Censorship, fake news, perception management

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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Wed Jun 07, 2023 2:15 pm

15 Reasons Why Mass Media Employees Act Like Propagandists

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If you watch western news media with a critical eye you eventually notice how their reporting consistently aligns with the interests of the US-centralized empire, in almost the same way you’d expect them to if they were government-run propaganda outlets.

The New York Times has reliably supported every war the US has waged. Western mass media focus overwhelmingly on foreign protests against governments the United States dislikes while paying far less attention to widespread protests against US-aligned governments. The only time Trump was universally showered with praise by the mass media was when he bombed Syria, while the only time Biden has been universally slammed by the mass media was when he withdrew from Afghanistan. US media did such a good job deceitfully marrying Saddam Hussein to the September 11 attacks in the minds of the public in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq that seven in ten Americans still believed he was connected to 9/11 months after the war began.

That this extreme bias occurs is self-evident and indisputable to anyone who pays attention, but why and how it happens is harder to see. The uniformity is so complete and so consistent that when people first begin noticing these patterns it’s common for them to assume the media must be controlled by a small, centralized authority much like the state media of more openly authoritarian governments. But if you actually dig into the reasons why the media act the way they act, that isn’t really what you find.

Instead, what you find is a much larger, much less centralized network of factors which tips the scales of media coverage to the advantage of the US empire and the forces which benefit from it. Some of it is indeed conspiratorial in nature and happens in secret, but most of it is essentially out in the open.

Here are 15 of those factors.

1. Media ownership.


The most obvious point of influence in the mass media is the fact that such outlets tend to be owned and controlled by plutocrats whose wealth and power are built upon the status quo they benefit from. Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post, which he bought in 2013 from the also-immensely-wealthy Graham family. The New York Times has been run by the same family for over a century. Rupert Murdoch owns a vast international media empire whose success is largely owed to the US government agencies with whom he is closely intertwined. Owning media has in and of itself historically been an investment that can generate immense wealth — “like having a license to print your own money” as Canadian television magnate Roy Thomson once put it.

Does this mean that wealthy media owners are standing over their employees and telling them what to report from day to day? No. But it does mean they control who will run their outlet, which means they control who will be doing the hiring of its executives and editors, who control the hiring of everyone else at the outlet. Rupert Murdoch never stood in the newsroom announcing the talking points and war propaganda for the day, but you’ve got a snowball’s chance in hell of securing a job with the Murdoch press if you’re a flag-burning anti-imperialist.

Which takes us to another related point:

2. “If you believed something different, you wouldn’t be sitting where you’re sitting.”



In a contentious 1996 discussion between Noam Chomsky and British journalist Andrew Marr, Chomsky derided the false image that mainstream journalists have of themselves as “a crusading profession” who are “adversarial” and “stand up against power,” saying it’s almost impossible for a good journalist to do so in any meaningful way in the mass media of the western world.

“How can you know that I’m self-censoring?” Marr objected. “How can you know that journalists are-”

“I’m not saying you’re self-censoring,” Chomsky replied. “I’m sure you believe everything you’re saying. But what I’m saying is that if you believed something different, you wouldn’t be sitting where you’re sitting.”

In a 1997 essay, Chomsky added that “the point is that they wouldn’t be there unless they had already demonstrated that nobody has to tell them what to write because they are going to say the right thing anyway.”

3. Journalists learn pro-establishment groupthink without being told.
This “you wouldn’t be sitting where you’re sitting” effect isn’t just some personal working theory of Chomsky’s; journalists who’ve spent time in the mass media have publicly acknowledged that this is the case in recent years, saying that they learned very quickly what kinds of output will help and hinder their movement up the career ladder without needing to be explicitly told.

During his second presidential primary run in 2019, Senator Bernie Sanders enraged the mass media with some comments he made accusing the Washington Post of biased reporting against him. Sanders’ claim was entirely correct; during the hottest and most tightly contested point in the 2016 presidential primary, Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting noted that WaPo had published no fewer than sixteen smear pieces about Sanders in the span of sixteen hours. Sanders pointing out this blatantly obvious fact sparked an emotional controversy about bias in the media which yielded a few quality testimonials from people in the know.



Among these were former MSNBC reporter Krystal Ball and former Daily Caller White House correspondent Saagar Enjeti, who explained the subtle pressures to adhere to a groupthink orthodoxy that they’d experienced in a segment with The Hill’s online show Rising.

“There are certain pressures to stay in good with the establishment to maintain the access that is the life blood of political journalism,” Ball said in the segment. “So what do I mean? Let me give an example from my own career since everything I’m saying here really frankly applies to me too. Back in early 2015 at MSNBC I did a monologue that some of you may have seen pretty much begging Hillary Clinton not to run. I said her elite ties were out of step with the party and the country, that if she ran she would likely be the nominee and would then go on to lose. No one censored me, I was allowed to say it, but afterwards the Clinton people called and complained to the MSNBC top brass and threatened not to provide any access during the upcoming campaign. I was told that I could still say what I wanted, but I would have to get any Clinton-related commentary cleared with the president of the network. Now being a human interested in maintaining my job, I’m certain I did less critical Clinton commentary after that than I maybe otherwise would have.”

“This is something that a lot of people don’t understand,” said Enjeti. “It’s not necessarily that somebody tells you how to do your coverage, it’s that if you were to do your coverage that way, you would not be hired at that institution. So it’s like if you do not already fit within this framework, then the system is designed to not give you a voice. And if you necessarily did do that, all of the incentive structures around your pay, around your promotion, around your colleagues that are slapping you on the back, that would all disappear. So it’s a system of reinforcement, which makes it so that you wouldn’t go down that path in the first place.”

“Right, and again, it’s not necessarily intentional,” Ball added. “It’s that those are the people that you’re surrounded with, so there becomes a groupthink. And look, you are aware of what you’re going to be rewarded for and what you’re going to be punished for, or not rewarded for, like that definitely plays in the mind, whether you want it to or not, that’s a reality.”

During the same controversy, former MSNBC producer Jeff Cohen published an article in Salon titled “Memo to mainstream journalists: Can the phony outrage; Bernie is right about bias” in which he described the same “groupthink” experience:

“It happens because of groupthink. It happens because top editors and producers know — without being told — which issues and sources are off limits. No orders need be given, for example, for rank-and-file journalists to understand that the business of the corporate boss or top advertisers is off-limits, short of criminal indictments.

“No memo is needed to achieve the narrowness of perspective — selecting all the usual experts from all the usual think tanks to say all the usual things. Think Tom Friedman. Or Barry McCaffrey. Or Neera Tanden. Or any of the elite club members who’ve been proven to be absurdly wrong time and again about national or global affairs.”


Matt Taibbi also jumped into the controversy to highlight the media groupthink effect, publishing an article with Rolling Stone about the way journalists come to understand what will and will not elevate their mass media careers:

“Reporters watch as good investigative journalism about serious structural problems dies on the vine, while mountains of column space are devoted to trivialities like Trump tweets and/or simplistic partisan storylines. Nobody needs to pressure anyone. We all know what takes will and will not earn attaboys in newsrooms.

And it is probably worth noting here that Taibbi is no longer with Rolling Stone.

4. Mass media employees who don’t comply with the groupthink get worn down and pressured out.

Journalists either learn how to do the kind of reporting that will advance their careers in the mass media, or they don’t learn and they either remain marginalized and unheard of or they get worn down and quit. NBC reporter William Arkin resigned from the network in 2019, criticizing NBC in an open letter for being consistently “in favor of policies that just spell more conflict and more war,” and complaining that the network had begun “emulating the national security state itself.”

Arkin said he often found himself a “lone voice” in scrutinizing various aspects of the US war machine, saying he “argued endlessly with MSNBC about all things national security for years.”

“We have contributed to turning the world national security into this sort of political story,” Arkin wrote. “I find it disheartening that we do not report the failures of the generals and national security leaders. I find it shocking that we essentially condone continued American bumbling in the Middle East and now Africa through our ho-hum reporting.”

Sometimes the pressure is much less subtle. Pulitzer-winning journalist Chris Hedges left The New York Times after being issued a formal written reprimand by the paper for criticizing the Iraq invasion in a speech at Rockford College, realizing that he would either have to stop speaking publicly about what he believed or he’d be fired.

“Either I muzzled myself to pay fealty to my career… or I spoke out and realized that my relationship with my employer was terminal,” Hedges said in 2013. “And so at that point I left before they got rid of me. But I knew that, you know, I wasn’t going to be able to stay.”

5. Mass media employees who step too far out of line get fired.

This measure doesn’t need to be applied often but happens enough for people with careers in media to get the message, like when Phil Donahue was fired from MSNBC for his opposition to the Bush administration’s warmongering in the lead-up to the Iraq invasion despite having the best ratings of any show on the network, or in 2018 when Temple University professor Marc Lamont Hill was fired from CNN for supporting freedom for Palestinians during a speech at the United Nations.

