great respect for his legal work and the accomplishments of his ongoing Waterkeeper Alliance. And I appreciate his dedication to alerting the public about alternative narratives related to the pandemic.

I am fully vaccinated and a believer in the efficacy of the vaccines. However, as a bedrock liberal with a deep reverence for the First Amendment and time-honored right to freedom of speech, I became alarmed that social media sites, including Instagram and YouTube, have banned Kennedy from pointing out flaws in the dominant narratives surrounding the COVID crisis.

In my view, Kennedy has been falsely vilified as an anti-vaccination disinformation “conspiracy theorist.” Blanket censorship by mainstream media seems to prohibit him from responding to such attacks.

And it disturbs me that once-idealistic liberal media outlets have devolved into apologists for the pharmaceutical industry (including its captured public health technocrats), as well as their stifling of any dissent. Why the vitriol against Kennedy, I wondered, from leading liberal news websites such as Daily Kos, The Daily Beast, and more recently, Rolling Stone?

A The Daily Beast headline appearing one year before the pandemic set the tone (Feb. 8, 2019): “Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. spouts his insane anti-vaxxer conspiracy theory in measles hot zone.”

Seeming to borrow a page from the CIA’s propaganda manuals, the liberal blogs have employed the signature trope of portraying opposition to official theology as the dangerous product of right-wing extremism.

After Kennedy gave a speech in Berlin in August 2020, The Daily Beast falsely claimed the event organizers were a “Weird Pro-QAnon German Group Behind RFK Jr.’s Latest Anti-Vaxx Stunt.”

In lockstep, Daily Kos headlined a story by one of its regular contributors, DowneastDem, “Anti-Vaxxer RFK JR. joins neo-Nazis in massive Berlin ‘Anti-Corona’ Protest.” Kennedy fought back by filing a defamation lawsuit against Daily Kos and its pseudonymous author. In fact, the Berlin “Peace and Justice Rally” had been attended by a million peaceful Europeans of every ethnicity protesting what they saw as the global imposition of totalitarian controls and seeking restoration of democracy, tolerance (the stage banner was a giant mural of Mahatma Gandhi and the MC was a Black Ghanaian), constitutional guarantees and civil rights — the opposite of Nazism.

The enmity against Kennedy has only escalated as his prominence in the resistance has grown.

“His quackery has likely killed people,” Daily Kos went so far as to assert. Another posting read: “He’s a twisted, sick individual who has made a mockery of his family’s legacy. His own family has distanced itself, calling him ‘dangerous,’ as if he has the plague, because he likely does. Maybe even more than one plague. He is, indeed, against all vaccinations.”

Anyone who has followed Kennedy’s nuanced, measured and well-informed views on the science might recognize such sophomoric characterizations as “disinformation propaganda.”

Yet the liberal metamorphosis appears so complete that Public Citizen, an advocacy group that once served as a scourge to Big Pharma, is using its tax-deductible legal assets to defend Daily Kos pro bono against Kennedy’s lawsuit. Daily Kos’ support of censoring debate about the government’s COVID countermeasures belies Public Citizen’s rationale that its passion for defending the First Amendment prompted its decision to defend Daily Kos.

So how did the Pharma cartel capture the liberal media? The abduction has been multifaceted.

In his new book, Kennedy shows how Pharma’s deployment of $9.6 billion in annual advertising expenditures allows it to dictate content in electronic and print outlets, transforming the traditionally liberal networks ABC, NBC, CBS and CNN into marketing and propaganda vehicles.

With $319 million in strategic donations, Bill Gates simultaneously gained control of so-called “independent” media outlets like NPR, public television, The Guardian and dozens of other “advertising-free” liberal news outlets that can now be used to promote a bio-security agenda generally and Gates’ vaccines in particular. This has been well-documented in publications ranging from the Los Angeles Times in 2007 to The Nation in 2020-21.

My investigation suggests that Pharma and Gates have a powerful clandestine partner that has made the medical-industrial complex’s media hegemony airtight through their apparent penetration of leading liberal online news sites. It is also well-documented, though often forgotten, that since its inception more than 70 years ago, the CIA has orchestrated news and editorial coverage in America’s most influential liberal national news organs — Washington Post, New York Times and TIME.

