Media Manipulation:
The Fall of a Free Press
“Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation
must begin by subduing the freeness of speech.”
-- Benjamin Franklin
That was then and this is now.
-- Aldous Huxley, 1946
A Journey into Semi-enlightenment
If I can control what you see and hear, then I can control how you think, I can control what you believe, I can control how you behave. Give me control of those informational building blocks that make up your reality, and I can lead you as a parent leads a child.
Upon reflection, most people would agree with the above statement. They would not agree however, that it’s being done to them. The idea that their reality has been skewed, that they don’t know how the world really works, or who’s in control is beyond their comprehension. After all, there’s so much “news” available that they don’t have time for it all. They believe that anything of real importance will be brought to their attention. They believe that the team at “60 Minutes” is on the job, eager to bring them the unvarnished truth. They are wrong.
The product delivered to us by the mainstream media very often bears little resemblance to the real world. Even the language used to deliver that product can be misleading.
For example, as we all know, NAFTA, GATT, and the WTO involve free trade, and free trade is good. Of course we know that. The advantages of these programs are spelled out to us in the media on a regular basis. The only problem is -- it’s not true. NAFTA, GATT, and the WTO do not involve free trade; they involve managed trade (Note 1). You’re not supposed to think or use the word “managed” because then you might ask the obvious questions. Managed by whom, for whom? The people who sit around the negotiating tables—do they represent their governments or their people; or do they have corporate masters? Is trade all about economics, or is there a social and/or political agenda? Is trade being managed for the benefit of the people, or the workers, or the multi-national corporations who can make hundreds of millions of dollars based on the addition or deletion of a single paragraph in an agreement? Or is the answer (d), all of the above? Who knows? As long as they use the word “free” we don’t have to think about it. Like “liberty” or “democracy” the word “free” has a powerful positive connotation that tends to shut down our ability to think critically. That’s why it has never dawned on you – FREE trade does not require a treaty.
Let’s look at another example of how language is used to control the way you think. What is a peacekeeper? A peacekeeper is a soldier who wears a blue helmet and/or arm band, works for the United Nations or some other supranational body, defends women and children, maintains the peace, and is an all around good guy. You probably thought something like that automatically, because that’s what you were programmed to think. In fact a peacekeeper is a man with a gun who will beat you or kill you if you don’t do what he tells you to do. What he tells you to do may or may not be good, morale, ethical, or legal. In fact, scores of “Peacekeepers” have been charged with theft, rape, torture, and murder. Hundreds of millions of people around the world feel very strongly that the military operations carried out by peacekeepers have been wrong, unjust, and illegal for a variety of reasons.
Imagine if our soldiers went off to fight soldiers who were called Peacekeepers. Peace is good; therefore peacekeeping is good; therefore peacekeepers are good; therefore whatever the peacekeepers do to keep the peace must be good. So how could anyone fight a peacekeeper and be in the right? Do you see how words can be used to control your thinking?
Am I being critical of the young men and women who carry the guns, fire the missiles or drop the bombs? For the most part, no. I used to be one of them. I understand the training and the system that they are a part of. I was a paratrooper and a Ranger, and was decorated on numerous occasions for conducting state-sanctioned murder. In fact, there was a time when I probably would have killed just about anything and anyone I was told to kill. That was before I began to understand who really gives the orders, why they’re being given, and how I was being manipulated by information that was designed for that purpose.
It was only after I left the military that I began to see beyond the world as it is portrayed by TV’s talking heads. I had been interested in investments and the financial markets for most of my life. When I became a stockbroker I was very fortunate that my office had one group of brokers involved in fundamental analysis, and another that did technical analysis. I joined them both. Although we spent a great deal of time analyzing individual companies and their stocks, I found that I was more interested in the macro economic forces that moved world markets; not just in equities, but in currencies, interest rates, and commodities.
The more I studied, the more I found things that weren’t right; that they didn’t make sense. In some cases I was being asked to believe in a free lunch, or that 2+2 = 3; while in others the story was that the most brilliant financiers on earth were in fact incompetent fools who lost billions of taxpayer dollars because they were trying to “help” the less fortunate. They were just “good guys”, who had made an honest mistake (150 times). I had entered a world where business and political interests collided to create a shifting and illusionary landscape. A macro economic Twilight Zone, where it was difficult to identify the real players, even with a scorecard. In fact, the scorecards themselves were often falsified so as to hide the identity of the real players. And the real agenda was never openly discussed in the mainstream media.
“Economic hit men (EHM) are highly paid professionals who cheat countries around the globe out of trillions of dollars. They funnel money from the World Bank, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and other foreign “aid” organizations into the coffers of huge corporations and the pockets of a few wealthy families who control the planet’s natural resources. Their tools include fraudulent financial reports, rigged elections, payoffs, extortion, sex, and murder. They play a game as old as empire, but one that has taken on new and terrifying dimensions during this time of globalization.
I should know; I was an EHM.”
