We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Friday, January 2, 2015

Murdoch, Scaife and CIA Propaganda

Click here to access article by Robert Parry from ConsortiumNews

I, and many others (for a recent example, see this), have noticed and commented on the appearance of a very controlled and coordinated media that spews out the same Empire propaganda on every media outlet here in the US. I've wondered for a long time how this could have been organized and details about its organization. Now thanks to people like Parry, FBI whistleblower extraordinaire Sibel Edmonds, and others, this conspiracy by leading members of the ruling capitalist class is rapidly coming into focus.

Of course, I was keenly aware that the media under ownership and sponsorship of major corporations have always to a more limited extent provided biased coverage, however this trend of propaganda skewed coverage increased during the Vietnam War, and accelerated most dramatically since 9/11. What I now see today are symptoms which suggest that major media are under tightly organized and centralized control, something like what Orwell described as the "Ministry of Truth" in Nineteen Eighty-Four. 

So, the question remains as to how major media is so well managed and coordinated to produce such monolithic propaganda. I read in Sibel Edmond's recently published outstanding book of political fiction (if you don't how political fiction can serve the truth, click on this link!) entitled The Lone Gladio, in which she has CIA personnel located in every major media outlet. This makes complete sense to me because there have been many reports in the past of journalists paid by the CIA in such books as The Mighty Wurlitzer by Hugh Wilford. On pages 226-227 he writes:
Estimates of the number f U.S. reporters who carried out secret assignments for the CIA vary: in 1973, the Agency itself conceded,in the face of questioning from newspaper publishers, a figure of "some three dozen"; a congressional inquiry conducted in 1976 concluded that the total was more like fifty; a year later, Carl Bernstein calculated that as many as four hundred American journalist had worked for the CIA sin 1952.
Now Parry brings us up-to-date on this subject in this article with his survey of recently released FOIA documents related to this subject. His findings brings the truth into much sharper focus. These documents clearly show that...
...right-wing media executives Rupert Murdoch and Richard Mellon Scaife [were brought] into a CIA-organized “perception management” operation which aimed Cold War-style propaganda at the American people in the 1980s, according to declassified U.S. government records.

.... A driving force behind creation of Reagan’s extraordinary propaganda bureaucracy was CIA Director William Casey who dispatched one of the CIA’s top covert action specialists, Walter Raymond Jr., to the National Security Council to oversee the project. According to the documents, Murdoch was brought into the operation in 1983....
Now, it appears that CIA personnel sit at the highest levels of management in media corporations to insure that the organizations report the news "correctly".