These outlets continue to hew faithfully to CIA theology on globalism, biosecurity, coerced vaccinations, Russiagate, a militarized foreign policy, censorship, lockdowns, vaccine passports, digitized currencies and other issues. My investigation for The Defender indicates that Kennedy’s most vitriolic critics among the liberal online journals may themselves have also fallen under the sway of the intelligence apparatus.

In “The Real Anthony Fauci,” Kennedy exposes Pharma’s alarming entanglements with the CIA, bioweapons developers, medical technocrats and the Silicon Valley robber barons. My own research has revealed that military and intelligence agencies enjoy disturbing links to the leading editors of Daily Kos, The Daily Beast and Rolling Stone that may explain why these journals have lately devolved into ideological commissars for the pharmaceutical cartel’s official orthodoxies, champions of the biosecurity paradigm and censors against critics of the biosecurity state.

‘Here’s a little secret I don’t think I’ve ever written about’

Markos Moulitsas Zúñiga, the founder and public face of Daily Kos for two decades, was born in Chicago in 1971 to a Greek father and a Salvadoran mother. At the age of four, Markos’ father moved with his family to El Salvador during the brutal CIA-sponsored civil war.

The country’s feudal and homicidal oligarchy — with U.S. government assistance — was ferociously suppressing a civil rights movement by its oppressed peasantry.

The CIA’s Salvadoran project was the inaugural conflict in the agency’s notorious “War on the Poor’’ across Central America. CIA-controlled death squads and U.S.-trained Salvadoran military battalions devastated some 90,000 peasants, intellectuals, Catholic priests and nuns, students and labor leaders to fortify the positions of feudal oligarchs allied with U.S. multinationals. U.S. Sen. Chris Dodd, a contemporary critic of the CIA’s murderous role in Salvador, dismissed the Salvadoran government’s self-serving claims that it was battling Communists.

“Only a tiny, tiny fraction of the murdered poor were Communists,” Dodd told Kennedy. “Virtually all of the casualties were unarmed civilians — mostly peasants seeking escape from a barbaric feudal serfdom.” Dodd continued, “It wasn’t a civil war — it was a massacre.” Dodd is currently the director of the Dodd Center for Human Rights at the University of Connecticut.

Moulitsas’ father evidently took the side of the oligarchs and the Agency. The younger Markos later reflected on his experience:

“I actually grew up in a war zone. I witnessed communist guerillas execute students accused of being government collaborators. I was 8 years old, and I remember stepping over a dead body, warm blood flowing from a fresh wound. Dodging bullets while at market. I lived in the midst of hate, the likes of which most of you will never understand. There’s no way I could ever describe the ways this experience colors my worldview.”

When rebel fighters appropriated the Moulitsas home for their headquarters, Markos says, his parents received an envelope containing his photograph and that of his younger brother boarding a bus. That thinly veiled threat prompted his family’s return to the Chicago suburbs.

Moulitsas enlisted in the U.S. Army at 17, spending his service as an artillery scout for a missile unit in a small German town and dodging deployment to the Gulf War “by a hair.” He later reflected that “I would not be the person I am today without my military service.”

During a confessional moment at San Francisco’s Commonwealth Club in 2006, Moulitsas acknowledged that at some point following his discharge, he enlisted in the CIA, entering the agency’s rigorous training program, hoping to become an undercover spy: “So, I applied to the CIA and I went all the way to the end, I mean it was to the point where I was going to sign papers to become [part of] Clandestine Services.” This and other remarks by Moulitsas were captured on audiotape, a transcript of which now appears online.

Like many journalists who began their careers working for the CIA, Moulitsas claims to have left the agency before turning to journalism. (Anderson Cooper makes the same claim.) It’s nearly always impossible to ascertain the truth, but Moulitsas’ story has some internal inconsistencies.

Moulitsas contends that he abandoned his CIA dreams because the job would have required him to live, at least briefly, in Washington, D.C., a locale he says he detested. (Nota bene: The CIA does, of course, send most of its undercover operatives to locales outside Washington, D.C.)