-- John Perkins (xi)
My investigation led to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank, Export-Import Bank, the Federal Reserve, and other central banks, where financial power was leveraged into political power, and then back into even greater financial power. The level of Machiavellian political and financial corruption in these organizations is mind-boggling. I discovered that stock, commodity and currency markets were being rigged, quasi- governmental bodies were laundering taxpayer money through countries and into multi-national corporations and banks that they controlled, and that taxpayer money was being used to initially bribe and eventually extort foreign governments into re-writing their laws so as to allow foreign domination of their economies and eventually their countries. From there it was only one step into the shadow government that stands between business and government, and that most people don’t even know exists. Trying to put all of this information together in a meaningful way was like trying to put together a jigsaw puzzle that had been dropped from an airplane. First you have to find the pieces, and then you have to put them together without the benefit of a picture to go by.
It didn’t take long to realize that in some cases information was being withheld, while in others false information was being promulgated. I turned my attention to the media to find out why the stories I was uncovering on a weekly basis were not making it to the general public. In some cases, sanitized versions of the stories ended up on page 12 of the Washington Post or the New York Times, and were never seen again. In other cases the stories were blacked out, and never appeared in the mainstream media at all.
One of the first statements I encountered on the media’s role in all of this was made by a former Chief of Staff of the New York Times, John Swinton. Mr. Swinton was one of the most eminent newspapermen of his day. At a New York Press Club dinner he was asked to make a toast to an independent press. This is what he said:
“There is no such thing, at this date of the world's history, 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 opinions out of the paper I am connected with. Others of you are paid similar 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 journalist is to destroy the truth; to lie outright; to pervert; to vilify; to fawn at the feet of mammon, and to sell the country 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 the 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.”
-- Staff, Media Bypass, “Taking Wealth by the Horns”
When I first read that I thought that perhaps Mr. Swinton had been having a bad night. Things couldn’t be as bad as he was leading us to believe. I have since come to realize that the above statement can be taken literally.
“You are part of the most conditioned, programmed culture the world has ever known. Not only are your thoughts and attitudes continually being shaped and molded, but your very awareness of the whole design seems like it is being subtly and inexorably erased.The doors of your perception are carefully and precisely regulated.”
-- Dr. Joseph Mercola, 2007
The Muckrakers
"Media power is political power. There is a dangerous change in the philosophy of the airwaves to permit the growth of corporations and the deregulation of the government to the point of decimating the consumer."
Prof. Ben Bagdikian, "The Media Monopoly"
"The sad truth is that the closer a story gets to corporate power and corporate domination of our society, the less reliable the corporate news media are."
Prof. Robert McChesney, "Rich Media, Poor Democracy"
If you’re going to investigate the takeover of the American media, the easiest place to start is with the muckrakers. The term “muckraker” was used to describe a group of investigative and political reformist magazines, which gained influence in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They became famous in American history by exposing the abuses made possible by monopolies and trusts, and the systematic bribery of government by bankers and industrialists. These magazines included some of the most prestigious in the country, such as Harpers, Scribners, Century, and a dozen others.
The power of the muckraker magazines became so great that they began to influence elections at the local, state, and national level. The American people demanded legislation to protect themselves from the abuses of big business. J.P. Morgan ended up in front of a congressional committee (Cujo Committee) in
“That was too much, and in a series of abrupt acts J.P. Morgan and the Rockefeller interests simply bought controlling interest in the magazines- Harpers, Scribners, Century, and a number of others- installed their own managers, and announced that the public was tired of reading exposes of banks and business. It ended an era of American journalism and national politics.” -- Ben Bagdikian (p. 211)
The words of Congressman Oscar Callaway, taken from the
“In March, 1915, the J.P. Morgan interests, the steel, shipbuilding, and powder interests, and their subsidiary organizations, got together 12 men high up in the newspaper world and employed them to select the most influential newspapers in the United States and sufficient number of them to control generally the policy of the daily press of the United States. These 12 men worked the problem out by selecting 179 newspapers, and then began, by an elimination process, to retain only those necessary for the purpose of controlling the general policy of the daily press throughout the country. They found it was only necessary to purchase the control of 25 of the greatest papers. The 25 papers were agreed upon; emissaries were sent to purchase the policy, national and international, of these papers; an agreement was reached; the policy of the papers was bought, to be paid for by the month; an editor was furnished for each paper to properly supervise and edit information regarding the questions of preparedness, militarism, financial policies, and other things of national and international nature considered vital to the interests of the purchasers…This policy also included the suppression of everything in opposition to the wishes of the interests served.”
-- James Perloff (p.178) and -- G. Edward Griffen (p. 244)
In 1922 Theodore Roosevelt, a man who was famous for his straight talk, described the situation this way, “These international bankers and Rockefeller – Standard Oil interests control the majority of newspapers and the columns of these papers to club into submission or to drive out of public office officials who refuse to do the bidding of the powerful corrupt cliques which compose the invisible government.”
