Sensationalism and false reporting is just the tip of the iceberg for the American press. The American press has long been the loyal servant of corporate giants, acting more as a humongous advertising agency and policy spokesperson than as an independent investigator of current events. David Rockefeller, founder of the Trilateral Commission, in an address to a meeting of The Trilateral Commission, in June, 1991, blatantly told the audience, "We are grateful to the Washington Post, The New York Times, Time Magazine and other great publications, whose directors have attended our meetings and respected their promises of discretion for almost forty years. It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subjected to the bright lights of publicity during those years. But, the work is now much more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world government. The supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national auto-determination practiced in past centuries."
John Swinton, the former Chief of Staff for the New York Times, was one of New York's best loved newspapermen. Called by his peers "The Dean of his Profession", John was asked in 1953 to give a toast before the New York Press Club, and in so doing, made a monumentally important and revealing statement. He is quoted as follows:
"There is no such thing, at this date of the world's history, in America, as an independent press. You know it and I know it. There is not one of you who dares to write your honest opinions, and if you did, you know beforehand that it would never appear in print. I am paid weekly for keeping my honest opinion out of the paper I am connected with. Others of you are paid similar weekly salaries for similar things, and any of you who would be so foolish as to write honest opinions would be out on the streets looking for another job. If I allowed my honest opinions to appear in one issue of my paper, before twenty-four hours my occupation would be gone. The business of the journalists is to destroy the truth; to lie outright; to pervert; to vilify; to fawn at the feet of mammon, and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread. You know it and I know it, and what folly is this toasting an independent press? We are the tools and vassals of rich men behind the scenes. We are the jumping jacks, they pull the strings and we dance. Our talents, our possibilities, and our lives are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes."
But wait, there’s still more.
Ever hear of Operation Mockingbird? Operation Mockingbird is a Central Intelligence Agency operation to influence domestic and foreign media. In 1948 Frank Wisner was appointed director of the Office of Special Projects. Soon afterwards it was renamed the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC). This became the espionage and counter-intelligence branch of the Central Intelligence Agency. Wisner was told to create an organization that concentrated on "propaganda, economic warfare; preventive 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."
Later that year Wisner established Mockingbird, a program to influence the domestic American media. Wisner recruited Philip Graham (Washington Post) to run the project within the industry. Graham himself recruited others who had worked for military intelligence during the war. By the early 1950s, Wisner 'owned' respected members of the New York Times, Newsweek, CBS and other communications vehicles.
One of the most important journalists under the control of Operation Mockingbird was Joseph Alsop, whose articles appeared in over 300 different newspapers. Other journalists willing to promote the views of the CIA included many of the leading journalists of the day. The CIA also provided them with classified information to help them with their work.
It is clear that by the early 60s, most American media had become nothing more than a CIA/big business soundboard. The American public was being fed more and more propaganda meant to steer them in a particular direction rather than providing them with the information they need to make up their own minds. While repeating over and over that we have an inherent free press because it is in the Constitution, the media actually performed their work under the most stringent and biased rules imaginable. For example, the US public was told that we were fired upon in international waters at the Gulf of Tonkin, Vietnam, in 1964. Well, Toeg fans, I can assure you that it was a lie, a lie started by the Democrat President Lyndon Johnson and spoon-fed to the American public ad nauseum by the supposedly free press.
While working at a pharmaceutical company in Southern California, I came across a coworker thirteen years my senior. One day we began discussing the Vietnam War and his participation in it and he asked me point blank, “Ever hear of the Gulf of Tonkin.”
“Of course,” I replied, “It’s what started the Vietnam War.”
He then proceeded to tell me what happened in reality during those fateful days in early August, 1964. He was a young sailor on the destroyer USS Maddox, whose top officer was always a captain. In late July, 1964, they replaced the captain with a Commander, Lieutenant Commander Dempster M. Jackson. He told me that at the same time, tons of secret intelligence gathering material were placed on board. Then, on August 2 they approached the harbor at the Gulf of Tonkin and in my friend’s words, “Just after sunset we started making a mad dash to the harbor from several miles out. It was like we were going to attack them. Then, at the last minute, we would pull a 180 and head back out to sea. Well, after a few hours of this maneuver, they did fire one shot over our bow. Sorta like a warning shot. Other than that, nothing much happened that night.”
However, the story that the media reported back to the American public was far different. We were told that the US Maddox was not attacked once, but twice, that three North Vietnamese torpedo boats attacked it in international waters. Democrat President Lyndon Johnson immediately called for retaliation, and the press had a frenzy that could only be described as sharks feeding in a community pool filled with old people. Ten years later, over 55,000 American soldiers lay dead, and over 2 million Vietnamese are killed. In the end, Ho Chi Minh finally achieves that which he first pleaded for from the French in 1919 at the Treaty of Versailles, Vietnam was a free and united country.
We have seen how since the 1950s, the US media has kept the truth from the American public as well as Joseph Goebbels at his height during the Third Reich. We have seen how since the onset of Operation Mockingbird, the CIA has ensured that Americans hear only those stories our government wishes for them to hear. We have seen how since Pulitzer and Hearst, sensationalism can rally a nation to war, even under the most falsified of pretenses.
And here’s the kicker.
In 1983, 50 corporations controlled the vast majority of all news media in the U.S. At the time, Ben Bagdikian was called "alarmist" for pointing this out in his book, The Media Monopoly. In his 4th edition, published in 1992, he wrote "in the U.S., fewer than two dozen of these extraordinary creatures own and operate 90% of the mass media" -- controlling almost all of America's newspapers, magazines, TV and radio stations, books, records, movies, videos, wire services and photo agencies. He predicted then that eventually this number would fall to about half a dozen companies. This was greeted with skepticism at the time. When the 6th edition of The Media Monopoly was published in 2000, the number had fallen to six. Since then, there have been more mergers and the scope has expanded to include new media like the Internet market. More than 1 in 4 Internet users in the U.S. now log in with AOL Time-Warner, the world's largest media corporation.
In 2004, Bagdikian's revised and expanded book, The New Media Monopoly, shows that only 5 huge corporations -- Time Warner, Disney, Murdoch's News Corporation, Bertelsmann of Germany, and Viacom (formerly CBS) -- now control most of the media industry in the U.S. General Electric's NBC is a close sixth.
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