He said:

“And it was at that point [in 2001] that the Howard Dean campaign took off and I had to make a decision whether I was gonna kinda join the Howard Dean campaign… or was I going to become a spy. (Laughter in the audience.)”


At some point prior to the Dean campaign, Moulitsas suddenly metamorphosed from right-wing conservative Republican to straight-ticket Democrat.

He said:

“It was going to be a tough decision at first, but then the CIA insisted that, if I joined that, they’d want me to do the first duty assignment in Washington, D.C., and I hate Washington, D.C.”


There is an obvious flaw in Moulitsas’ story: Had Dean won, Moulitsas would of course have ended up back in his despised Washington, D.C.

Before Dean’s political nosedive early in 2004, Moulitsas moved west to Silicon Valley at a time when the CIA was storming the Internet. There, as project manager in a web development start-up, he met and married Elisa Batista, a reporter for Wired.

As Kennedy shows in his book, Wired served as an external newsletter for the U.S. intelligence community, which had taken a strong interest in infiltrating Silicon Valley since before the Internet’s inception. U.S. military and intelligence agencies first launched the Internet by building the ARPANET grid in 1969. The CIA established a vast investment fund called In-Q-Tel, which it used to fuel the eruption of Silicon Valley’s tech industry by funding a vast array of tech startups with intelligence potential.

In May 2002, Markos Moulitsas had founded his blog, calling it “Daily Kos” after his military nickname. Within two years, Moulitsas attracted a large readership and made blogging his full-time occupation. A gifted organizer, Moulitsas ensconced himself deep into the Democratic Party power structure. He promised to deploy armies of cyber warriors to hijack the Democratic Party away from its bedrock constituents — Big Labor, trial lawyers, and civil rights leaders — “[the] ineffective, incompetent, and antiquated Democratic Party establishment” — and transform it into the party of Big Data/Big Tech.

Moulitsas said:

“We cannot wait any longer for the Democratic Party to reform itself and lead us into a new era of electoral success… [T]he netroots, the grassroots, the progressive base of America — must act now to take back our party and our country… Technology has opened up the previously closed realm of activist politics to riffraff like us.”


Crashing the gate

Using his blog to mount fundraising drives for Democratic candidates around the country, Moulitsas gave high-ranking politicians “diary space,” established a Yearly Kos convention for bloggers, and became an acerbic and polarizing voice of a new tech-based version of left-wing liberalism.

By mid-2018, Daily Kos had mushroomed into the largest liberal community blog in the country, with some 8 million unique viewers per month and 2.3 million registered users. The “liberal” mass media lionized its founder in dozens of fawning profiles which he cultivated.

For years, Moulitsas managed to conceal a key biographical fact despite myriad articles and detailed hagiographies praising his recreation of liberalism. Moulitsas only publicly acknowledged his brush with the CIA during an unguarded moment when the circumstance summoned him to defend the agency against the harsh assessments of a moderator during his June 2, 2006, Commonwealth Club appearance.

The CIA’s role in some 73 known coups d’état against mainly democratic governments between 1947 and 2000 — one-third of the world’s governments — had earned the agency condemnation from liberals for decades.

In his opening question to Moulitsas, the Commonwealth Club moderator wondered why liberal media outlets were suddenly going sweet on the CIA:

“[N]ot long ago, liberals loathed the Central Intelligence Agency as the enemy of democratic governments and they installed dictators around the world, and these days you read the papers, and people on the Left are rallying to the defense of the CIA and are indignant when the CIA is politicized. How did this come about, that suddenly liberals are championing the CIA?”


At first, Moulitsas stammered in response: “I don’t know.” The questioner persisted: “Do you find it strange or ironic, this sudden love for the CIA?”

Under this pressure, Moulitsas blurted out the truth: “Here’s a little secret I don’t think I’ve ever written about.”

Moulitsas described his tenure at the agency as a brief flirtation interrupted only by his sudden passion for Howard Dean. Moulitsas coughed as he launched into his enthusiastic defense of the agency with, unsurprisingly, falsehoods:

“I think a lot of the people that did have problems with the CIA, I mean it was a very vocal minority. I think most people really didn’t think about it all that much, right? It wasn’t really on their radar screens, in the way that now it is, because now we are in this huge [Iraq] war, and it was the CIA that was warning the [Bush] Administration against invading because there were no weapons of mass destruction.”