The problems encountered by the financial elite with the American people’s influence over government (otherwise known as democracy) did not occur overnight. Nor did their solution of taking direct and indirect control of the media so as to shape public opinion. The following paragraphs clearly demonstrate that
During hearings held by the Senate Privileges and Elections Committee in 1912, it was revealed that Congressman Joseph Sibley from
“An efficient literary bureau is needed, not for a day or a crisis but a permanent healthy control of the Associated Press and kindred avenues. It will cost money, but will be the cheapest in the end.”
-- Ferdinand Lundberg (p.249)
“Charles S. Mellen of the New Haven Railroad testified before Congress that his Morgan-owned railroad had more than one-thousand
-- G. Edward Griffin (p. 244)
All processes tend to be perfected over time. The process of controlling the American people by controlling their primary sources of information is no different. The following was written in 1937 by author Ferdinand Lundberg (p. 245):
“So far as can be learned, the Rockefellers have given up their old policy of owning newspapers and magazines outright, relying now upon the publications of all camps to serve their best interests in return for the vast volume of petroleum and allied advertising under Rockefeller control. After the J.P. Morgan bloc, the Rockefellers have the most advertising of any group to dispose of. And when advertising alone is not sufficient to insure the fealty of a newspaper, the Rockefeller companies have been known to make direct payments in return for a friendly editorial attitude.”
On the topic of advertising as a means of media control, Mr. Lundberg (p. 244) has this to say about J.P. Morgan:
“More advertising is controlled by the J.P. Morgan junta than by any single financial group, a factor which immediately gives the banking house the respectful attention of all alert independent publishers.”
The “stick and carrot” use of advertising dollars to control content is now a fine art. Many knowledgeable people consider it to be the primary source of media control, although that’s certainly debatable, as you shall see when we discuss corporate control. The book Conspiracy Against Freedom (Willis A. Carto, ed. 1986, Liberty lobby, Inc., Washington D.C.) documents the deliberate destruction of a syndicated radio program through the power of advertising.
Due to mergers and globalization, there are now two huge umbrella advertising groups in the
“The history of Interpublic began 50 years before its incorporation in 1961. In 1911 the U.S. Supreme Court dismantled the Rockefeller Standard Oil Trust and divided it into 37 different companies. The largest of these was Standard Oil of New Jersey (now Exxon). Harrison McCann, who had been advertising manager at the Rockefeller Trust for a number of years, opened up his own ad agency and took on Jersey Standard as his first client.”
-- Answer.com
These two companies have absorbed hundreds of subsidiaries and effectively silenced the competition to their political, social, and economic biases.
As the decades rolled by, the financial elite (elite is the word they most often use to describe themselves) that created the Business Roundtable, Council on Foreign Relations, Tri-Lateral Commission, Bilderbergers, and the Federal Reserve, also spun a web of control over the nation’s supply of information. Utilizing a combination of advertising extortion and boardroom financial control, they create their version of reality, and then put it out for mass consumption.
“These men, the ‘elite’, the ‘ruling class’, the ‘Establishment’, the ‘Insiders’, or whatever you want to call them, have learned to influence the thinking of most citizens through their control of communications and education. By such means they have shaped national and international policy”.
-- Fr. James Thornton, “Faith, Family, Freedom”, (p.36)
If you really wanted to know how bad the situation was, what better person to ask than a President of the
“Since I have entered politics, I have chiefly had men’s views confided to me privately. Some of the biggest men in the
"The corporate grip on opinion in the United States is one of the wonders of the Western world. No first world country has ever managed to eliminate so entirely from its media all objectivity -- much less dissent."
-- Gore Vidal. 1991
The average person has trouble believing that a relatively small group of families and the organizations that they have created could exercise so much control over such a seemingly diverse, trillion-dollar industry. With that in mind, let’s cover a few points that might help to bring this into perspective.
1. The power of men like Morgan and Rockefeller to do such things appears to have been forgotten along with most of American history. Bill Gates is now the richest man in
John Moody, author of many standard reference works on American finance, stated in McClure’s Magazine, Aug., 1911, “The Seven Men”,
“Seven men in Wall Street now control a great share of the fundamental industry and resources of the
-- Eustice Mullins (p. 101)
2. There is a misconception that the people who control corporations are their Presidents and CEO’s. The truth is that many Presidents and CEO’s serve at the pleasure of the Board of Directors. The Directors themselves are merely representatives of the controlling stockholders.
3. Most people think that in order to control a corporation you need to own more than 50 % of the stock. This is usually not the case. The stock of most large corporations is so dilute that minority control and representation on the board can be had with 3 - 8 % ownership of the stock.
4. Large financial institutions have a fiduciary responsibility over hundreds of billions of dollars. When they use their clients’ money to buy huge stock positions in corporations, it gives them influence that they couldn’t afford to buy in their own name. The Rockefeller family has access to hundreds of billions of dollars in assets via their control of JPMorgan Chase; and Chase is only one of many companies that they control.