6. Mass media employees who toe the imperial line see their careers advance.
https://twitter.com/schwarz/status/1432477704188833797

In his 2008 book War Journal: My Five Years in Iraq, NBC’s Richard Engel wrote that he did everything he could to get into Iraq because he knew it would provide a massive boost to his career, calling his presence there during the war his “big break”.

“In the run-up to the war, it was clear that Iraq was a land where careers were going to be made,” Engels wrote. “I sneaked into Iraq before the war because I thought the conflict would be the turning point in the Middle East, where I had already been living for seven years. As a young freelancer, I believed some reporters would die covering the Iraq war, and that others would make a name for themselves.”

This gives a lot of insight into the way ambitious journalists think about climbing the career ladder in their field, and also into one reason why those types are so gung-ho about war all the time. If you know a war can advance your career, you’re going to hope it happens and do everything you can to facilitate it. The whole system is set up to elevate the absolute worst sort of people.

Engels is now NBC’s chief foreign correspondent, by the way.

7. With public and state-funded media, the influence is more overt.

So we’ve been talking about the pressures that are brought to bear on mass media employees in the plutocrat-run media, but what about mass media that aren’t owned by plutocrats, like NPR and the BBC?

Well, propaganda thrives in those institutions for more obvious reasons: their proximity to government powers. Right up into the 1990s the BBC was just letting MI5 outright vet its employees for “subversive” political activity, and only officially changed that policy when they got caught. NPR’s CEO John Lansing came directly out of the US government’s official propaganda services, having previously served as the CEO of the US Agency for Global Media — and he was not the first NPR executive with an extensive background in the US state propaganda apparatus.

With US government-owned outlets like Voice of America the control is even more overt than that. In a 2017 article with Columbia Journalism Review titled “Spare the indignation: Voice of America has never been independent,” VOA veteran Dan Robinson says such outlets are entirely different from normal news companies and are expected to facilitate US information interests to receive government funding:

I spent about 35 years with Voice of America, serving in positions ranging from chief White House correspondent to overseas bureau chief and head of a key language division, and I can tell you that for a long time, two things have been true. First, US government-funded media have been seriously mismanaged, a reality that made them ripe for bipartisan reform efforts in Congress, climaxing late in 2016 when President Obama signed the 2017 National Defense Authorization Act. Second, there is widespread agreement in Congress and elsewhere that, in exchange for continued funding, these government broadcasters must do more, as part of the national security apparatus, to assist efforts to combat Russian, ISIS, and al-Qaeda disinformation.

8. Access journalism.

Krystal Ball touched on this one in her anecdote about MSNBC’s influential call from the Clinton camp above. Access journalism refers to the way media outlets and reporters can lose access to politicians, government officials and other powerful figures if those figures don’t perceive them as sufficiently sympathetic. If someone in power decides they don’t like a given reporter they can simply decide to give their interviews to someone else who’s sufficiently sycophantic, or call on someone else at the press conference, or have conversations on and off the record with someone who kisses up to them a bit more.

Depriving challenging interlocutors of access funnels all the prized news media material to the most obsequious brown-nosers in the press, because if you’ve got too much dignity to pitch softball questions and not follow up on ridiculous politician-speak word salad non-answers there’s always someone else who will. This creates a dynamic where power-serving bootlickers are elevated to the top of the mainstream media, while actual journalists who try to hold power to account go unrewarded.

9. Getting fed “scoops” by government agencies looking to advance their information interests.

In Totalitarian Dictatorships, the government spy agency tells the news media what stories to run, and the news media unquestioningly publish it. In Free Democracies, the government spy agency says “Hoo buddy, have I got a scoop for you!” and the news media unquestioningly publish it.

One of the easiest ways to break a major story on national security or foreign policy these days is to get entrusted with a “scoop” by one or more government officials — on condition of anonymity of course — which just so happens to make the government look good and/or make its enemies look bad and/or manufacture consent for this or that agenda. This of course amounts to simply publishing press releases for the White House, the Pentagon or the US intelligence cartel, since you’re just uncritically repeating some unverified thing that an official handed you and disguising it as news reporting. But it’s a practice that’s becoming more and more common in western “journalism” as the need to distribute propaganda about Washington’s cold war enemies in Moscow and Beijing increases.

Some notorious recent examples of this are The New York Times’ completely discredited report that Russia was paying Taliban-linked fighters to kill US and allied forces in Afghanistan, and The Guardian’s completely discredited report that Paul Manafort paid visits to Julian Assange at the Ecuadorian embassy. Both were simply falsehoods that the mass media were fed by intelligence operatives who were trying to seed a narrative in the public consciousness, which they then repeated as fact without ever disclosing the names of those who fed them the false story. Another related example is US officials admitting to NBC last year — again under cover of anonymity — that the Biden administration had simply been feeding lies about Russia to the media in order to win an “information war” against Putin.

This dynamic is similar to the one in access journalism in that outlets and reporters who’ve proven themselves sympathetic and uncritical parrots of the government narratives they are fed are the ones most likely to be fed them, and therefore the ones to get the “scoop”. We caught a whiff of what this looks like from the inside when acting CIA director under the Obama administration Mike Morell testified that he and his intelligence cartel cohorts had initially planned to seed their disinfo op about the Hunter Biden laptop to a particular unnamed reporter at The Washington Post, whom they presumably had a good working relationship with.

Another twist on the intelligence cartel “scoop” dynamic is the way government officials will feed information to a reporter from one outlet, and then reporters from another outlet will contact those very same officials and ask them if the information is true, and then all outlets involved will have a public parade on Twitter proclaiming that the report has been “confirmed”. Nothing about the story was verified as true in any way; it was just the same story being told by the same source to different people.

10. Class interests.

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The more a mass media employee goes along with the imperial groupthink, follows the unwritten rules and remains unthreatening to the powerful, the higher up the media career ladder they will climb. The higher up the career ladder they climb, the more money they will often find themselves making. Once they find themselves in a position to influence a very large number of people, they are a part of a wealthy class which has a vested interest in maintaining the political status quo which lets them keep their fortune.

This can take the form of opposing anything resembling socialism or political movements that might make the rich pay more taxes, as we saw in the virulent smear campaigns against progressive figures like Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn. It can also take the form of encouraging the public to fight a culture war so that they won’t start fighting a class war. It can also take the form of making one more supportive of the empire more generally, because that’s the status quo your fortune is built on. It can also take the form of making one more sympathetic to politicians, government officials, plutocrats and celebrities as a whole, because that class is who your friends are now; that’s who you’re hanging out with, going to the parties and the weddings of, drinking with, laughing with, schmoozing with.

Class interests dance with the behavior of journalists in multiple ways because, as both Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi have noted, journalists in the mass media are increasingly coming not from working-class backgrounds but from wealthy families, and have degrees from expensive elite universities.

The number of journalists with college degrees skyrocketed from 58 percent in 1971 to 92 percent in 2013. If your wealthy parents aren’t paying that off for you then you’ve got crushing student debt that you need to pay off yourself, which you can only do in the field you studied in by making a decent amount of money, which you can only do by acting as a propagandist for the imperial establishment in the ways we’ve been discussing.

Universities themselves tend to play a status quo-serving, conformity-manufacturing role when churning out journalists, as wealth won’t flow into an academic environment that is offensive to the wealthy. Moneyed interests are unlikely to make large donations to universities which teach their students that moneyed interests are a plague upon the nation, and they are certainly not going to send their kids there.

11. Think tanks.

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The Quincy Institute has a new study out which found that a staggering 85 percent of the think tanks cited by the news media in their reporting on US military support for Ukraine have been paid by literal Pentagon contractors.

“Think tanks in the United States are a go–to resource for media outlets seeking expert opinions on pressing public policy issues,” writes Quincy Institute’s Ben Freeman. “But think tanks often have entrenched stances; a growing body of research has shown that their funders can influence their analysis and commentary. This influence can include censorship — both self-censorship and more direct censoring of work unfavorable to a funder — and outright pay–for–research agreements with funders. The result is an environment where the interests of the most generous funders can dominate think tank policy debates.”

This is journalistic malpractice. It is never, ever in accord with journalistic ethics to cite war profiteer-funded think tanks on matters of war, militarism or foreign relations, but the western press do it constantly, without even disclosing this immense conflict of interest to their audience.

Western journalists cite empire-funded think tanks because they generally align with the empire-approved lines that a mass media stenographer knows they can advance their career by pushing, and they do it because doing so gives them an official-looking “expert” “source” to cite while proclaiming more expensive war machinery needs to be sent to this or that part of the world or what have you. But in reality there’s only one story to be found in such citations: “War Industry Supports More War.”

The fact that war profiteers are allowed to actively influence media, politics and government bodies through think tanks, advertising and corporate lobbying is one of the most insane things happening in our society today. And not only is it allowed, it’s seldom even questioned.

12. The Council on Foreign Relations.

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It should probably also be noted here that the Council on Foreign Relations is a profoundly influential think tank which counts a jarring number of media executives and influential journalists among its membership, a dynamic which gives think tanks another layer of influence in the media.

