Is it any wonder, MSM sucks? The C.LA.'s 3‐Decade Effort To Mold the World's Views

[kestrel9]

I'm sure it's better today /s

http://archive.is/wjFaL
NYT 1977

"The C.I.A. has refused every appeal for details of its secret relationship with American and foreign journalists and the news‐gathering organizations that employed them, even though most have been brought to an end.
One C.I.A. official, explaining that such relationships were entered into with promises of “eternal confidentiality,” said that the agency would continue to refuse to discuss them “in perpetuity.”

But in interviews with scores of present and former intelligence officers, journalists and others, the scope and substance of those relationships became clearer. Among the principal features that emerged were the following:

The C.I.A. has at various times owned or subsidized more than 50 newspapers, news services, radio stations, periodicals and other communications entities, sometimes in this country but mostly overseas, that were used as vehicles for its extensive propaganda efforts, as “cover” for its operatives or both. Another dozen foreign‐based news organizations, while not financed by the C.I.A., were infiltrated by paid C.I.A. agents.

'Nearly a dozen American publishing houses, including some of the most prominent names in the industry, have printed at least a score of the more than 250 English‐language books financed or produced by the C.I.A. since the early 1950's, in many cases without being aware of the agency's involvement.

Since the closing days of World War II, more than 30 and perhaps as many as 100 American journalists employed by a score of American news organizations have worked as salaried intelligence operatives while performing their reportorial duties. A few others were employed by the American military and, according to intelligence sources, by some foreign services, including the K.G.B., the Soviet intelligence agency. 

Over the years at least 18 American reporters have refused C.I.A. offers, in some cases lucrative ones, to undertake clandestine intelligence assignments. Another dozen employees of American newspapers, wire services and news magazines, though never paid, were considered by the agency to be valued sources of information or assistance.

In the last 30 years, at least a dozen full‐time C.I.A. officers have worked abroad as reporters or noneditorial employees of American‐owned news organizations, in some cases with the approval of the organizations whose credentials they carried.

According to a number of former C.I.A officials, the agency's broad campaign of propaganda was carried out with the awareness that the bogus news stories it planted might be treated as genuine by the American media, which they sometimes were.

The agency's legislative charter has been interpreted as prohibiting the propagandizing of Americans, but it says nothing about the propriety of the domestic effect, inadvertent or intentional, of propaganda disseminated overseas.

Lyman B. Kirkpatrick, for many years the C.I.A.'s Inspector General, said he could not recall any agency employee's ever having raised questions about the ethics or legality of its endeavors in mass communications. 

Lawrence R. Houston, its retired general counsel, said it had always been his understanding that the C.I.A. was forbidden by law to employ American journalists, although he said no one had ever consulted him on that matter.

The C.I.A.'s efforts to mold foreign opinion ranged from tampering with his- torical documents, as it did with the 1956 denunciation of Stalin by the late Nikita S. Khrushchev; to embellishing and distorting accounts that were otherwise factual, such as the provision of detailed quotes from a Russian defector; to outright fabrication, as with a report that Chinese troops were being sent to aid Vietnamese Communists.

According to former C.I.A. officials, the agency has long had an “early warning network” within the United States Government that advises diplomats and other key officials to ignore news stories that have been planted by the agency overseas. The network, they said, has worked well, with only occasional failures.

But there is no such mechanism for alerting newspapers, magazines and broadcasting stations in this country as to which of the foreign dispatches that come chattering across their teletypes are distorted or, in a few instances, altogether false. There is, the former officials say, simply no practical way of letting Americans know that some of the stories they read over their morning coffee were written not by a foreign correspondent but by a C.I.A. officer in a corner of some American embassy.

Domestic ‘Replay’ of Items Was Considered Inevitable

The C.I.A. accepts, as an unavoidable casualty of its propaganda battles, the fact that some of the news that reaches American readers and viewers is tainted with what the Russians call “disinformation.” The agency has even coined terms to describe the phenomenon; blowback, or replay, or domestic fallout.

“The particularly dangerous thing” about bogus information, a former senior agency official said recently, “is the blowback potential. It's a real one and we recognize that.”

A 1967 C.1.A directive stated simply that “fallout in the United States from a foreign publication which we support is inevitable and consequently permissible.” Or as one succinct former C.I.A. man put it, “It hits where it hits.” 

The agency's favorite medium for launching what it terms “black,” or unattributed, propaganda has always been the foreign‐based media in which it has had a secret financial interest, or the reporters and editors overseas who were among its paid agents. At one time, according to agency sources, there were as many as 800 such “propaganda assets,” mostly foreign journalists. Asked in an interview last year whether the C.I.A. had ever told such agents what to write, William E. Colby, the former C.I.A. Director, replied, “Oh, sure, all the time.”

Most often, former officials have said, the C.I.A.'s propaganda consisted of factual accounts that the agency felt were not being widely reported, or of essentially accurate accounts with some distortions or embellishments. But one authoritative former official said that “there were outright fabrications, too.” ...(more http://archive.is/wjFaL)

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I guess when we hear a lot of stink over foreign governments targeting journalists we should think twice about the role that some journalists may play within the agendas of various intelligence agencies. (Surely it's not just ours that utilize media and journalism for clandestine purposes /s).