David Corn,
writing for The Nation, covered the breaking "bought journalist" scandal : "....then Williams violated a PR rule: he got off-point. "This happens all the time," he told me. "There are others." Really? I said. Other conservative commentators accept money from the Bush administration? I asked Williams for names. "I'm not going to defend myself that way," he said. The issue right now, he explained, was his own mistake. Well, I said, what if I call you up in a few weeks, after this blows over, and then ask you? No, he said.....Does Williams really know something about other rightwing pundits?"
Corn neglects, however, to mention a bit of very relevant background material ( more inside ).
It has long been assumed that
The Noise Machine is fundamentally corrupt and so this sort of palm-greasing so gleefully expressed in Corn's ( tongue in cheek) "who woulda thunk it?" attitude is newsworthy for the simple fact that it makes incontrovertible what most on the left had long assumed about Fox news and all the other keys in the far-right's off key but deafening Wurlitzer blasts.
What I find curious, though, it that Corn fails to mention the decades-long history ( both alleged and proven ) of US government influence and control over the 4th Estate that has been exerted by putting journalists on secret payrolls, by way of blackmail and other "dirty tricks" (that's for the most part unprovable though), and by way of a host of other mechanisms such and tactics*
MOCKINGBIRD is an appropriate relative starting point for a quick history in the corruption of the media ( further corruption, that is. It's all relative of course - see The First Casualty" )
Excerpted from the Disinfopedia entry on "Operation Mockingbird"
"In an October 1977, article published by Rolling Stone magazine, Carl Bernstein reported that more than 400 American journalists worked for the CIA. Bernstein went on to reveal that this cozy arrangement had covered the preceding 25 years. Sources told Bernstein that the New York Times, America's most respected newspaper at the time, was one of the CIA's closest media collaborators. Seeking to spread the blame, the New York Times published an article in December 1977, revealing that 'more than eight hundred news and public information organisations and individuals,' had participated in the CIA's covert subversion of the media.
"As these stories hit the news, Senate investigators began to probe the CIA sponsored manipulation of the media - the 'Fourth Estate' that supposedly was dedicated to acting as a check and balance on the excesses of the executive. This investigation was, however, curtailed at the insistence of Central Intelligence Agency Directors, William Colby and George H.W. Bush - who would later be elected US President. The information gathered by the Senate Select Intelligence Committee chaired by Senator Frank Church, was 'deliberately buried' Bernstein reported.
"Slowly, the role of Mockingbird in muzzling and manipulating the press began to be revealed. In 1974, two former CIA agents, Victor Marchetti and John D. Marks, published a sensational book entitled 'The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence.' The book caused uproar for the many revelations it contained."
From "Myth of Liberal Media", posted at Democratic Underground (includes citation links), Democracy Unbound (scroll down), and at http://web.archive.org/web/20011217025849/www.geocities.com/alanjpakula/triplecrown.html (access via the Wayback Machine): "After this embarrassment, it was necessary for the Right to use its own private network to replace Mockingbird. As a result, there is now the Cato Institute, with Media Mogul Rupert Murdoch (Fox, NY Post, TV Guide) on the Board with ATT/TCI's Malone [10] . Another big contributor to Cato is Viacom, which recently acquired CBS. Consequently, CBS/Viacom is now headed by Sumner M. Redstone, who is yet another powerful right wing figure with a WWII intelligence background [11] and apparent ties to OSS/CIA figures [12] . Cato serves the purpose of infusing the Media with Right Wing Propaganda, along with such organizations as Accuracy in Media (AIM), the Independent Women's Forum, the Western Journalism Center and -- of course -- the Heritage Foundation (See Main Page for Details).
"The difference between the days of Operation Mockingbird and the present situation is that, instead of actually placing network executives, publishers, editors, reporters and pundits on the CIA payroll, their contemporary counterparts are now members of the Right Wing Think Tanks ( see footnote ). In addition to Cato's Murdoch, some high profile examples are MSNBC's Laura Ingraham (a notorious 'Scaifette' from the Independent Women's Forum [13] ) and ABC's John Stossel [14] . CNN's Kate O'Beirne is a Heritage fellow (and previous VP) who is a regular columnist for the National Review. Also, old Bonesman/CIA hand William F. Buckley, Jr. is the Editor of the arch-conservative Review. The National Review's President and Chairman is none other than Thomas Rhodes, who was recently a Heritage Board member. Other right wing journals financed by these sugar-daddies (and mommies) include the American Spectator, Human Events and Murdoch's Weekly Standard."
From Glen Yeadon's "From the streets of Little Beirut".
"CIA censorship and media-propagandizing was supposed to have stopped in the mid-1970s after the Church Committee investigated the CIA's Project Mockingbird. At the time, every major media outlet was infected with Mockingbird. Coexisting with Project Mockingbird was a FBI operation named COINTELPRO. COINTELPRO was successful in destroying not only leftist groups but also more importantly the press of the left. Ramparts Magazine was a major target eliminated by COINTELPRO. In one short decade, the alternative press had been wiped out."