In 1993 former Washington Post senior editor and ombudsman Richard Harwood approvingly described CFR as “the nearest thing we have to a ruling establishment in the United States.”

Harwood writes:

The membership of these journalists in the council, however they may think of themselves, is an acknowledgment of their active and important role in public affairs and of their ascension into the American ruling class. They do not merely analyze and interpret foreign policy for the United States; they help make it. Their influence, Jon Vanden Heuvel speculates in an article in the Media Studies Journal, is likely to increase now that the Cold War has ended: “By focusing on particular crises around the world {the media are in a better position} to pressure government to act.”

13. Advertising.

In 2021 Politico was caught publishing fawning apologia for top weapons manufacturer Lockheed Martin at the same time Lockheed was sponsoring a Politico newsletter on foreign policy. Responsible Statecraft’s Eli Clifton wrote at the time:

There’s a very blurry line between Politico’s financial relationship with the largest weapons firm in the United States, Lockheed Martin, and its editorial output. And that line may have just become even more opaque.

Last week, Responsible Statecraft’s Ethan Paul reported that Politico was scrubbing its archives of any reference to Lockheed Martin’s longtime sponsorship of the publication’s popular newsletter, Morning Defense. While evidence of Lockheed’s financial relationship with Politico was erased, the popular beltway outlet just published a remarkable puff piece about the company, with no acknowledgement of the longstanding financial relationship with Politico.



Politico didn’t respond to questions about whether Lockheed was an ongoing sponsor of the publication after last month when it scrubbed the defense giant’s ads or whether the weapons firm paid for what read largely-like an advertorial.



Politico’s Lee Hudson visited Lockheed’s highly secure, and mostly classified, Skunk Works research and development facility north of Los Angeles and glowingly wrote, “For defense tech journalists and aviation nerds, this is the equivalent of a Golden Ticket to Willy Wonka’s factory, but think supersonic drones instead of Everlasting Gobstoppers.”


Ever wondered why you’ll see things like ads for Northrop Grumman during the Superbowl? Do you think anyone’s watching that ad saying “You know what? I’m gonna buy myself a stealth bomber”? Of course not. The defense industry advertises in media all the time, and while it might not always get caught red-handed in blatant manipulation of news publications like Lockheed did with Politico, it’s hard to imagine that their money wouldn’t have a chilling effect on foreign policy reporting, and perhaps even give them some pull on editorial matters.

Like Jeff Cohen said above: the top advertisers are off limits.

14. Covert infiltration.

Just because a lot of the mass media’s propagandistic behavior can be explained without secret conspiracies doesn’t mean secret conspiracies aren’t happening. In 1977 Carl Bernstein published an article titled “The CIA and the Media” reporting that the CIA had covertly infiltrated America’s most influential news outlets and had over 400 reporters who it considered assets in a program known as Operation Mockingbird.

We are told that this sort of covert infiltration doesn’t happen anymore today, but that’s absurd. Of course it does. People believe the CIA no longer engages in nefarious behavior because they find it comfortable to believe that, not because there is any evidentiary basis for that belief.

There were no conditions which gave rise to Operation Mockingbird in the 1970s which aren’t also with us today. Cold war? That’s happening today. Hot war? That’s happening today. Dissident groups? Happening today. A mad scramble to secure US domination and capital on the world stage? Happening today. The CIA wasn’t dismantled and nobody went to prison. All that’s changed is that news media now have more things for government operatives to toy with, like online media and social media.

And indeed we have seen evidence that it happens today. Back in 2014 Ken Dilanian, now a prominent reporter for NBC, was caught intimately collaborating with the CIA in his reporting and sending them articles for approval and changes before publication. In his emails with CIA press handlers Dilanian is seen acting like a propagandist for the agency, talking about how he intended an article about CIA drone strikes to be “reassuring to the public” and editing his reporting in accordance with their wishes.

Other potential CIA assets include CNN’s Anderson Cooper, who interned with the agency, and Tucker Carlson, whose past features a highly suspicious amount of overlap with the CIA.

15. Overt infiltration.

Lastly, sometimes the mass media act like state propagandists because they are actual state propagandists. Back in Carl Bernstein’s day the CIA had to secretly infiltrate the mass media; nowadays the mass media openly hire intelligence insiders to work among their ranks. Mass media outlets now openly employ intelligence agency veterans like John Brennan, James Clapper, Chuck Rosenberg, Michael Hayden, Frank Figliuzzi, Fran Townsend, Stephen Hall, Samantha Vinograd, Andrew McCabe, Josh Campbell, Asha Rangappa, Phil Mudd, James Gagliano, Jeremy Bash, Susan Hennessey, Ned Price and Rick Francona.

The mass media also commonly bring in “experts” to provide opinions on war and weapons who are direct employees of the military-industrial complex, without ever explaining that massive conflict of interest to their audience. Last year Lever News published a report on the way the media had been bringing on US empire managers who are currently working for war profiteer companies as part of their life in the DC swamp’s revolving door between the public and private sector and presenting them as impartial pundits on the war in Ukraine.


So as you can see, the news media are subject to pressures from every conceivable angle on every relevant level which push them toward functioning not as reporters, but as propagandists. This is why the employees of the western mass media act like PR agents for the western empire and its component parts: because that’s exactly what they are.

https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2023/06/04 ... agandists/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Wed Jun 14, 2023 3:00 pm

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Exposed: Disturbing details of the Pentagon “Perception Management Office”
Originally published: MintPress News on June 9, 2023 by Kit Klarenberg (more by MintPress News) | (Posted Jun 14, 2023)

Ken Klippenstein, an investigative journalist at The Intercept, has exposed how the Pentagon very quietly launched a new internal division, dubbed the “Influence and Perception Management Office” (IPMO), in March.

Its existence is not strictly secret, although there has been no official announcement of its launch, let alone an explanation from Department of Defense (DoD) officials as to its raison d’être or modus operandi. Its budget likewise remains a mystery but purportedly runs into the “multimillions.”

Pentagon financial documents from 2022 offer a laconic and largely impenetrable description of IPMO. The Office, it is said, “will serve as the senior advisor” to Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence & Security, Ronald S. Moultrie, on “strategic and operational influence and perception management (reveal and conceal) matters”:

It will develop broad thematic influence guidance focused on key adversaries; promulgate competitive influence strategies focused on specific defense issues, which direct subordinate planning efforts for the conduct of influence-related activities; and fill existing gaps in policy, oversight, governance, and integration related to influence and perception management matters. [IPMO]… provides necessary support to National Defense Strategy… to address the current strategic environment of great power competition.

Nonetheless, references to “reveal and conceal” and “influence and perception management” are tantalizing in the extreme. So too, is IPMO’s position within the U.S. national security structure and the Office’s acting director being intimately tied to the Pentagon’s spookiest operations.

Despite its low-key rollout, IPMO looks set to be a hugely influential new DoD agency in the future, waging ceaseless information warfare at home and abroad. What makes the new venture all the more sinister is that such capabilities are nothing new; the Pentagon has managed multiple similar, if not identical, operations in the past and continues to do so, despite significant controversy and public backlash.

Indeed, the DoD’s official dictionary has a dedicated definition of “perception management”, linking the practice to “psychological operations,” which are defined as actions intended to influence the “emotions, motives, objective reasoning, and ultimately the behavior” of target governments, organizations, groups, and individuals:

Actions to convey and/or deny selected information and indicators to foreign audiences to influence their emotions, motives, and objective reasoning as well as to intelligence systems and leaders at all levels to influence official estimates, ultimately resulting in foreign behaviors and official actions favorable to the originator’s objectives. In various ways, perception management combines truth projection, operations security, cover and deception, and psychological operations.

This, of course, begs the question of why a new incarnation of what came before and never went away is now being inaugurated by the U.S. defense establishment. As we shall see, no reassuring answers are forthcoming.

“SIGNATURE REDUCTION”
Despite the lack of a public paper trail, a memo outlining IPMO’s modus operandi was acquired by Klippenstein. It offers a hypothetical scenario in which the Pentagon “wants to influence Country A’s leaders to stop purchasing a weapon system from Country B” because it believes the sale “might jeopardize DoD’s military advantage, in some way, if the U.S. ever had to engage in armed conflict with Country A.”

“Assuming IPMO has worked to establish the desired behavior change, how might key influencers be identified that have sway over these leaders’ thought processes, beliefs, motives, reasoning, etc. (including ascertaining their typical modes and methods of communication)?” the memo reads.

Thereafter, assuming an influence strategy is developed, how might the DIE [Defense Intelligence Estimate] or IC [Intelligence Community] determine if DoD’s influence activities are working (aside from waiting and watching hopefully that Country A eventually stops purchasing the weapons system in question from Country B)?

The document was signed by IPMO director James Holly, previously Director of Special Programs for the U.S. Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC). During this time, he ran espionage operations for an unnamed paramilitary organization in Iraq and was an intelligence officer for a Combined Joint Task Force in Afghanistan.

