“He who controls the narrative controls the world.”
Operation Mockingbird was a large-scale project undertaken by the CIA beginning in the late 1940’s in which they actively recruited American journalists into a propaganda network. The recruited journalists were put on the payroll of the CIA and instructed to write fake stories that promoted the views of the intelligence agency. Student cultural organizations and magazines were funded as fronts for this operation.
As stated, Operation Mockingbird was a secret project, arising during 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 take-over of major news outlets. The clear intention was to buy influence behind the scenes at main stream media outlets by putting reporters on the CIA payroll.
The CIA effort to recruit American news organizations and journalists to become spies and disseminators of propaganda was headed by Frank Wizner, Allen Dulles, Richard Helms, and Phillip Graham (publisher of the Washington Post). Wizner had taken Graham under his wing to direct the Operation Mockingbird program. Wisner, the director of the espionage and counter-intelligence branch, spearheaded the organization and was told to concentrate on “propaganda, economic warfare, preventative direct action, including sabotage, anti-sabotage, demolition and evacuation measures, subversion against hostile states, including assistance to underground resistance groups, and support of indigenous anti-Communist elements in threatened countries of the free world.” Eventually, media assets would include ABC, NBC, CBS, Time, Newsweek, AP, UPI, Reuters, Hearst Newspapers, Scripps-Howard, Copley News Service, etc. and over 400 journalists who had secretly carried out assignments according to documents on file at CIA headquarters.
The CIA/deep state had effectively infiltrated the nation’s businesses, media, and universities with tens of thousands of on-call operatives by the 1950’s.
A 1977 article in the Rolling Stone magazine, written by Carl Bernstein, was titled, “The CIA and the Media.” Bernstein said in the article that the CIA “has secretly bankrolled numerous foreign press services, periodicals, and newspapers–both English and foreign language–which provided excellent cover for CIA operatives.” These reports led to a series of congressional investigations done in the 1970’s under a committee that was set up by the U.S. Senate and named the Church Committee. The Church Committee investigations looked into government operations and potential abuses by the CIA, the NSA (National Security Agency), the FBI, and the IRS.
In examining the CIA’s past and present use of U.S. media organizations for clandestine operations, the Committee found two reasons for concern:
- the potential, inherent in covert media operations, for manipulating or incidentally misleading the American public, and
- 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.
CIA Director Allen Dulles had staffed the CIA almost exclusively with Ivy League graduates, especially from Yale with figures like George Herbert Walker Bush from the “Skull and Crossbones” secret society. Before the CIA was an actual agency, intelligence was operated under the Office of Strategic Services. In 1947, President Harry S. Truman reportedly recognized the need for a new, fully-functional post-war intelligence organization. So, on September 18, 1947, he signed the National Security Act, establishing the Central Intelligence Agency.
Many Americans still insist and persist in believing that we have a free press, while getting most of their news from state-controlled television and media outlets, under the misconception that journalists are meant to serve the people. Actually, journalists are paid employees and serve the media owners, who usually cower when challenged by advertisers or major government figures. One prominent Newsweek reporter, after acknowledging a retraction of a true story for political reasons stated in a talk called “Fooling America” that “the people who succeeded and did well were those who didn’t stand up, who didn’t write the big stories, who looked the other way when history was happening in front of them, and went along either consciously or just by cowardice with the deception of the American people.” Some things never change.
Major networks are primarily controlled by giant corporations that are obligated by law, to put the profits of their investors ahead of all other considerations which are often in conflict with the practice of responsible journalism. There were around 50 corporations a few decades ago, which was considered monopolistic by many and yet today, these companies have become larger and fewer in number as the biggest ones absorb their rivals. This concentration of ownership and power reduces the diversity of media voices, as news falls into the hands of large conglomerates with holdings in many industries that interferes in news gathering because of conflicts of interest. Operation Mockingbird was an immense financial undertaking with funds flowing from the CIA largely through the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CFF) founded by Tom Braden with Pat Buchanon of CNN’s Crossfire.
Media corporations share members of the board of directors with a variety of other large corporations including banks, investment companies, oil companies, health care, pharmaceutical, and technology companies. Until the 1980’s, media systems were generally domestically owned, regulated, and national in scope.
However, pressure from the IMF, World Bank, and U.S. government to deregulate and privatize the media, communication, and new technology resulted in a global commercial media system dominated by a small number of super-powerful transnational media corporations (mostly U.S. based), working to advance the cause of global markets and the CIA/deep state agenda.
While independent media outlets still exist (and there are a lot of them), the major outlets are almost all owned by these “Big 6” conglomerates (see image below). These six media giants control a whopping 90% of what we read, watch, or listen to. To be clear, “media” in this context does not refer just to news outlets — it refers to any medium that controls the dissemination of information.