.......... end Disinfopedia excerpt ............
But the US alternative media is also, the following lengthy article alleges, subject to such covert manipulation and influence :
"The mass-circulation weekly TEMPO accused Ford of having once played, at the urging of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, a covert role in Indonesian political affairs by consciously supporting the work of individuals who were deemed to be sympathetic to the anti-communist aims of American foreign policy.
-- Chronicle of Philanthropy, 12/13/01
The Ford Foundation's history of collaboration and interlock with the CIA in pursuit of U.S. world hegemony is now a well-documented fact...The Ford Foundation has in some ways refined their style of collaboration with Washington's attempt to produce world cultural domination, but retained the substance of that policy...The ties between the top officials of the Ford Foundation and the U.S. government are explicit and continuing.
--James Petras in "The Ford Foundation and the CIA: A documented case of philanthropic collaboration with the Secret Police" on 12/15/2001"
ALTERNATIVE MEDIA CENSORSHIP: SPONSORED BY CIA's FORD FOUNDATION? - By Bob Feldman
In fact, Feldman's exhaustively detailed account ( I cannot vouch for the veracity of the story though - the fact checking would be overwhelming, so take it with a bit of healthy skepticism ) contains sections detailing the financial ties of most of the prominent alternative media to establishment institutions that are both CIA associated and not. Corn's venue, The Nation, is caught in a dense web of interesting financial ties - as Feldman reports.
Back to mainstream media : in their fine and damning account, "The Record of The Paper" ( see footnote ) and prior to the US invasion of Iraq, the mainstream media's discounting of the size of antiwar protests as well as it's widespread mischaracterization of the character of those protests - in denial of the wide cultural demographic range of protestors that ranged far beyond the derogatory "60's serial protestor" stereotype - was especially telling. "...It was not as large as the organizers of the protest had predicted. They had said there would be 100,000 people here. I'd say there are fewer than 10,000" reported NPR's Nancy Marshall on the first of several large Washington D.C. anti-war protests. NPR later admitted the size of that protest to be 10-20 times the size of Marshall's estimate.
This sort of behavior is now quite normal, and the job of keeping up with the now routine mainstream media inaccuracy, distortion, selective omission ( Newsweek's Michael Isikoff, fulminating against Michael Moore's F-9-11 ) , mischaracterization, and outright lies ( not to mention ex-post facto deletions and censorship - "Nightline's" curiously 'disappeared' May 6, 2004 show segment ) --would be a momumental one.
Here's a particularly ugly an egregious example of de-facto media censorship :
The US ( and UK but for the Economist ) media recently did a belly-up job of failing to report on a new Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health study indicating probably 100,000 or more Iraqi dead since the US/coalition invasion of Iraq in early 2003* This massive failure in coverage quite conveniently synced up with a new Pentagon approach towards civilian casualties that was covered in a report by the Project on Defense Alternatives and reported on, early 2004, by the Boston Globe : "....in promoting it's "New [sanitized] Warfare" concept, the Pentagon has refused to release it's estimates of civilian casualties and sought to "sink the whole issue of war casualties in an impenetrable murk of skepticism""
Also relevant : "The Bias of Balance" ( a case study into how mainstream media's fetish for 'balance' has given wildly unwarranted strength to "skeptics" of Global Warming ) -
Here's how this dynamic plays out in the political arena ( right-leaning Metafilter members may be able to provide analogous examples which apply to the Kerry campaign ).
How the "Bias of Balance" works :
- John Kerry says "The moon is made out of rock" (or whatever it's made from) - a factually accurate, verifiable statement.
- George W. Bush says "The moon is made out of green cheese!".
- The media slavishly airs the two statements, side by side, without stopping to comment on the fact that Bush's statement is demonstrably untrue and amounts to a delusion, a fantasy, or a lie.
- 55% of Americans come to believe that the moon is made out of green cheese.
*Power exerted via the FCC and over mergers and acquisitions, "soft power" wielded by the granting or denial of media access to government sources, and so on.
*The Iraqi casualty count certainly has risen 10,000s of thousands since the Hopkins/Bloomberg School study was conducted - and especially from the Grozny-ification of Fallujah that was the 2nd US invasion and occupation of that city.
* "The Record of the Paper" - "In this meticulously researched study, Howard Friel and Richard Falk reveal how the Times has consistently misreported major US foreign policy issues, including the bombing of North Vietnam in response to the Tonkin Gulf and Pleiku incidents in 1964-65, the Reagan administration's policy toward the Sandinista government of Nicaragua in the 1980s, the 2002 military coup that briefly overthrew Hugo Chavez, Venezuela's elected president, and the Bush administration's 2003 invasion of Iraq. "