Precisely what these roles entailed is not certain. However, that he made the leap from JSOC to IPMO is striking, given the Command is the nucleus of all the Pentagon’s spookiest, most sensitive operations. The division very rarely makes the news, but when it does, the stories are invariably remarkable and disturbing. For example, in May 2021, Newsweek exposed how the Command operates “the largest undercover force the world has ever known” under a program named “Signature Reduction.” In all, 60,000 people—“more than ten times the size of the clandestine elements of the CIA”—are part of this secret army, “many working under masked identities and in low profile.” Working both at home and overseas, its operatives carry out covert assignments using civilian cover “in real life and online, sometimes hiding in private businesses and consultancies, some of them household name companies.”

Dozens of little-known and secret government organizations support the program, doling out classified contracts and overseeing publicly unacknowledged operations. Altogether, the companies pull in over $900 million annually to service the clandestine force, doing everything from creating false documentation and paying the bills and taxes of individuals operating under assumed names to manufacturing disguises and other devices to thwart detection and identification, to building invisible devices to photograph and listen in on activity in the most remote corners of the Middle East and Africa.

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A series of photos from the Signature Reduction program provided to Newsweek by William Arkin (Editing by MintPress News)

This cloak-and-dagger militia moves entirely in the shadows and may contravene U.S. laws, the Geneva Conventions, basic standards of accountability, and various codes of military conduct. Chief among the latter is the longstanding principle that the military does not conduct covert operations on American soil. Yet, JSOC has circumvented this restriction ever since its founding in December 1980, operating under a veil of almost total official secrecy, all the while often in tandem with the CIA.

In June 1984, The New York Times outlined how JSOC effectively acted as a law unto itself, quickly evolving far beyond its original remit to “collect intelligence to plan for special military operations” into “a nighttime operation, with its own weapons procurement and research, as well as communications.”

Two months earlier, a senior Pentagon official told elected lawmakers that the Command was not “an agency of interest to the intelligence oversight committee” and refused to answer questions about its activities.

Nonetheless, the Times offered a brief overview of what was known about JSOC’s activities over the prior four years. In addition to assisting the illegal invasion of Grenada, the Command had provided extensive assistance to CIA cloak-and-dagger operations in Central America. In particular, it supported the fascist Contras in Nicaragua, helping the Agency sidestep Congressional restrictions on its brutal efforts to topple the elected left-wing Sandinista government.

“PROHIBITED, COVERT PROPAGANDA”
JSOC’s involvement in that CIA dirty war is particularly notable given this period gave rise to the very concept of “perception management” as a legitimate form of psychological warfare to be waged by the CIA, Pentagon, and other government agencies against the domestic population.

The overriding objective of this Reagan administration push was to falsely paint the murderous Contras as heroic freedom fighters. In reality, the Contras, with CIA direction, funding and arms, deliberately targeted civilian infrastructure, including schools and hospitals, slaughtered priests, nuns, labor activists, students, peasants and indigenous citizens.

In turn, the social democratic Sandinistas were transformed into viciously repressive autocrats, ruling Nicaragua with an iron fist and transforming their country into a “beachhead” for Soviet invasion of the U.S. Similar propaganda messaging has been employed in every American proxy war since, from Yugoslavia to Ukraine. All this activity, the full extent of which may never be known, represented egregious violations of the 1948 Smith-Mundt Act, which places strict restrictions on the domestic dissemination of state propaganda.

Take, for instance, the Office of Public Diplomacy, a dedicated pro-Contra propaganda unit run by Reagan’s top National Security Council aide Oliver North, who was simultaneously working with cocaine traffickers to arm the Nicaraguan “rebels.” The unit was found to have broken a welter of U.S. laws by separate official investigations into the Iran-Contra scandal. The U.S. Comptroller General, for example, concluded the Office engaged in “prohibited, covert propaganda…beyond the range of acceptable agency public information activities.”

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An ad placed by the Young Republicans under the cognizance of the Office of Public Diplomacy, March 20, 1985. (Photo: NSA Archive)

Yet, despite such damning findings, the “perception management” techniques honed by these assorted units, and many of the formal and informal structures contemporaneously created to disseminate CIA, Pentagon, and White House propaganda, did not go anywhere.

Two decades later, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, the Pentagon under Donald Rumsfeld’s leadership struck upon the bright idea of creating the Office of Strategic Influence to deliberately plant “misleading” black propaganda in the foreign media, which would then be picked up by the U.S. media.

In a perverse twist, precisely this strategy was used by British foreign intelligence service MI6 as far back as 1998 to lay the foundations for the Iraq War. Under “Operation Mass Appeal”, the agency circulated dubious or even fabricated “intelligence” to editors and journalists on its payroll the world over, influencing the output of leading international news outlets. The spooks sought to “shape public opinion about Iraq and the threat posed by WMD.”

The Office of Strategic Influence operated in secret from its launch in October 2001 until February of the next year, when the mainstream media caught wind of its existence. Due to intense outcry, just a week later, it was officially shuttered at Rumsfeld’s request. Yet, at a November 2002 press conference, the defense secretary made unguarded remarks starkly indicating it very much lived on thereafter:

The Office of Strategic Influence. You may recall that. And ‘oh my goodness gracious isn’t that terrible, Henny Penny, the sky is going to fall.’ I went down that next day and said fine, if you want to savage this thing, fine, I’ll give you the corpse. There’s the name. You can have the name, but I’m gonna keep doing every single thing that needs to be done. And I have.

OF WORLD WAR III AND UFOS
The Klippenstein-secured memo suggests IPMO is involved in identical propaganda operations to those described here. It notes the Office “is tasked with the development of broad thematic messaging guidance and specific strategies for the execution of DoD activities designed to influence foreign defense-related decision-makers to behave in a manner beneficial to U.S. interests.”

Given that Washington is again heavily engaged in a Nicaragua-style proxy war in Ukraine, an accompanying propaganda unit would be of enormous use. After all, despite the Western media’s best efforts to whitewash the issue, Nazi sympathies of soldiers and military units remain stubbornly flagrant.

The phenomenon of Swastika tattoo and military patch-toting fighters is so profuse that, earlier this month, the New York Times was prompted to publish an article bemoaning how such National Socialist iconography leaves “diplomats, Western journalists and advocacy groups in a difficult position.” On the one hand, “calling attention to the iconography risks playing into Russian propaganda,” on the other, “saying nothing allows it to spread.” The wider question of why so many Ukrainian nationalists eagerly elect to exhibit such emblems was unexplored.

Fittingly too, in December 2022, independent journalist Jack Murphy published an investigation alleging the CIA was “using a European NATO ally’s spy service to conduct a covert sabotage campaign inside Russia under the agency’s direction,” in which JSOC was a key player. The Command purportedly supports these operations “with targeting information from intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance platforms, such as drones, that can see and hear deep into Russia.”

Further clues as to the sudden push to formally codify what the Pentagon has been doing with total impunity for so long may likewise be provided by the online records of private security company Sancorp Consulting, which offers “counter-insider threat solutions, artificial intelligence and machine learning, IT solutions, identity and data activities, intelligence and counterintelligence solutions” to private sector and state clients.

This DoD division is charged with investigating UFOs and other unexplained aerial phenomena. The Pentagon has of late exhibited a pronounced interest in flying saucers, just as it did during the Cold War. Then, the purpose was to bamboozle and bedevil the public while providing cover for experimental U.S. military innovations, aircraft, and testing. There is little cause to believe the DoD’s motives have changed in the present day.

Declassified documents show that for years, the Navy Office of the Deputy Chief of Naval Operations for Information Warfare, known as N2N6, currently exercises complete control over the dissemination of UFO-related information to American audiences on behalf of the Pentagon. This extends to directing Pentagon divisions to respond to media inquiries and FOIA requests from journalists and the public and how.

Perhaps the Pentagon has decided to bring these responsibilities in-house. Coincidentally, on June 6, an Air Force veteran and former member of the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency went public with claims that extraterrestrial craft are routinely recovered in secret by the U.S. government.

This shock exposé couldn’t have come at a better time. As the New Cold War ramps up, and ever-more threatening tech is inevitably road-tested in the skies above Area 51 and other shadowy military installations in the U.S. and elsewhere, it is necessary to misdirect public attention away from the known to the unknown and unknowable. Meanwhile, U.S. military chiefs regularly and openly talk about waging war on China in the very near future—which makes constructing a dedicated propaganda office in advance all the more expedient.

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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Thu Jun 15, 2023 1:52 pm

Udo Ulfkotte Exposed the CIA’s Role in Controlling Worldwide Media in his book “Journalists For Hire” and Should Be Celebrated Among the Great Whistleblowers of All-Time
By Olga Peterson - June 13, 2023 0

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Dr. Udo Ulfkotte [Source: promiflash.de]

Ulfkotte’s political awakening about the corruption of the media industry came when he was sent to cover the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s and was instructed to present Iraq as the good guys
A former editor for the German main daily newspaper, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), Dr. Udo Ulfkotte became nationally renowned in dissident circles for his 2014 book Journalists for Hire: How the CIA Buys the News, originally published in German, which went through multiple translations.