5. One of the first clues you will get, as to the financial sophistication of someone is how they view ownership and control. Most people want to own things: houses, cars, investment portfolios, businesses, etc. They think ownership is good.
Financially sophisticated people on the other hand, don’t want to own anything. They want to control everything, while owning nothing. They know that ownership is easily traced, and that it implies responsibility and liability. Now with this information in mind, ask yourself: Would you rather own one $10 billion dollar company, or would you rather control ten or fifteen $10 billion companies? With control you can do anything that an owner can do, but you are so far removed from responsibility, that most people don’t even know that you exist (your stock can be held by another legal entity that you control). The answer is obvious.
Corporate Control
“The simple fact is, most mainstream business news is sanitized—“tainted” might be a better word—by the heavy hand of multinational corporations that have plenty to hide”.
Dr. Gerald Kimball, Media Studies Scholar at the
The media is owned by “a handful of huge firms controlled by some of the wealthiest individuals in the world. They make billions providing a product that services the needs of the 200 largest advertisers” and report news not for the national interests, but for their bottom line.
Robert McChesney, Professor in the
When you realize who owns the mainstream news organizations it isn’t difficult to see why much of our news is manipulated or suppressed.
“…over 70% of the stock of CBS, ABC and NBC are held not by individuals but by financial institutions. Bank of America, Citibank, Bankers Trust, Chase Manhattan and Morgan Guaranty Trust hold these stocks. And these banks appoint the representatives who sit on the boards of the major networks.”
-- Phil Hunter (p. 110)
“A July 1968 report, issued by a House Banking subcommittee, revealed that Chase Manhattan Bank alone controlled 5.9% of the stock in CBS and that it had gained interlocking directorates with ABC. A later report issued by Congress in 1974 indicated that Chase Manhattan’s stake in CBS had risen to 14.1 percent, and that it had made major inroads toward control of NBC by purchasing 4.5 percent of RCA Corporation, the parent of NBC. The same report disclosed that Chase held stocks in twenty-eight broadcasting firms. The report, entitled ‘Disclosure of Corporate Ownership’ was the result of more than two years of investigation and was published by the Senate subcommittee on intergovernmental relations. Shortly after the release of these findings, yet another study revealed that Chase had gained control of 6.7 percent of ABC’s stock as well.”
-- Gary H. Kah (p.56)
There are people who don’t see a problem here. People who think that corporations are great amorphous beings with no real agenda other than making a profit. They couldn’t be more mistaken. If you follow the money and the reigns of power, you will eventually come to one office, with one desk, and one person sitting behind that desk. In some cases it’s a trustee, in most cases it’s a member of a dynastic banking family. In the case of Chase Manhattan Bank (now JPMorgan Chase ) that person’s name is Rockefeller. The Rockefellers have for generations demonstrated a very clear economic, political, and social agenda (See The Rockefeller File, 1976, Gary Allen, CPA Publishers, Boring, OR, or America’s Sixty Families, Ferdinand Lundberg, New York Vanguard Press, 1937, among others).
“When one considers that 5 percent ownership of the stock of a widely held corporation is usually enough to assure minority control of that firm, the influence of just one family in the television industry is truly mind-boggling. “
-- Gary H. Kah (p.57)
When news is shaped in the boardrooms of the corporate owners or the advertisers, objectivity goes out the window. News networks often act as “infomercials” to sell the corporation’s agendas and political goals, rather than to tell people the truth. As Christine Triano of the Institute for Alternative Journalism put it:
“There’s a specific danger inherent in having a handful of global corporations controlling most of the ways people get their information. Problems come up when ownership of the content and the conduit (the way that information is put out there-television, newspapers, radio, books, movies) is all being decided by a Disney or a Time Warner. It feeds right into civic life, public debate, politics, what happens federally, locally, regionally. It affects what issues are considered important and what people’s perceptions of those issues are.”
-- Phil Hunter (p.111)
Once you step outside of the mainstream press, there is no shortage of information or opinions on this topic. The following is from commentator Jim Hightower:
“With all the recent mega-mergers,
issues that really matter to us, these new corporate-media amalgamations are into what they call “synergy”.
That’s a 50-cent word that the dictionary defines as ‘combined action.’ You would define it as: shameless self-promotion. Instead of news, for example, the Private Ministry of Information is giving us such fluff as a report by Disney-owned ABC’s ‘Good Morning America’ on Disney World’s 25th anniversary hoopla. That’s right — Disney ‘reporting’ on Disney.”