“Media” includes 24-hour news stations, newspapers, publishing houses, Internet utilities, and even video game developers. Objectivity in journalism is an illusion created by the ruling class to give the appearance of balanced news. In actuality there is no such thing as unbiased news. We are being fed what the media oligarchs want us to eat. The same can be said of the big tech companies that own social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube. As we have seen this year, these tech overlords silence dissenters and censor content (and people) that do not fit the elite agenda.
Frank Wizner’s media manipulation program became known as “Wizner’s Wulitzer,” and proved an effective technique for sending journalists overseas to spy for the CIA. It also proved wildly successful as a tool to infiltrate and influence the main stream media for domestic propaganda purposes. Today the common terminology for such behavior is “social engineering” which is effectually a form of mind control.
After WWII, Phillip Graham, a military intelligence officer during the war, became the Washington Post’s publisher. He continued to have close contact with his fellow upper-class intelligence veterans–now making policy at the newly formed CIA–and actively promoted the CIA’s goals in his newspaper.
This incestuous relationship between the Post and the intelligence community even extended into its hiring practices. Watergate-era editor Ben Bradlee also had an intelligence background; and before he became a journalist, reporter Bob Woodward was an officer in Naval Intelligence. In the above mentioned 1977 article in Rolling Stones magazine about CIA influence in American media, Woodward’s partner, Carl Bernstein, quoted this from a CIA official: “It was widely known that Phillip Graham was somebody you could get help from.” Graham has been identified by some investigators as the main contact in Operation Mockingbird.
In her autobiography, Katherine Graham described how her husband worked overtime at the Post during the Bay of Pigs operation to protect the reputations of his friends from Yale who had organized the ill-fated venture.
After Graham allegedly committed suicide and his widow Katherine assumed the role of publisher, she continued her husband’s policies of supporting the efforts of the intelligence community in advancing the foreign policy and economic agenda of the nation’s ruling elites.
In a retrospective column written after her death, FAIR analyst Norman Solomon wrote, “Her newspaper mainly functioned as a helpmate to the war-makers in the White House, State Department, and the Pentagon. It accomplished the function (and continues to do so) using all the classic propaganda techniques of evasion, confusion, misdirection, targeted emphasis, disinformation, secrecy, omission of important facts, and selective leaks.”
So, this is an abbreviated history of the CIA’s involvement with the American media, a precursor of today’s media environment which helps us understand how today’s main stream media continues to be shrouded by an official policy of obfuscation and deception. Today the MSM almost exclusively provides cover for the deep state operations and the American people remain largely ignorant of that reality to our great detriment.
On December 29, 2012, President Barak Obama made fake news legal when he signed HR-4310, the 2013 National Defense Authorization Act. Section 1078 of the bill authorizes the use of propaganda inside the U.S., which had previously been banned since 1948 when the Smith-Mundt Act was passed. This made it legal for the deep state to pay corporate media outlets to publish news anonymously. This news was actually fake, and it was specifically propaganda curated by the government for the U.S. citizenry to consume as fact.
This news which was never real to begin with is funded by the U.S. taxpayers. President Obama made it legal to br0adcast completely fake news to the American people. This gave broadcasters the right to run with any story, even though there was no basis of truth to it. Mass media was given legal cover to do the bidding of the Obama administration without any legal ramifications.
In his September 2019 Fox News article, Jason Chaffetz, a former Utah representative and former Chairman of the U.S. House Oversight Committee describes the deep state as “a bureaucracy that allowed agencies to become weaponized in the service of political battles.” He goes on to say that in the beginning “that meant protecting President Obama by using federal power to target political opponents or by covering the tracks of the corrupt or incompetent within his administration. By the time I left Congress, the deep state’s focus had shifted to thwarting the administration of the newly elected President Donald Trump.”
Chaffetz goes on to explain the mechanisms the deep state uses to control the status quo:
“Spying is just one trick up the sleeves of politicized bureaucrats. Powerful senior staffers with authority to classify, resist disclosure, and subvert oversight have perfected other strategies to avoid transparency and accountability. The deep state manipulates congressional investigations by pretending to cooperate with document subpoenas. Those who are part of the deep state bury congressional committees in piles of paper ostensibly responsive to the investigation, and then brag to the media about the number of pages they have turned over. In reality, many of those pages will either be fully redacted, duplicates of other pages, or irrelevant to the investigation. Misleading the public about the nature of documents sought either by Congress or through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests is another art the deep state has perfected. Agencies employ lawyers specifically to find reasons to withhold documents.”
Awareness is the key to navigating the media mine field that exists in today’s culture. If we wish to remain a free society, we must allow the past to inform the present so that we will have insight, discernment, and wisdom for how to act and react to future challenges. In other words, we can not simply be thoughtless “consumers” of the main stream media propaganda, without understanding and evaluating truth for ourselves.
The more concerned citizens like you and I participate in our local governments, take part in the conversation, uncover and report the truth, and challenge possible fake news, the more aware the general public will be and the fewer opportunities the deep state actors will have to influence elected officials, sway policies and quietly push their agenda.