The book relays Ulfkotte’s experience with how the CIA and German Intelligence (BND) bribe journalists to write articles free of truth and facts, and with a decidedly pro-Western, pro-NATO bent or, in other words, propaganda.

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[Source: goodreads.com]

One of Ulfkotte’s formative professional experiences was as a war correspondent during the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988), where the Iraqis were considered to be “the good guys”—because they were serving Western interests in confronting Iran, whose Islamic regime had toppled a long-standing U.S. client, the Shah, in a 1979 revolution.

Iraqi war crimes under Saddam Hussein were covered up along with Washington’s interests in trying to weaken and divide two aspiring Middle Eastern powers so the U.S. could dominate the region and exploit its oil resources.

When he first arrived in Baghdad, Ulfkotte was a little scared. He did not have any experience as a war correspondent. The Iraqi Army quickly sent him off to the front line; the bus was full of loud, experienced war correspondents from prestigious media such as BBC, and Udo was just a miserable rookie.

The first thing that struck him as odd was that everybody was carrying canisters with them. He got upset that very moment and he thought to himself: “Ooops, if the bus gets stuck far from the petrol station, all of them chip in by filling in some petrol into the engine so Udo decided that in the future he would have to carry a canister as well.”

They were on a bus for hours on end riding through the desert. At 20 to 30 kilometers from the border, there was literally nothing there. There was no war whatsoever. There were armed vehicles and tanks long since burned to ash. The reporters got off the bus and sprayed the contents of the canisters all over the vehicles. The Iraqi soldiers were there with them with the machine guns: “Imagine that, tanks in the desert, burned to ash a long time ago, set on fire only now. The clouds of smoke all around. And the reporters positioning their cameras.”

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Iraqi soldiers standing in front of tanks look toward Khorramshahr, Iran, October 1980. As a naïve young reporter, Ulfkotte was told to present the Iraqis as the good guys in a morality play, obscuring the war’s complexity and manipulation by Western powers. [Source: al-monitor.com]

What he witnessed was flame and clouds of smoke behind them, and the Iraqis running around in front of the cameras all the time with machine guns in their arms and scowling military looks in their eyes. Udo mustered up courage and asked one reporter: “I understand. The photos are brilliant, but why do they keep stooping and ducking down?”

The man replied: “Simple. In the audio played in the background one could hear machine guns, and it will sound very good back home.”

Udo kept thinking all the way home. “Young man, you did not see a war at all. You were by the campfire. What are you going to write about?”

Yes, that is a problem for a rookie working for a news agency. Performances are mainly adapted to suit the media needs. It is necessary that one “fits in” with the other seasoned professionals and concoct stories out of thin air that those in positions of authority want the people to hear—not ones that actually exist.

When Udo got back to Baghdad, there were no mobile phones; they were waiting in the Rashid Hotel for hours at times for the international line. He first phoned his mother, not his employer. He was desperate. He did not know what to do. At that point his mother started crying over the phone: “My boy! You are alive!” Udo thought to himself: “What do you mean? Is everything all right? My dear boy! We thought….What is happening, Mother? We saw on TV what happened around you.”

The TV channel had already sent back the fake stories and he tried to calm his mother down, trying to explain that it did not happen the way she believed it did. She thought Udo lost his mind. Udo said in his book that he would finish there, because he was not there to tell us a satire. He only wanted to say that this was his first experience with the truth in journalism and war correspondence. Basically, he was utterly shocked with the first contact he made. But, unfortunately, that was not an isolated case.[1]

In Udo’s naïve mind, war was a place where a reporter could report on horrifying events and help the public to empathize with the victims of war and expose the hidden political machinations behind it.

Instead, he found himself forced to write fake stories from far away from the front lines and to manufacture propaganda to induce consent among the public.

The ones manufacturing the stories were associated with the intelligence agencies whose job it is to deceive the public.

By serving as a correspondent in the Middle East, Ulfkotte was able to meet agents from the CIA, British M16, the Israeli MOSSAD and the German intelligence agency Bundesnachrichtungendienst (BND).

His editors used to readily cooperate in such operations of collating intelligence information, which the reporters would dutifully transcribe for the public back home.

The skill of unofficial reporting is when a reporter essentially works for the CIA and he or she is not employed in an official role, Ulfkotte explains.

Both sides hugely benefit from their partnership and at the same time both sides can deny their relationship. The CIA would have found young reporters and they would then be their mentors. All of a sudden many doors would open for them, they would be granted awards and before they knew it, their mentors (read: paymasters) would have owned their whole careers.[2]

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[Source: youtube.com]

This is basically the name of the game. This is how it all works. Ulfkotte admitted with regret that he published articles in his own name that were actually written by CIA agents and other intelligence services, particularly the German secret services.

Ulfkotte went on to say that he had close contact with the German intelligence service, BND. Two persons from BND were regularly coming to the newspaper office where he worked. On occasion, he says, he was not only given the report but that the BND wrote the articles, which were published in the newspapers under Udo’s name.

Udo was asked by an interviewer if he could document what he was saying and he responded yes, that he could.

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Headquarters of Germany’s intelligence agency, the BND. [Source: electrospaces.net]

“I can say that this and that article with my text in the papers was written by the intelligence services because I couldn’t have possibly known what was written in it. I couldn’t have possibly known what was there in a cave in Libya, what secret thing in one particular place, what is being built there. That is what BND wanted to publish (using my name),” writes Udo.[3]

It was not like this only in FAZ. This was in other media as well.

“If we had rule of law, there would be an investigative committee to investigate dubious claims. Political parties would be outraged and rise [against the injustice of the fake news], regardless of whether they were the political left, the political right or the center and they would say: ‘What is this guy Ulfkotte saying? And he claims that he can document everything? This needs to be investigated.’”[4]

Udo continued: “This is still a common thing. I know some colleagues of mine who still maintain a close contact with the intelligence services. I would feel very good if there was an investigative committee but this obviously is not going to happen, because it is in nobody’s interest to do so. Because in that case the general public would understand to what extent politics, media and secret services are closely connected in this country.”[5] And in this world!

When Ulfkotte had a close encounter with his own conscience—and if one reads Dostoyevsky, they know that there is no person in the world who does not wrestle with their own moral dilemmas—he decided to elaborate on his experiences. In doing so, he provided significant insight into contemporary media and of the society that we live in.

Almost everybody knows but only a few dare speak about what Udo said.

He wrote: “I was in close contact with some European media or big private media companies—you cannot write or say what you feel like and what your views are necessarily. I can tell you that what I am saying here is what I have experienced everywhere. There are clear directives and everybody knows that one cannot publish what they want in the newspapers owned by Springer such as Bild or Welt—for instance the articles critical of Israel. There is no way you can do that there! You have signed an agreement that you will not challenge the question of the existence of a country of Israel or the Israeli point of view. These directives exist in all big media companies.”[6]

Ulfkotte continued: “If you do not wish to remain stuck in the lower corporate levels but you would rather travel with the chancellor, ministers, president or with the politicians, in the airplanes which belong to the government, in that case you have to adhere to certain rules. I have learnt that rather quickly.

What we consider as free journalism is a rather orderly and orchestrated thing to its every detail. But for your superiors, it is vitally important that that is not viewed as censorship and limiting of free reporting or whichever (bland and vague) terms and phrases they tend to use.

I soon realized that when I was tasked to accompany Helmut Kohl, the then German Chancellor, in my capacity of a journalist, you are not invited to do this job because your name is Udo Ulfkotte but because you work for Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.”[7]

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Ulfkotte’s newspaper. [Source: welt.de]

Udo went on to write:

“In such a case, one is expected to deliver a certain kind of reporting. Which one? Forget about my news agency. This is to do with all of them in general. At the outset of the journey, a reporter is given a set of directions as to what to ask, how to communicate. Normally, you are not told what to say and ask, to write something in this way or that way but you are painfully aware that if you do not do that in such and such a way, you will not be invited next time. Your media company will be called to tell them that you are not wanted. And then you are out!

Those in charge of the cooperation with the media are the non-government ‘think tanks,’ those foundations and organizations which arguably are ‘independent’ in the same way that independent journalists supposedly are.

I am often asked where are those people who ‘pull all the strings,’ so that everything is told in a similar way? Look at those people who sit in the huge transoceanic think-tanks and foundations, for instance, look at the foundation Atlantic Bridge, and in all such organizations. And how is one supposed to influence others there?

I know from personal experience. Let us not speak only theoretically. The German Marshall Fund invited me as their colleague to visit the USA for six weeks earlier on. All expenses paid. This think-tank had close contact with the CIA, and I gained easy access to all the U.S. politicians, to all of them I was eager to be in contact with.

Above all, they literally showered me with gifts.”[8]

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[Source: gmfus.org]

The journalists and the news agencies which are supposed to be, if one follows the logic of their role in a democratic society and its laws and constitutions, and then code of ethics and professional conduct, to take care of general interests, find themselves facing a challenging situation—take something for yourself or give something from within yourself for something distant and uncertain. A human being cannot resist small things that the powers that be are able to provide for them profusely.