Ten Little Indians
“More and more media outlets are falling into fewer and fewer hands; as of last year Disney, General Electric and Westinghouse- owners of ABC, NBC and CBS- controlled more than 450 broadcast and print media entities between them, worldwide.” --Stu Dawrs, “The More You Watch, the Less You Know”
“In the 1990’s, for example, NBC was already part of giant General Electric Company by the time the Walt Disney Company absorbed ABC. Westinghouse Electric Corporation consumed CBS and Time Warner, Inc., acquired Ted Turners’ Archipelago of media interests. Thus GE, Disney, Westinghouse and Time Warner- the largest media company on the planet- now control, along with numerous other entities, NBC News, ABC News, CBS News and 24-hour CNN, respectively. Meanwhile, NBC joined with Bill Gates’ Microsoft corporation in creating cable’s all-news MS-NBC and Rupert Murdoch’s mammoth News Corporation has Fox Television, the Fox News Channel, 20th Century Fox, TV Guide, Harper Collins, the New York Post, major newspapers in England, Australia and New Zealand, massive TV systems in Italy and Asia, and somewhere, probably, a partridge in a pear tree.”
-- Howard Rosenberg, “Who’s the Real Villain Here? The Media Conglomerates?”
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ben Bagdikian wrote The Media Monopoly in 1983. Due to the rapid consolidation of the world’s media, he has had to re-write the book six times. Although the seventh edition came out in 2004, it will no doubt have to be replaced before long.
In the first edition Bagdikian wrote of forty-six corporations that controlled most of the business in newspapers, magazines, television, books, and motion pictures. By 1997 that number had dropped to twenty-three. Here they are:
1. Bertelsmann, G.G. (books)
2. Capital Cities/ABC (newspapers, broadcasting)
3. Cox Communications (newspapers)
4. CBS (broadcasting)
5. Buena Vista Films (Disney; motion pictures)
6. Dow Jones (newspapers)
7. Gannett (newspapers)
8. General Electric (television, NBC)
9. Paramount Communications (books, motion pictures)
10. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich (books)
11. Hearst (newspapers, magazines)
12. Ingersoll (newspapers)
13. International Thomson (newspapers)
14. Knight Ridder (newspapers)
15. Media News Group (Singleton; newspapers)
16. Newhouse (newspapers, books)
17. News Corporation Ltd. (Murdoch; television, newspapers,
magazines, motion pictures)
18. New York Times (newspapers)
19. Reader’s Digest Association (books)
20. Scripps- Howard (newspapers)
21. Time Warner (broadcasting, magazines, books, motion pictures)
22. Times Mirror (newspapers)
23. Tribune Company (magazines)
Disney has since swallowed Capital Cities/ABC, AOL has acquired Time Warner and has recently purchased nine cable companies in
“Tribune Co., the Chicago-based media conglomerate best known for its flagship newspaper and the Chicago Cubs, has agreed to merge with Times Mirror Co., The Los Angeles-based publisher of the Los Angeles Times, the
Under terms of the stock and cash deal, which was valued at $8 billion, Tribune Co. would control operations of the combined companies.”
--
News “cooperatives” are becoming the order of the day. ABC and the New York Times recently announced plans to form an editorial partnership for the coverage of news events. This follows the creation of the NBC - Washington Post / Newsweek consortium a few months ago.
“Three networks are joining their news services into a single domestic news cooperative called ‘Network News Service’ (NNS), reported the AP on
-- Staff, The New American, “
Here’s the situation as of 2004.
“These five huge corporations — Time Warner, Disney, Murdoch's News Corporation, Bertelsmann of Germany, and Viacom (formerly CBS) — own most of the newspapers, magazines, books, radio and TV stations, and movie studios of the United States.”
“These Big Five (with General Electric's NBC a close sixth) … are a major factor in changing the politics of the
-- http://www.benbagdikian.com/
Interlocking Directorates
or
“And Then There Was One”
"I came to understand that freedom of the press is only guaranteed when you own the press. This is something I learned from The New York Times."
-- Frances Cerra, former New York Times reporter
When one person sits on the board of directors of two or more corporations those corporations are said to have interlocking directorates. This may be accomplished by selecting one representative to sit on both boards, or by placing an officer of Corporation A on the board of Corporation B. In some cases Corporation A reciprocates by placing an officer from Corporation B on its board.
The news media is hard wired into the Business Roundtable. Interlocking directorates are the rule, not the exception.
“How much objectivity can you expect from CBS News when its board members represent ITT, IBM, Philip Morris, Dow Corning, J.P. Morgan, Rand, AT&T, Chase Manhattan, Citibank, Alcoa, Bulova, Carnegie Corporation, and Metropolitan Life? OR what in-depth pieces will you see in the Washington Post about the board of directors’ companies (IBM, Johnson & Johnson, Bank of New York, Bankers Trust, Heinz, General Electric, and Coca-Cola)?”
-- Phil Hunter (p.110)
Interlocking boards have enormously complicated potential conflicts of interest in the major national and multinational corporations that now control most of the country’s media.