This, of course, was classic disinformation. In fact, the CIA in 2003 was, as usual, aggressively pushing for war. The agency played a direct and reprehensible role in fabricating intelligence to grease the skids for President Bush’s Iraq invasion. During the run-up to the attack, CIA Director George Tenet famously assured President Bush that Saddam had a secret arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. He said, “Don’t worry, it’s a slam dunk.”

George W. Bush later said his worst mistake during his White House years was swallowing the CIA’s guarantees. He said:

“The biggest regret of all the presidency has to have been the intelligence failure in Iraq. A lot of people put their reputations on the line and said the weapons of mass destruction is a reason to remove Saddam Hussein.”


Apparently assuming the illiteracy of his Commonwealth Club audience, Moulitsas went on to describe the CIA as “a very liberal institution.” He said:

“And in a lot of ways, it really does attract people who… want to make the world a better place… Of course, they’ve got their Dirty Ops and this and that, but as an institution itself the CIA is really interested in a stable world … And stable worlds aren’t created by destabilizing regimes and creating wars.

“Their [sic] done so by other means. Assassination [of] labor leaders … I’m kidding! I don’t think it’s a very partisan thing to want a stable world. And even if you’re protecting American interests, I mean that can get ugly at times, but generally speaking I think their heart’s in the right place. As an organization, their heart is in the right place. I’ve never had any problem with the CIA. I’d have no problem working for them.”


Operation Mockingbird

In 1948, the year after its founding, the CIA created a top-secret program — Operation Mockingbird — to wield influence over the American media. From its inception, this clandestine project was yet another of the CIA’s outlaw enterprises.

The 1948 Smith-Mundt Act had illegalized the use of CIA funding to broadcast propaganda to Americans. When a congressional investigation in the mid-1970s first revealed Operation Mockingbird’s existence, shocked Americans learned that the agency’s key CIA collaborators included Washington Post owner Philip Graham; CBS owner William Paley; Time-Life publisher Henry Luce; top editors at the New York Times, and Joseph Alsop, whose influential column appeared in more than 300 newspapers.

CIA Director Allen Dulles oversaw Mockingbird’s illegal network until RFK Jr.’s uncle, President John Kennedy, fired him at the end of 1961. By then, Mockingbird was employing “some 3,000 salaried and contract CIA employees… engaged in propaganda efforts.”

The agency commissioned its journalists to write articles promoting the expansion of the military-industrial complex and the national security state, and rewarded them with classified information to spice up their “scoops.”

The CIA also established formal journalism training for its spies, embedding them in key journals and nurturing their careers. The agency promoted propaganda narratives, including portraying murdered Salvadoran farmers as Communists under Soviet control, and discouraged newspapers from delving into CIA atrocities such as the agency’s mass murders of tens of thousands of Vietnamese peasants, Buddhist leaders and intellectuals (Operation Phoenix); its orchestration of the butchering of a million Indonesian civilians; its political assassination, torture training and regime-change projects across Latin America (Operation Condor), Africa, and Asia; its crack dealing and drug smuggling operations; and its role in the overthrow of the Democratic governments in Chile, Guatemala, Iran, Iraq and elsewhere.

CIA-affiliated journalists were instrumental in suppressing questions about the CIA’s role in the Kennedy assassination — even as the agency’s former chief, Allen Dulles (who remarked with satisfaction of JFK’s murder: “That little Kennedy … He thought he was a god”), crafted and defended the official “lone shooter” narrative from his chair running the Warren Commission.

In November 1963, Life Magazine’s Executive Editor C.D. Jackson — a longtime CIA asset — purchased the original Zapruder film, published select frames upholding the lone-gunman theory, then locked the original in a vault to preserve it from public view.

Jackson also negotiated exclusive rights to Marina Oswald’s story and enlisted a CIA ghostwriter to fortify the official Warren Commission orthodoxy.