“Media is just a word that has come to mean bad journalism.” – Graham Greene

All that is the name of the game. When The German Marshall Fund took Ulfkotte to the U.S., they told him that they knew he took a diving course in Oman. The CIA knew with utmost precision. They even gave him diving equipment through his contact in Oman.

During these six weeks he got an invitation from the governor of Oklahoma. He went there. There was a small ceremony and he received honorary U.S. citizenship. He became an honorable citizen of the USA. It was written in his certificate that from then on he would only write nice things in his reports.

The English version of the book by Udo Ulfkotte, The Bought Journalists, i.e., Journalists for Hire: How the CIA Buys the News, appeared on May 15, 2017, but by it having been published, the whole story surrounding it was not over.

According to the research by Off Guardian, Tayen Lane Publishing has since removed all references for this book from its website. Amazon UK indicates that the title is currently unavailable, with the possibility of the purchase from independent distributors, which offer used copies for an exorbitant amount of a thousand U.S. dollars per copy.

At least a 2019 version of the book, Presstitutes Embedded in the Pay of the CIA: A Confession from the Profession is available for a reasonable price on amazon and goodreads.com at least in the U.S. Though you won’t find the book on display in Barnes & Noble or other big book shops as the powerful people who rule the world don’t want its content being widely read.

Regrettably, Udo Ulfkotte died of a heart attack at the age of 57 (Tracy, 2018).

After reading his books and writings, one wonders: “Is there anybody in the mainstream media who has not worked for the CIA?”

“In America, the president reigns for four years, and journalism governs forever and ever.” – Oscar Wilde.

Edward Snowden and Julian Assange are both world famous, with the former having much more luck by moving to Russia. Udo Ulfkotte, however, is almost completely out of the public gaze, although he was a journalist and whistleblower in the media industry, possibly as important as both.

One might think that this comes across as paradoxical. Yet it only means that the public does not recognize profound relations in the media industry.

Ulfkotte was a renowned European journalist with a Ph.D. in the social sciences and an immigration reform activist, among other things. When he wrote Gekaufte Journalisten: Wie Politiker, Geheimdienste und Hochfinanz Deutschlands Massenmedien lenken (the translation of its original title is Bought Journalists [alternatively, a translation of the title more to the point is Journalists for Hire]: How Politicians, Secret Services and High Finance Steer German’s Mass Media), he became one of the most significant whistleblowers in recent history.

James Tracy pointed out in Off Guardian that Ulfkotte showed how the Western secret services took over the central place in the Western journalism.” According to Tracey, Ulfkotte was able to witness all that with credibility and his personal and professional integrity because he was working in top echelons of the mainstream media profession for years.

Tracy added that the presence of the secret (intelligence) services is neither a chance encounter nor is it random. Their recruitment techniques are always similar in every corner of the globe.


1.Udo Ulfkotte, Journalists for Hire: How the CIA Buys the News (London: Tayen Lane Publishing, 2017). See also Slobodan Reljić, The Will to Lie: The New Disinformation World Order, https://catenamundi.rs/shop/volja-za-la ... an-reljic/

2.James Tracy, “English Translation of Udo Ulfkotte’s ‘Bought Journalists’ Suppressed?” Off Guardian, January 18, 2018, https://off-guardian.org/2018/01/08/eng ... uppressed/. ↑

3.Ulfkotte, Journalists for Hire. ↑

4.Ulfkotte, Journalists for Hire. ↑

5.Ulfkotte, Journalists for Hire. ↑

6.Ulfkotte, Journalists for Hire. ↑

7.Ulfkotte, Journalists for Hire. ↑

8.Ulfkotte, Journalists For Hire. ↑

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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Fri Jun 16, 2023 2:55 pm

Why Propaganda Works

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It’s not really deniable that western civilization is saturated with domestic propaganda geared toward manipulating the way the public thinks, acts, works, shops and votes. Mass media employees have attested to the fact that they experience constant pressure to administer narratives which are favorable to the political status quo of the US empire. The managers of empire have publicly acknowledged that they have a vested interest in manipulating public thought. Casual naked-eye observation of the way the mass media reliably support every US war, rally behind the US foreign policy objective of the day, and display overwhelming bias against empire-targeted governments makes it abundantly obvious that this is happening when viewed with any degree of critical thought.

To deny that these mass-scale manipulations have an effect would be as absurd as denying that advertising — a near trillion-dollar industry — has an effect. It’s just an uncomfortable fact that as much as we like to think of ourselves as free-thinking sovereign agents immune to outside influence, human minds are very hackable. Manipulators understand this, and the science of modern propaganda which has been advancing for over a century understands this with acute lucidity.

By continually hammering our minds with simple repeated messaging about the nature of the world we live in, propagandists are able to exploit glitches in human cognition like the illusory truth effect, which causes our minds to mistake the experience of having heard something before with the experience of having heard something that is true.

Our indoctrination into the mainstream imperial worldview begins when we are very young, largely because schooling is intertwined with the same power structures whose information interests are served by that worldview, and because powerful plutocrats like John D Rockefeller actively inserted themselves into the formation of modern schooling systems.

Our worldview is formed when we are young in the interests of our rulers, and from there cognitive biases take over which protect and reinforce that worldview, typically preserving them in more or less the same form for the rest of our lives.

This is what makes it so hard to convince someone that their beliefs about an issue are falsehoods born of propaganda. I see a lot of people blame this problem on the fact that critical thinking isn’t taught in schools, and I’ve seen some strains of Marxist thought arguing that westerners choose to espouse propaganda narratives because they know it advances their own class interests, and I’m sure both of these factor into the equation to some extent. But the primary reason people tend to remain committed to their propaganda-installed perspectives actually has a much simpler, well-documented explanation.

Modern psychology tells us that people don’t just tend to hold onto their propaganda-induced belief systems; people tend to hold onto any belief system. Belief perseverance, as the name suggests, describes the way people tend to cling to their beliefs even when presented with evidence disproving them. The theory goes that back when humans lived in tribes that were often hostile to each other, our tribal cohesion and knowing who we can trust mattered more to our survival than taking the time to figure out what’s objectively true, so now we’ve got these brains that tend to prioritize loyalty to our modern “tribes” like our nation, our religion, our ideological factions and our pet causes.



This tendency can take the form of motivated reasoning, where our emotional interests and “tribal” loyalties color the way we take in new information. It can also give rise to the backfire effect, where being confronted with evidence which conflicts with one’s worldview will not only fail to change their beliefs but actually strengthen them.

So the simple answer to why people cling to beliefs instilled by imperial propaganda is because that’s just how minds work. If you can consistently and forcefully indoctrinate someone from an early age and then give them a mainstream ideological “tribe” with which to identify in their indoctrination, the cognitive glitches in these newly-evolved brains of ours act as sentries which protect those worldviews you implanted. Which is exactly what modern propaganda, and our modern political systems, are set up to do.

I often see people expressing bewilderment about the way the smartest people they know subscribe to the most ridiculous propaganda narratives out there. This is why. A smart person who has been effectively indoctrinated by propaganda will just be more clever than someone of average intelligence in defending their beliefs. Some of the most foam-brained foreign policy think pieces you’ll ever read come from PhDs and Ivy League graduates, because all their intelligence gives them is the ability to make intelligent-sounding arguments for why it would be good and smart for the US military to do something evil and stupid.



The Oatmeal has a great comic about this (which someone also made into a video if you prefer). Importantly, the author correctly notes that the mind’s tendency to forcefully protect its worldview does not mean it’s impossible to change one’s beliefs in light of new evidence, only that it is more difficult than accepting beliefs which confirm one’s biases. It takes some work, and it takes sincerity and self-honesty, but it can be done. Which is happy news for those of us who have an interest in convincing people to abandon their propaganda-constructed worldviews for reality-based ones.

Sometimes just being patient with someone, showing empathy, treating them how we’d like to be treated, and working to establish things in common to overcome the primitive psychology which screams we’re from a hostile tribe can accomplish a lot more than just laying out tons of objective facts disproving their believed narrative about Russia or China or their own government or what have you.

And above all we can just keep telling the truth, in as many fresh, engaging and creative ways as we can come up with. The more we do this, the more opportunities there are for someone to catch a glimmer of something beyond the veil of their propaganda-installed worldview and the cognitive biases which protect it. The more such opportunities we create, the greater a chance the truth has of getting a word in edgewise.

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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Sat Jun 17, 2023 3:01 pm

The USA’s Covert Empire: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

In an interview shortly before his death Daniel Ellsberg said the US runs a “covert empire”, which is a really good way of putting it. A giant globe-spanning cluster of nations consistently moves in alignment with the dictates of Washington, but they all keep their official flags and their official governments, so it doesn’t look like an empire despite functioning as one in every meaningful way.




