{"id":2362,"date":"2016-12-19T12:22:23","date_gmt":"2016-12-19T10:22:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/?p=2362"},"modified":"2016-12-19T16:49:55","modified_gmt":"2016-12-19T14:49:55","slug":"is-the-cia-editing-your-newspaper","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/2016-12-19\/is-the-cia-editing-your-newspaper\/","title":{"rendered":"Is the CIA editing your newspaper?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Here is a great overview<\/a> by Ed Jones of why corporate media are the arch-exponents of \u201cfake news\u201d. The media are overwhelming owned and controlled by billionaires and gargantuan corporations, who depend on the support of other corporations for ad revenue, and employ journalists from a narrow, privileged class whose careers depend on maintaining access to elite sources. It would be simply astounding in these circumstamces if we had anything resembling a pluralistic media.<\/p>\n

The data concerns UK outlets, but the same principles apply in the US.<\/p>\n

One section makes especially disturbing reading. It is the little-discussed matter of the intelligence services\u2019 deep penetration of most western, and in some cases non-western, media organisations. In short, US intelligence services \u2013 and to a lesser extent British ones \u2013 have for many decades fed information to sympathetic journalists in key positions inside the \u201cfree\u201d media, working with them hand in glove. Additionally, the CIA has sought to\u00a0put its own people into publications to shape directly editorial content and influence public opinion. In some cases, these people may have reached very\u00a0senior positions.<\/p>\n

Nick Davies, of the Guardian, dedicated a whole chapter of his book Flat Earth News to documenting these practices. Strangely, that chapter is rarely mentioned. Journalists who praise the book instead concentrate on his less revealing concept of \u201cchurnalism\u201d \u2013 journalism compromised by constraints of time and resources.<\/p>\n

Jones adds other sources who make\u00a0much the same point:<\/p>\n

Richard Keeble, professor of journalism at the University of Lincoln, \u2026 has written on the history of the links between journalists and the intelligence services. \u2026 He quotes Roy Greenslade, who has been a media specialist for both the Telegraph and the Guardian [and is a former editor of the Mirror newspaper], as saying: “Most tabloid newspapers \u2013 or even newspapers in general \u2013 are playthings of MI5 [Britain\u2019s FBI].”<\/p>\n

Keeble goes on to say:<\/p>\n

\u201cBloch and Fitzgerald, in their examination of covert UK warfare, report the editor of ‘one of Britain\u2019s most distinguished journals’ as believing that more than half its foreign correspondents were on the MI6 payroll<\/strong> [the British equivalent of the CIA – my emphasis]. And in 1991, Richard Norton-Taylor revealed in the Guardian that 500 prominent Britons paid by the CIA and the now defunct Bank of Commerce and Credit International, included 90 journalists.\u201d<\/p>\n

Keeble has given many more examples in his book chapter of the intelligence services infiltrating the media and changing the politics of the time, including around the miners strikes and Arthur Scargill in the 1980s and during the lead-up to the Iraq war in 2003. \u2026<\/p>\n

David Leigh, former investigations editor of The Guardian, wrote about a series of instances in which the secret services manipulated prominent journalists. He claims reporters are routinely approached and manipulated by intelligence agents and identifies three ways \u2013 providing examples for each in his article \u2013 in which they do it:<\/p>\n

\u2022 They attempt to recruit journalists to spy on other people or themselves attempt to go under journalistic \u201ccover.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2022 They allow intelligence officers to pose as journalists \u201cto write tendentious articles under false names.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2022 And \u201cthe most malicious form\u201d: they plant intelligence agency propaganda stories on willing journalists who disguise their origin from readers.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Remember that those who should be exposing\u00a0the intelligence services’ manipulation of the mainstream media are the very\u00a0same mainstream media that are already compromised. In other words, this story of systematic “fake news” planted by our intelligence services is almost impossible for the\u00a0media\u00a0to tell because it would expose a very uncomfortable\u00a0reality: that they are not, as they claim, watchdogs on power, but rather the lapdogs of the powerful.<\/p>\n

If all this still seems hard to believe, please watch this video of a senior German journalist admitting that he was recruited by the US intelligence services (h\/t Antonio Nascimento). Udo Ulfkotte covered the Middle East for the Frankfurter Allgemeine\u00a0for 12 years, and says he regularly acted as a conduit for CIA propaganda. He adds that\u00a0many of his colleagues were doing the same, willingly promoting CIA disinformation.<\/p>\n