“A 1979 study by Peter Dreier and Steven Weinberg found interlocked directorates in major newspaper chains. Gannett shared directors with Merrill Lynch (stockbrokers), Standard Oil of Ohio, 20th Century Fox, Kerr-McGee (oil, gas, nuclear power, aerospace), McDonnell Douglas Aircraft, McGraw-Hill, Eastern Airlines, Phillips Petroleum, Kellogg Company, and
The most influential newspaper in
Time, Inc. (before it became Time Warner) had so many interlocks it almost represented a Plenary Board of directors of American business and finance, including Mobil Oil, AT&T, American Express, Firestone Tire & Rubber Company, Mellon National Corporation, Atlantic Richfield, Xerox, General Dynamics, and most of the major international banks.”
-- Ben Bagdikian (p. 25)
Eustace Mullins (p. 104) takes it one step further, backing up to look at the financial wellspring and the interlocking directorates that control the Business Roundtable. The Senate report that he refers to took over two years to compile.
“During a period when thousands of
CITICORP 97 directorates
J.P. MORGAN CO. 99 directorates
CHEMICAL BANK 96 directorates
CHASE MANHATTAN 89 directorates
MANUFACTURERS HANOVER 89 directorates
Total 470
This centralized control over American industry by five
-- Eustace Mullins (p.104)
Centralized wealth and power of this magnitude, and the fact that it is deliberately being used to shape the world is beyond the comprehension of the average person. They know that if it were true Barbara Walters would be there to tell them about it. Since she’s not, anything they might hear on this or a related topic must be “conspiracy theory”.
“At issue here is the possession of power to surround almost every man, woman, and child in the country with controlled images and words, to socialize each new generation of Americans, to alter the political agenda of the country. And with that power comes the ability to exert influence that in many ways is greater than that of schools, religion, parents, and even government itself.”
-- Ben Bagdikian (p. ix)
All the News That’s Fit to Control
“We paid $3 billion for these television stations. We will decide
what the news is. The news is what we tell you it is.”
David Boylan, Station Manager, FOX affiliate WTVT,
as spoken to two reporters, Jane Akre and Steve Wilson, whose
story was being killed by FOX News before they were fired.
"Our [media personnel] task is not to tell the truth; we are opinion molders."
-- Walter Cronkite on ABC News in 1976
“We are going to impose our agenda on the coverage by dealing
with issues and subjects that we choose to deal with.”
-- Richard M. Cohen, Senior Producer of CBS political news
“Our job is to give people not what they want, but what we decide they ought to have.” Richard Salent, Former President CBS News
PATNWO (p. 19)
“The worst sin a journalist can commit is serving as the instrument of coercive power, and too many in the American media seem content to do just that."
-- Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, English journalist
Many Americans feel that the news media is biased, even though they don’t understand the who, what, when, where, how and why of it.
“They’re dangerous. The media have an agenda. They try to make the public think they’re just reporters who report facts. Not true. They carry their personal beliefs and attitudes into the articles they write.”
-- Governor Jesse Ventura, “Playboy Interview”
“Most of the dominant news institutions in
-- Linda Bowles, WorldNetDaily.com
"...[T]he news media is essentially aligned with one party against the other party. This unbalances our democracy. ... News reporting breaks down when those assigned the job value news less than the causes or issues favored by newsmakers."
--Paul Craig Roberts, The Federalist
Of those that feel that the news is biased, the vast majority would say that the media is biased towards political correctness and liberalism. (
Those on the right can bury you under a mountain of examples and data showing a left-wing bias in the media. Studies and polls conducted in the last two generations (such as the Lichter-Rothman survey and the Los Angeles Times poll) have shown a bias often exceeding 90%, when it comes to media personnel voting for liberal Democrats, and supporting liberal, politically correct positions.
There is another, smaller group on the left that claims that the media is the rightwing mouthpiece of the conservative capitalists who control it. They make
a strong case of their own, pointing to innumerable examples such as this:
“Rupert Murdoch, an Australian who controls papers in
-- Ben Bagdikian (p. 41)
Both sides make convincing arguments, and in their own way they’re both right. Unfortunately, they are also both wrong. The people who control the media have their own agenda, which often does not fit on the inaccurate and misleading left-right political spectrum that the people have been given to play with. While that agenda is certainly beyond the scope of this paper, you can get a glimpse of it in books such as The Naked Capitalist, written by ex-FBI agent and police chief Cleon Skousen, or The World Order, written by ex-Library of Congress staffer turned investigative reporter and author, Eustace Mullins, or The Satori and the New Mandarins, written by CEO and industrialist Dr. Adrian Kreig.
Despite the fact that so many people feel that the media is biased, it still seems to surprise them when they find out point blank that they’re being lied to. Retired Admiral Thomas Moorer, at the time chairman of the Joint Chiefs, gives this version of his enlightenment. (2000 WorldNetDaily.com,
“I went to see Mr. Arthur Ochs Sulzberger (the publisher) at the New York Times, in an effort to persuade him and his news organization to report accurately on what was actually happening at the front in the Vietnam War at that time.