The CIA coined the term “conspiracy theory” to discredit those who questioned the Warren Report. A Jan. 4, 1967, CIA document released under the Freedom of Information Act describes the agency’s strategizing how to combat critics of the Warren Report.

The report said:

“To employ propaganda assets to [negate] and refute the attacks of the critics. Book reviews and feature articles are particularly appropriate for this purpose. The unclassified attachments to this guidance should provide useful background material for passing to assets. Our ploy should point out, as applicable, that the critics are (I) wedded to theories adopted before the evidence was in, (II) politically interested, (III) financially interested, (IV) hasty and inaccurate in their research, or (V) infatuated with their own theories.”


It’s noteworthy that this was the same propaganda playbook that media outlets — including The Daily Beast, Daily Kos and Rolling Stone — applied during the COVID-19 crisis to marginalize, gaslight, discredit and vilify dissenters.

When the first exposé of the CIA’s dark deeds (The Invisible Government) appeared in 1964, the agency secretly obtained the galleys and formed a special group to arrange negative reviews. When the left-wing Ramparts Magazine planned to break a story of the CIA’s clandestine and illegal funding of the National Student Association, the agency organized a campaign that the orchestrator later said “had all sorts of dirty tricks to hurt their circulation and financing… We had awful things in mind, some of which we carried out.”

Despite the CIA’s best efforts to deny and stonewall a Senate investigation into its many illegal media activities, the Church Committee warned in 1976:

“In examining the CIA’s past and present use of the U.S. media, the Committee finds two reasons for concern. The first is the potential, inherent in covert media operations, for manipulating or incidentally misleading the American public. The second is the damage to the credibility and independence of a free press which may be caused by covert relationships with U.S. journalists and media organizations.”


In response to public and congressional outrage, then-CIA Director George Bush issued new guidelines regarding the cozy relationship.

The guidelines said:

“Effective immediately, CIA will not enter into any paid or contractual relationship with any full-time or part-time news correspondent accredited by any U.S. news agency, U.S. news service, newspaper, periodical, radio or television network or station.”


Mockingbird redux

Despite President Bush’s assurances, Operation Mockingbird never really closed up shop. The CIA continued to expand its media tentacles around the globe and across the decades.

A year and a half after Bush’s proclamation, Carl Bernstein, who partnered with Bob Woodward to expose the Watergate scandal, revealed in Rolling Stone that over a 25-year period more than 400 American journalists had carried out assignments for the CIA. Bernstein expressed his skepticism toward the agency’s avowal that it had ended its crusade to corrupt reporters and control the media.

The CIA continued to act to punish media criticism of its activities and even to swallow an entire network that refused to buckle under. As far back as 1954, several cronies of Allen Dulles, including lawyer and Wall Street speculator William Casey, created Capital Cities Communications, which over the next quarter-century became a global media conglomerate. Casey remained on the company’s board until 1981, when he became — wait for it — director of the CIA.

Several years into Casey’s CIA tenure, an ABC News report implicated the CIA in an assassination attempt against an American citizen. Casey retaliated by asking the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to revoke all of ABC’s TV and radio licenses.

The CIA next asked the FCC to levy Fairness Doctrine penalties against the disobedient network.

The New York Times described the CIA’s attacks against ABC: “This amounts to a government plot to commit intimidation.”

The Times, which in that epoch was still a champion of freedom of speech, warned that:

“William Casey, the CIA director, seems to think he and his agency were libeled, but to sue for libel he’d have to prove reckless disregard of the truth and open his files on the case. Unwilling or unable to do that, he’s using the FCC as a shortcut to punishment. […] This is a chilling assault on a network and the Constitution. It needs to be thrown out fast.”


A month later, in March 1985, Casey’s Capital Cities (in which he secretly retained considerable stock) appears to have found another solution to the ABC News problem — The company paid $3.4 billion to take over ABC, a company four times its size. Board members came to include billionaire investor Warren Buffet and Robert P. Bauman, chair of the SmithKline Beecham pharmaceutical company.