We really don’t pay enough attention to the fact that all the most influential media platforms are owned and operated by extremely wealthy people who have every motive to keep us all focused on culture wars and electoral politics so we don’t focus on class war and direct action.



It’s surreal how saying the FBI constantly grooms mentally ill people to get involved in terrorist plots makes you sound like a kooky crackpot, but it’s actually a well-documented fact that we just don’t talk about much for some reason.



The only time Trump was praised by the mass media was when he bombed Syria. The only time Biden was condemned by the mass media was when he withdrew from Afghanistan. There’s probably a lesson in there somewhere.



The New York Times publishing an article which criticizes Ukrainian Nazis for wearing Nazi insignia, not because Nazism is wrong but because it’s bad war propaganda, was one of the most New York Times things that has ever happened.
The New York Times
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The decision by some Ukrainian soldiers to wear patches with Nazi icons threatens to reinforce Russian propaganda used to justify the invasion. It also could give the symbols mainstream life after the West's decades-long efforts to eliminate them.
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nytimes.com
Nazi Symbols on Ukraine’s Front Lines Highlight Thorny Issues of History
Troops’ use of patches bearing Nazi emblems risks fueling Russian propaganda and spreading imagery that the West has spent a half-century trying to eliminate.
The article even admitted that western reporters have been avoiding acknowledging the problem because they don’t want to play into “Russian propaganda”, and have actually asked Ukrainian soldiers to remove Nazi patches before taking photos. If you choose not to report something because it would hurt your side’s propaganda efforts, then you are not a journalist, you are a propagandist.

What’s funny about the “Nazis in Ukraine” controversy is that Nazis in Ukraine is not even the strongest argument against western proxy warfare in that nation. Western propagandists could just say “Yes Ukraine has a Nazi problem but we believe the benefits of protecting Ukrainian democracy outweigh the negatives of some skinheads getting rocket launchers here and there” or whatever, and most westerners would swallow it. The only reason propaganda outlets like The New York Times feel the need to keep diddling this issue and manipulating people’s minds and gaslighting everyone about it is because they’re so habituated to pushing for complete and total narrative control on US foreign policy, so it never occurs to them to cede even the slightest amount of ground or yield even the most obvious admissions to avoid looking ridiculous.



The world is ruled by thugs and tyrants, the most thuggish and tyrannical of whom pour a tremendous amount of energy into convincing their populations that only other countries are ruled by thugs and tyrants.



If people and digital records survive the Earth’s next act of nuclear warfare, let the record show that we were seeing clear warning signs every day and overwhelmingly ignored them.



Saying “America didn’t bomb Nord Stream, Ukraine did!” is like saying “Will Smith didn’t slap Chris Rock, his hand did!” It’s a distinction without any meaningful difference, no matter how hard they try to spin it as an independent act that the US would’ve had no control over.



There’s no basis for the belief that today’s CIA and FBI are any less depraved than they were in the days of Dulles and J Edgar Hoover.

Seriously, what’s changed since that time? There was a cold war back then? There’s a cold war now. The laws, rules and policies were drastically changed and the people who did those bad things were punished? They were not.

There’s no basis whatsoever for the belief that the CIA and FBI did bad things in the past but don’t do bad things currently. It’s believed because it is comfortable, and for no other reason.

We learn about bad things the CIA and FBI did “in the past” because they stand nothing to lose by us learning about bad things they wanted to do and already did. Later on what’s happening today will be “in the past” and we’ll learn what they were up to in this slice of spacetime.

All the conditions which existed during the most notorious acts of depravity by those agencies are also the case today. Cold war. Hot war. Dissident groups. The fight for US hegemony. That’s all happening currently, and there’s no reason to believe they’re any nicer and cuddlier about it today.



If western governments need to keep ramping up censorship, propaganda and the persecution of journalists in order to defend western freedom and democracy, is it really freedom and democracy? And is it worth defending?



The only way to get a good read on what manipulators are really about is to ignore their words and watch their actions, because they only use language to manipulate and extract what they want from people. Apply this to politicians and governments, and to narcissists in your life.

Example: if you ignore the US government’s stories about its love of freedom and democracy and rules-based order and just look at its actions, what you see is a violent and tyrannical regime which works continually to destroy and subvert nations around the world which disobey it.



One of the hardest lessons I’ve ever had to learn in life is that projection cuts both directions. We project our bad qualities and motives onto others, wrongly assuming that they have the same character flaws as us, but we can also project our positive traits onto others who might not have them.

In a world full of narcissists, sociopaths and manipulators, this is important to be aware of — whether you’re looking at politicians, governments, or your own interpersonal relations. In the past I’ve suffered serious consequences for assuming that someone must have healthy and relatable reasons for their harmful actions toward me and projecting my own good motives onto them, when really all they wanted was to use and subjugate me.

You can’t assume that someone is operating from the same inner motivations as you, whether those imagined motivations are negative or positive. Some people just suck, and do things you would never do because of motives that would never even occur to you.

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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Thu Jun 29, 2023 2:21 pm

MintPress News is Being Targeted for Its Reporting: Stand in Support and Solidarity
JUNE 28, 2023

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Banner showing the members and contributors of MintPress News. Photo: MintPress News.

Message from Mnar Adley, founder-director of independent news outlet MintPress News:

Hey everyone, I’m Mnar Adley, founder and director of MintPress News and editor of our video project Behind the Headlines.

This decade has felt like a whirlwind, watching in real time the crackdown on independent journalism and alternative voices.

In the last year alone, MintPress was banned from PayPal with our balance seized, blocking donations to our website –and as leaked emails reveal, this took place with possible involvement of British intelligence and the US government.

At the same time, GoFundMe took down our fundraisers and banned us from their platform.

Our journalists have been detained, interrogated, surveilled, canceled and lobbied against by national security agencies and special interest groups, including directly by the Israel lobby. Our Wikipedia page has been written and managed by a mafia of pro-NATO editors and Israeli lobby groups. This, in addition to aggressive algorithmic blacklisting by Google’s Project Owl and Big Tech giants, shadowbanning from the likes of Twitter, Facebook & TikTok, all of whom we’ve exposed to have a deep relationship with the military-industrial complex to control your newsfeed and ensure a pro-war narrative is dominant.

We wear this as a badge of honor.

This is just a taste of what we’ve faced as an independent media outlet that has been at the forefront of exposing the profiteers of the permanent war state – holding the military class accountable, as every journalism outlet should be doing as protected by our first amendment.

Journalism is being criminalized.

This is why we’re turning to our readers and supporters to help us sustain our watchdog journalism. While Big Tech ramps up its efforts to make our journalism algorithmically disappear, we’re ramping up our efforts to circumvent this censorship and provide our readers with the most hard-hitting journalism that empowers ‘we the people.’

But to continue to do this and keep our investigative journalism free and accessible without a paywall, we’re appealing to our readers for their financial support. Suffice it to say big governments and corporations are not exactly banging down our door to support us.

We just launched our annual fundraiser to help sustain us, and I hope that you will join us as we continue to fight against the war machine in this information war.

MintPress is one of a handful of independent investigative news outlets left in the United States, featuring some of the most important journalists and activists of our time.

This includes investigative journalist, Ph.D. and author Alan MacLeod who co-hosts the MintCast podcast with me. His investigative work has exposed the deep relationship between NATO, weapons manufacturers and the national security state within Big Tech as well as US regime change operation mechanisms against the global south.

Rapper and activist for Palestinian human rights Lowkey hosts The Watchdog podcast on MintPress. His research and journalism have exposed how the Israel lobby, its intelligence and military have inserted themselves into Big Tech and NGOs to surveil and target pro-Palestine and antiwar dissent.

Kit Klarenberg is an investigative journalist whose work explores the role of intelligence services in shaping politics, perceptions and war policies in the US, UK and across NATO member nations.

Jessica Buxbaum is an investigative journalist based in Jerusalem. She is our Palestine correspondent who has spent the last five years uncovering how Israel works with Big Tech and NGOs to surveil and target Palestinian resistance to apartheid.

MintPress also features regular columns by renowned documentary filmmaker and investigative journalist John Pilger, Israeli peace activist Miko Peled, and Palestinian academic Dr. Ramzy Baroud.

As for myself, Mn​​ar Adley–the founder and director of MintPress News, I founded MintPress over ten years ago in an effort to revive the fourth estate in a post 9/11 world, when our first amendment was put on life support by the ever-growing military-industrial complex and its connections to the media. Since 2001, we saw major news outlets beat the drums of war to drive public support for the disastrous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that left millions dead and millions more as refugees.

Having lived under Israeli occupation and apartheid as a teenager, I witnessed firsthand the horrifying human rights abuses no child should have to see. From the New York Times to the Washington Post to MSNBC and CNN, every major news outlet has for decades whitewashed Israeli crimes and apartheid under the banner of “democracy and shared values” while dehumanizing Palestinians as mere terrorists, the same way our media dehumanizes the victims of our disastrous wars. This, of course, continues to this day.