In no uncertain terms, however, Mr. Sulzberger refused my request. He told me that he did not care if what the New York Times was reporting about the Vietnam War was true or not. He and the New York Times were against the Vietnam War, he said, and the paper would keep on reporting the way it had been. The paper wanted
The idea that fat cat capitalists are manipulating the media simply to enhance their bottom line is naive, simplistic and wrong. Among those who know the truth and then get upset about it, the dialogue goes something like this:
“Nowadays in this Orwellian era of double-talk and outright lies, newspapers omit real news, usually twist the rest that they do print and fill their pages with features or pure propaganda”.
--Vince Ryan, “News: What Fits Around Ads”
There are others who say virtually the same thing in a more analytical tone.
"The societal purpose of the media is to inculcate and defend the economic, social, and political agenda of privileged groups that dominate the domestic society and the state. The media serve this purpose in many ways: through the selection of topics, distribution of concerns, framing of issues, filtering of information, emphasis and tone, and by keeping debate within the bounds of acceptable premises."
-- Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky
Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media
“By controlling the pipelines that people use to communicate with one another and shaping much of the cultural content within those pipelines, companies like AOL-Time Warner affect the experiences of people everywhere. Giant media conglomerates and their content providers become the gatekeepers that determine the terms upon which human beings secure access to one another and share meanings and values.”
--Jeremy Rifkin, “Mass Media Transforming Capitalism”
Like the warning labels on cigarette packages, the above quotes need to be on the front page of every newspaper, the front cover of every magazine, and at the beginning of every news program.
The Truth is Out There
“If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, it expects what never was, and never will be.”
-- Thomas Jefferson
"A popular government without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy, or perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance, and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives."
--President James Madison, "Notes on
Here’s a paragraph that beautifully sums up the situation concerning the “news and commentary” that is being delivered to you on a daily basis.
“The rhetoric of idealized social purpose is the first step in immobilizing people for their enslavement. Authoritarian social idealism and idealistic rhetoric are the virtual reality concealing real world corruption, real world grasp for power, real world enablement of degeneracy, real world absolute constant scrutinized conformity, and real world enslavement. Bend a person's conscience with virtual-world idealistic rhetoric, then direct his bent conscience to blind him to reality. Rhetorically redefine objection to enslavement as objection to idealism, then impose enslavement and corruption as a moral virtue that is not to be contested.”
-- Robert L. Kocher, Zola Times
So where can a person go to find the truth, or at least to get “the rest of the story” so that they might reach an informed opinion? You’ve got to bypass the controlled media. Use the Internet (WorldNetDaily.com (www.wnd.com), The American Free Press, www.americanfreepress.net). Look for underground newspapers, books and magazines. Look for any publication or author described as anti-government, conspiracy theorist, extremist, wacko, right-wing, left-wing, fascist, racist, sexist, bigoted, small-minded, populist, nationalist, isolationist, reactionary, Christian, libertarian, fringe, ……… fill in the blank.
But wait a minute you say; I can’t be reading stuff like that. People will think ill of me. Thank you for making my point. Now go back, read this paper again, and take a look at your own brainwashing. You’re thinking what you are supposed to think. You’re thinking what you have been trained to think. Now try thinking for yourself.
Understand that in the past people were trained to shun Jews, heretics, or members of other groups whose most common characteristics were that they could be considered anti-government, anti-power structure, or they were being used as scapegoats. Today, the most powerful force in the western world is the new-age, secular-humanist religion of collectivism, known as “political correctness”. Anyone who goes up against this religion risks being destroyed by the four magic words of power: racist, sexist, bigot, homophobe. If those aren’t enough they can always go to “extremist”, “conspiracy theorist” or “anti-government”.
Ninety percent of the material that you are not supposed to read because it was written by one of these so called “extremists”, has in fact been written by intelligent, well-educated businessmen, military officers, government officials, lawyers, professors, graduate students, police officers, and journalists who stumbled onto something the same way I did. They began to investigate, and then realized that no one in the mainstream media was covering what they had found. Let me give you two just examples.
Dr. John Coleman worked for MI 6, the British version of our CIA (Central Intelligence Agency). The following was written as the opening paragraph of his book “Conspirators’ Hierarchy: The Story of the Committee of 300”.
“In my career as a professional intelligence officer, I had many occasions to access highly classified documents, but during service as a political science officer in the field in
Here are the opening paragraphs of Dr. Stanley Monteith’s book “brotherhood of darkness”:
“In the early 1960’s I was a busy young orthopedic surgeon, and like most people, I was unconcerned about what was going on in the world. Then someone told me that our State Department brought Fidel Castro to power despite the fact they knew he was a communist. I couldn’t believe that was true, but after reading the Senate Report on the fall of
I began to read and study. Initially I read about the Bolsheviks, and how they murdered sixty million people after coming to power. Then I learned about the millions of women who were raped in
In his book Dr. Monteith provides details and references for all of the stories he mentions above, as well as many others.