In his 2019 best-selling book, Presstitutes: Embedded in the Pay of the CIA, Udo Ulfkotte, a former editor for Germany’s mass daily newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), reveals how the CIA and the German Federal Intelligence Agency (BND) continued to use pervasive infiltration of the global media to spread propaganda to shape public opinion.

Ulfkotte recounted that the BND and CIA recruited him while he was in university and placed him at FAZ. An idealistic young man, he was thrilled to work for his country’s intelligence agency. He later said, “However, looking back, I was corrupt, I was manipulative and dealt in disinformation.”

CIA and BND handlers instructed Ulfkotte what stories to write — supplying him with information that he accepted without fact-checking. On one occasion in 2005, to cover up rampant industrial espionage against German companies, then-CIA Director James Woolsey ordered Ulfkotte to write articles saying the U.S. did not carry out industrial espionage.

Ulfkotte quotes a CIA agent who told the Washington Post, “You can get a journalist for less than a good whore, for a few hundred dollars.”

While on assignment in the Middle East, Ulfkotte regularly reported to the local CIA and BND outposts. While working abroad as a foreign correspondent, he discovered that “every foreign reporter for the American and British press was also active for their intelligence services.”

He describes how the CIA houses its captured journalists in sinecures at U.S. and German think tanks that have close ties to the CIA and NATO, where they manufacture pro-U.S. opinion and push for war with Russia. The State Department, Ulfkotte says, provides grant money to think tanks that house journalists/spies and that promote CIA propaganda.

Like Kennedy’s new book, Ulfkotte’s “Presstitutes” was a bestseller in Germany (for a full 18 months) when it was first published in 2013, despite a wall-to-wall boycott by mainstream media.

Today, leading liberal press organs routinely print unvetted CIA disinformation as verified news stories.

In April 2021, Glenn Greenwald revealed that the blockbuster New York Times story “Bountygate” was actually a CIA-generated propaganda fiction. The Times reported that the Russian government tried to pay Taliban-linked fighters to attack U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan. The Times reporters got this tall tale from the CIA and neither verified or fact-checked it. The Times reporters did not disclose that the CIA had provided the unverified story.

Only later — after the top U.S. military official in Afghanistan said there was no evidence to support the allegations — did one of the New York Times reporters who originally broke the Russia bounty story admit that he was publishing a clandestine disinformation press release from the CIA.

Greenwald tweeted, “So media outlets — again — repeated CIA stories with no questioning: congrats to all.”

One of the NYT reporters who originally broke the Russia bounty story (originally attributed to unnamed “intelligence officials”) say today that it was a CIA claim. So media outlets – again – repeated CIA stories with no questioning: congrats to all.https://t.co/4GbUXBCOpI

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) April 15, 2021


Following the exposure of CIA’s role in fabricating the Bountygate whopper, The Daily Beast belatedly condemned the deception, even though it had previously uncritically published many articles promoting the CIA “Bountygate” narrative.

Now it tried to distance itself from the scam. Ben Norton tweeted on April 15, 2021:

D’oh! US spy agencies basically admitted they lied about Russia supposedly paying militants in Afghanistan to kill American occupation forces.

Of course the entire Western media spread this lie for weeks, but don’t expect them to issue any corrections https://t.co/itOniutu0D

— Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) April 15, 2021


In an April 2021 article, “The CIA Used to Infiltrate the Media. Now the CIA Is the Media,” Caitlin Johnstone writes:

“So the mass media aggressively promoted a CIA narrative that none of them ever saw proof of, because there was no proof, because it was an entirely unfounded claim from the very beginning. They quite literally ran a CIA press release and disguised it as a news story.”


Johnstone says that the CIA’s Bountygate story was part of a larger propaganda effort to arouse Americans against Trump’s proposed troop withdrawals from Afghanistan and Germany, and to incite anti-Russia propaganda. The agency’s disinformation campaign, according to Johnstone, succeeded in winning the CIA an exemption from Biden’s Afghanistan “withdrawal.”

The New York Times’ role as a promoter of CIA propaganda is an old story: Following the 2001 Operation Iraqi Freedom, both the New York Times and Washington Post were forced to apologize for their fabricated weapons of mass destruction stories that drove the U.S. invasion.

