No, this isn't about Operation Mockingbird, whereby the CIA put journalists and news personnel on its payroll in order to lie to the American people.
This is about a more recent disgrace -- how the military has been able to spread its psyops and propaganda to a more-than-willing "press".
In his controversial new book, Nick Davies argues that shadowy intelligence agencies are pumping out black propaganda to manipulate public opinion – and that the media simply swallow it wholesale
This is of course not from the United States, but from the Independent, in the UK. God knows the United States Official Military Press Corps would never report on anything like this.
I wish I could just post the entire article, but I cannot. So here's an excerpt:
For the first time in human history, there is a concerted strategy to manipulate global perception. And the mass media are operating as its compliant assistants, failing both to resist it and to expose it.
The sheer ease with which this machinery has been able to do its work reflects a creeping structural weakness which now afflicts the production of our news. I've spent the last two years researching a book about falsehood, distortion and propaganda in the global media.
The "Zarqawi letter" which made it on to the front page of The New York Times in February 2004 was one of a sequence of highly suspect documents which were said to have been written either by or to Zarqawi and which were fed into news media.
This material is being generated, in part, by intelligence agencies who continue to work without effective oversight; and also by a new and essentially benign structure of "strategic communications" which was originally designed by doves in the Pentagon and Nato who wanted to use subtle and non-violent tactics to deal with Islamist terrorism but whose efforts are poorly regulated and badly supervised with the result that some of its practitioners are breaking loose and engaging in the black arts of propaganda.
We are now victims of our own government. In so many ways.
And how many "news" stories are we fed which read, somewhere in them, "a military spokesperson said ..." or "the Pentagon reports ...."
The Pentagon has now designated "information operations" as its fifth "core competency" alongside land, sea, air and special forces. Since October 2006, every brigade, division and corps in the US military has had its own "psyop" element producing output for local media. This military activity is linked to the State Department's campaign of "public diplomacy" which includes funding radio stations and news websites. In Britain, the Directorate of Targeting and Information Operations in the Ministry of Defence works with specialists from 15 UK psyops, based at the Defence Intelligence and Security School at Chicksands in Bedfordshire.
All the way back in 2006, Donald Rumsfeld had to admit that our own propaganda was affecting the U.S..
And psyops is now such a big part of the government's operations that they're starting to farm it out to civilian corporations, I mean, those other than CNN:
Here's a great example from CNN:
No safe way for U.S. to leave Iraq, experts warn! Uh, whose experts, exactly? Why, CNN's very own:
A rapid withdrawal of all U.S. troops would hurt America's image and hand al Qaeda and other terror groups a propaganda victory that the United States is only a "paper tiger," CNN terrorism analyst Peter Bergen said.
And in light of today's FISA embarrassment, there's this:
Republicans pushed 'bogus' terror threat to expand FISA.
Nice we can depend on our Democrats to keep the checks and balances in order! Wait .... oh right. We've been betrayed by all of them, Repub and Dem alike. What country is this again? I guess the Democrats who voted to protect the corporations figured we'd have a short memory.
I suppose the real question is this: Seeing as how Operation Mockingbird was the real deal, exposed by not only the Church Commission but also Carl Bernstein in a groundbreaking article in Rolling Stone, why is anyone assuming that's ancient history and is somehow over with? Why would anyone assume, in an era when Nixon's little henchmen like Cheney and Rumsfeld finally indeed managed to take over the American government, that such programs would have been eliminated? Our experience shows that these dastardly mo-fo's only improve their techniques and consolidate their toe-holds on power.
And now this, where it seems they don't even have to pay the members of the press anymore, the press simply reports whatever the Pentagon tells them to report. Maybe they're all on the payroll now, maybe it's that insidious. Maybe it's just that all the cool kids are stenographers for the military psyops divisions. Who knows? What matters is that we're being lied to every damn day, and there's nobody to report on THAT. Except us.
Basically, this diary is about reading the article in the Guardian. It's pretty good and it's just the tip of the iceberg. Check it out.
Peace.