Despite the massive amount of material that I go through, rarely do I encounter anything written by someone who could accurately be described as extremist, racist, bigoted, etc. I certainly don’t believe or agree with everything I read, but I’m not afraid to give the author a fair chance to convince me. The more knowledgeable you become the easier it gets to separate the wheat from the chaff of the left, the right, and most importantly the center, which is where they would like to keep you. The idea is to not allow the people who control the news to shape your vocabulary, reading list or your worldview with their carefully orchestrated use of language and demonization of anyone who disagrees with their beliefs or agenda. If you’re seeking the truth then you’re going to have to go beyond the bogus pabulum served up to you by the mainstream media. Unless you have all the facts, you’ll never be able to see the world as it really is.
Thinking for yourself can be scary. I’ve had people tell me that they would rather not know the truth. They say that they’re happier that way, and besides, “there’s nothing we can do about it anyway”. That’s their decision to make. It’s also yours.
"The press is the hired agent of a monied system, set up for no other reason than to tell lies where their interests are concerned."
-- Henry Adams
Note 1: “The leaders of the 34 participating states (at the Quebec “Free” Trade Summit) showed that they are much keener on managed trade than on free trade, and more interested in income redistribution and regulation than in the rooting out of trade restrictions. “The creation of a free trade area is not an end in itself,” said Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien.”
-- Professor Pierre Lemieux
“Genuine free trade doesn’t require a treaty (or it’s deformed cousin, a “trade agreement”; NAFTA is called an agreement so that it can avoid the constitutional requirement of approval by two-thirds of the Senate). If the establishment truly wants free trade, all it has to do is to repeal our numerous tariffs, import quotas, anti-dumping laws, and other American-imposed restrictions of free trade. No foreign policy or foreign maneuvering is necessary.”
-- Murray N. Rothbard, economist
Ben Bagdikian, The Media Monopoly, (Boston, MA, Beacon Press, 1983, Fifth Edition, 1997)
Linda Bowles, Unmasking Media Wrongs, WorldNetDaily.com,
David Boylan as quoted by Paul Hall, “FOX and Hounds”, Media Bypass, January, 2001
Frances Cerra, FEAR AND FAVOR IN THE NEWSROOM,
fearandfavor@fearandfavor.org
Stu Dawrs, “The More You Watch, the Less You Know”, The
G. Edward Griffin, The Creature from
Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (New York, NY, Pantheon Books, 1988)
Jim Hightower, “Media Synergy”, Hightower’s Daily Commentaries, November
11, 1996
Honolulu Advertiser, “Chicago Tribune, L.A. Times to merge”,
Phil Hunter, The Law- Abiding Citizen’s Defense Guide (Charlotte, North Carolina, Sentinel Publications, 1998)
Gary H. Kah,
Dr. Gerald Kimball as quoted by Martin Mann, “Who Can You Trust in Media?”, The Spotlight,
Robert L. Kocher, Zola Times, “Enslavement Through Social Idealism” http://www.zolatimes.com/V4.6/politics_amer8.html
Professor Pierre Lemieux, (professor of economics at the
Ferdinand Lundberg, America’s Sixty Families (New York Vanguard Press,
1937)
Robert Machesney, “News you may have missed”, The Spotlight ,
"FEAR & FAVOR IN THE NEWSROOM by Robert McChesney is a superb documentary that details the chilling and cancerous implications of corporate control of the news media. The documentary shows in clear detail how censorship and subtle self-censorship takes place in the real world of
Dr. Joseph Mercola, Freud Was Used to Control the Masses,
Dr. Stanley Monteith, brotherhood of darkness (Hearthstone Publishing,
Thomas H. Moorer, 2000 WorldNetDaily.com,
Eustice Mullins, The World Order (Staunton, Virginia, Ezra Pound Institute of Civilization, 1992, Second Edition)
PATNWO, Operation Vampire Killer 2000 (Phoenix, Arizona, PATNWO, 1996, revised 1996)
John Perkins, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man (Plume, Penguin Group,
James Perloff, The Shadows of Power (
Jeremy Rifkin, “Mass Media Transforming Capitalism”, The
Paul Craig Roberts, The Federalist fedmail@thefed.com,
Theodore Roosevelt, N.Y. Times,
Howard Rosenberg, “Who’s the Real Villain Here? The Media Conglomerates?”,
Murray N. Rothbard, Congressman Ron Paul’s Freedom Report, Volume 5, NO. 4, June 2001
Vince Ryan, “News: What Fits Around Ads”, The Spotlight,
Staff, “Taking Wealth by the Horns”, Media Bypass, January, 2000
Staff, “
Staff, “News you may have missed”, The Spotlight,
Fr. James Thornton, “Faith, Family, Freedom”, The New American,
1 William T. Still,
Jesse Ventura, “Playboy Interview”, conducted by contributing editor Lawrence Grobel, Playboy, November, 1999