As it turns out, the much-respected journalists who penned these articles were acting as glorified stenographers for the CIA.

Johnstone said:

“Nowadays the CIA collaboration happens right out in the open, and people are too propagandized to even recognize this as scandalous. Immensely influential outlets like the New York Times uncritically pass on CIA disinfo, which is then spun as fact by cable news pundits. The sole owner of the Washington Post [Jeff Bezos] is a CIA contractor [Amazon Web Services signed a $600 million cloud computing agreement with the CIA in 2013] and WaPo has never once disclosed this conflict of interest when reporting on U.S. intelligence agencies per standard journalistic protocol. Mass media outlets now openly employ intelligence agency veterans like John Brennan, James Clapper, Chuck Rosenberg, Michael Hayden, Frank Figliuzzi, Fran Townsend, Stephen Hall, Samantha Vinograd, Andrew McCabe, Josh Campbell, Asha Rangappa, Phil Mudd, James Gagliano, Jeremy Bash, Susan Hennessey, Ned Price and Rick Francona, as are known CIA assets like NBC’s Ken Dilanian, as are CIA applicants like Tucker Carlson.”


Johnstone continued:

“This isn’t Operation Mockingbird. It’s so much worse. Operation Mockingbird was the CIA doing something to the media. What we are seeing now is the CIA openly acting as the media. Any separation between the CIA and the news media, indeed even any pretense of separation, has been dropped.”
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Re: Suppression/Propaganda in Media

Postby MacCruiskeen » Mon Dec 20, 2021 6:54 pm

"Ich kann gar nicht so viel fressen, wie ich kotzen möchte." - Max Liebermann,, Berlin, 1933

"Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts." - Richard Feynman, NYC, 1966

TESTDEMIC ➝ "CASE"DEMIC
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Re: Suppression/Propaganda in Media

Postby Joe Hillshoist » Mon Dec 20, 2021 8:40 pm

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Re: Suppression/Propaganda in Media

Postby stickdog99 » Mon Dec 27, 2021 10:00 pm

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A Viral Blizzard

Postby Harvey » Tue Dec 28, 2021 7:02 pm

And while we spoke of many things, fools and kings
This he said to me
"The greatest thing
You'll ever learn
Is just to love
And be loved
In return"


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Re: Suppression/Propaganda in Media

Postby Harvey » Tue Dec 28, 2021 7:07 pm

And while we spoke of many things, fools and kings
This he said to me
"The greatest thing
You'll ever learn
Is just to love
And be loved
In return"


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Re: Suppression/Propaganda in Media

Postby Wombaticus Rex » Wed Dec 29, 2021 12:26 pm

Joe Hillshoist » Mon Dec 20, 2021 7:40 pm wrote:
I'm glad you';re immune to this. Where would we be otherwise....


Nobody is immune to propaganda, verily, and media consists of little else. These techniques are practiced and applied by a constellation of actors with conflicting agendas.

The more salient point, though, is who is wielding these tools at scale, who controls the machinery of the narrative as it is experienced by the vast majority of English speaking human beings. Who gets to proclaim RFK Jr. dangerous and have it stick? Who gets to decide when pandemics are over and compel policy actions in response? Fortunately, inevitably, these are rather easy questions to answer.

Without question, much of chaff and memes and blogs being fed to lockdown and vaccine skeptics are poisoned pills and weaponized disinformation. Making your opposition look stupid is very easy, and when you have the means to control their information streams, they will do much of the heavy lifting for you.

That fact is not enough to discredit the arguments of lockdown and vaccine skeptics, however. The Twitter to Facebook to RI pipeline of questionable .jpg agitprop is the basis for most of the discourse around the issue -- and surely, some of the decision making and belief formation of the adherents. Yet the questions around efficacy, the disturbing links between primary actors in the early days of the lockdown and the greatest financial beneficiaries of those decisions, the role of Chinese money, influence and espionage in seeding the policy responses here in the West, and the unambiguous money links between corporations like Pfizer and family foundations like the Rockefellers and the Gates and the media outlets who have shaping public perception at every step -- none of this is going away just because it's unfashionable or unseemly to raise doubts when people are dying every day.
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