Whether it’s war in Palestine, Yemen, Sudan or Somalia, economic sanctions against Iran, Venezuela or Cuba or the US proxy war with Russia in Ukraine–it is clear that corporate media act as PR for weapons manufacturers like Lockheed Martin and Raytheon to justify military adventurism and economic warfare to fuel the military-industrial complex that drives our war economy.

Thus MintPress was born out of this need to provide the public with investigative journalism that holds the ruling class and military accountable where corporate media has failed.

Our journalism gives a voice and spotlight to the people of the Global South ravaged by economic sanctions.

We’re continuously covering regime change operations, military coups and wars imposed by the US military, NATO and their proxies. Policies that line the pockets of the executives at Lockheed Martin and Raytheon.

We’ve been amplifying the voices of those who are silenced by the media, like government whistleblowers and publishers like Julian Assange and Daniel Hale.

This is exactly why we’ve been targeted and why we can’t take MintPress to the next level without your support.

With the conflict raging in Ukraine, we’ve entered wartime and are living in an intellectual no-fly zone where online censorship of dissenting journalism has become the new norm and the sanctions regime has come to target independent journalists–but it’s up to us to change that reality.

We’re proud to have broken through this censorship over the years, but it has only been possible through your continued support.

No matter the war waged against us, we refuse to be backed into a corner and bullied by tech giants who have a deep relationship with weapons manufacturers who work hand in hand with NATO to profit off of the blood of millions of people around the world.

The only way forward is for us all to unite on a broader front of non-partisanship and help fund our own media. There are no governments or corporations who will move in to save us. We are completely dependent on you.

Join us in reviving the fourth estate and protecting our First Amendment. Join our campaign today—live on Indiegogo.


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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Fri Jun 30, 2023 4:17 pm

Of COURSE Greta Met With Zelensky: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

Image

Foreign conflicts in the 2020s are always like,

USA: Let’s militarily encircle this large nation

Large Nation: Hey stop

USA: Let’s heavily arm proxy forces right on their border

Large Nation: We’re drawing a red line

USA: Let’s cross the red line immediately

Large Nation: *acts*

USA: OMG COMPLETELY UNPROVOKED AGGRESSION




Of course Greta Thunberg met with Zelensky. Of course she did. That was the only box left to check off in the most PR-intensive proxy war of all time. They got Bono. They got Mark Hamill and Sean Penn. They got appearances at the WEF, the New York Stock Exchange and the Grammys. They just needed Greta.




As with 2016 and 2020, by far the largest US election interference in 2024 will come not from Russia or China but from American oligarchs and empire managers. This is treated as fine and normal, because American oligarchs and empire managers are the nation’s real government. US election interference is an inside job.

We’ve been seeing this illustrated with RFK Jr’s censorship by Google-owned Youtube:


We also saw it illustrated recently when Obama’s acting CIA director just casually admitted to using his intelligence connections to orchestrate a blatant psyop to manipulate the 2020 election using false information, and literally nothing happened. It was just accepted as fine and normal.

It’s only illegitimate election interference if unauthorized foreign powers do it or if ordinary Americans do it; when US oligarchs and empire managers do it it’s just the normal thing that’s supposed to happen.



A 2014 study found that Americans have no idea how bad income inequality in their country really is; participants believed things are vastly more equal than they are. This is because western media never report on the class warfare that is being waged against the working class. The media are owned and controlled by extremely wealthy people who have a vested interest in keeping everyone from looking at class warfare, and the most influential media employees share this interest because their empire apologia has made them rich as well. That’s why they keep everyone focused on culture wars, irrelevant partisan spats, and other vapid nonsense.



The US empire is like the mind of a highly dysfunctional person. There might be parts of it that sometimes say “I shouldn’t be like this, I should change,” but the way it’s wired points it toward destructive behavior. There are significant parts of the empire who are acutely aware that things like military overextension and ramping up aggressions against China run directly against its own interests, but because the forces which pilot the empire’s actions are pointed in that direction, it’s happening anyway. The empire keeps waging destruction the way an addict keeps using.

The reason you seldom see people change despite their stated intent to do so is because your behavior doesn’t change just because you know it should, it changes when you fix the underlying forces within yourself which drive that behavior. It’s the same with the US empire. The US empire is inseparable from the forces of neoliberal capitalism, war profiteering and unipolarism with which its true leadership has intertwined itself, so while the odd empire manager may say “end the wars” it never happens, because everything in it is oriented toward war.

This is the same reason we keep destroying our biosphere despite being acutely aware that we need it to survive. Every system we’ve set up to drive human behavior and organize human civilization is pointed toward ecocide, despite all the science saying that’s a bad thing to do.



I know a lot of people are worried about neural implants turning the public into mindless servants of the powerful, but if it makes you feel any better the powerful have already achieved that with propaganda anyway.



An unhealthy relationship with mental narrative pervades every level of human suffering, from the individual to humanity as a whole. Individual suffering and dysfunction arises from believed mental narratives about who and what we are eclipsing our awareness of our boundless and indivisible true nature, and humanity’s collective suffering and dysfunction arises from believed propaganda narratives about our nations, our governments, our society and our world.

Just as it’s possible for the human organism to shed its unwholesome relationship with mental narrative in the transformation commonly known as spiritual enlightenment, it’s possible for the human species to shed its unwholesome relationship with mental narrative as a collective. Only then will we achieve maturity with these recently evolved large brains of ours and become truly capable of happiness, harmoniousness, and health.

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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Thu Jul 06, 2023 2:47 pm

How US Department of Homeland Security Became Global ‘Thought Police’
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on JULY 5, 2023
Kit Klarenberg

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Major tech companies were overwhelmingly a highly receptive audience, and actively encouraged CISA to push further and further into unconstitutional territory.

CISA’s “disinformation” busting activities served to systematically malign independent journalists and alternative media platforms, while reinforcing established news outlets as monopolies of truth.


On June 26th, the US House Judiciary Committee published an incendiary report, The Weaponization of CISA, which documents how the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), a shadowy division of Washington’s highly controversial Department of Homeland Security, “colluded with big tech and ‘disinformation’ partners to censor Americans.”

The report tracks how CISA, founded in 2018, “was originally intended to be an ancillary agency designed to protect critical infrastructure” and guard against cybersecurity threats,” but quickly “metastasized into the nerve center of the federal government’s domestic surveillance and censorship operations on social media.” Within two years of launch, the Agency was “routinely” reporting social media posts “that allegedly spread ‘disinformation’” to offending platforms, in particular Twitter.

Key to this sinister evolution was the creation in June 2021 of CISA’s Cybersecurity Advisory Committee, which in turn established a subcommittee known as “Protecting Critical Infrastructure from Misinformation & Disinformation”, commonly known as the “MDM Subcommittee”.

Since disbanded, it brought together representatives of government and the tech industry, along with purported “disinformation” experts, including University of Washington professor Kate Starbird, Twitter’s now former chief legal officer Vijaya Gadde, who led the social network’s suppression of the New York Post’s reporting on Hunter Biden’s laptop, and Suzanne Spaulding, a former CIA legal advisor.

Subsequently, CISA’s purview expanded dramatically, first to monitoring purported foreign “disinformation”, to eventually all “disinformation”, including the speech of average US citizens online. In an email obtained by the Committee, this mission creep dismayed even a non-profit focused on foreign “disinformation” with which the Agency was collaborating.

That organization was one of many to which CISA outsourced responsibility for its ever-increasingly aggressive censorship crusade. Ostensibly independent civil society organizations provided a legitimizing rubber stamp to the Agency’s pronouncements of what did and did not constitute “disinformation”, and in turn pressured major tech firms to take action accordingly.

Major tech companies were overwhelmingly a highly receptive audience, and actively encouraged CISA to push further and further into unconstitutional territory, suggesting optimal means to malign, ostracize, and silence dissenting voices on their own platforms. In internal communications, Starbird openly acknowledged that the Agency’s definitions of disinformation, and examples of the phenomenon it cited publicly, were “inherently political.”

The Committee slams all of CISA’s counter “disinformation” activities as “highly troubling”, although considers the Agency’s focus on “malinformation” to have been “particularly problematic”. According to CISA’s official definition, “malinformation” is information “based on fact, but used out of context to mislead, harm, or manipulate.” Given that “context” is determined by the government, “malinformation” could mean literally any inconvenient fact authorities wanted to suppress.

Members of the MDM Subcommittee weren’t unaware of how poorly its policing of “malinformation” would likely be received by the outside world. Starbird dubbed this work “perhaps the hardest challenge”, given “current public discourse…seems to accept malinformation as ‘speech’ and within democratic norms,” which she amazingly attributed to “information operations”. She foresaw CISA being subject to “bad faith criticism” in the media for censoring truthful content as a result.

However, in seeking to construct a “whole-of-government approach” to “disinformation”, whereby CISA took the lead on censoring “disinformation” on behalf of every federal agency, its operatives encountered stern pushback from some officials. In August 2022, a representative of the National Association of Secretaries of State warned the Subcommittee that it was “important for CISA to remain within [its] operational and mission limits,” and “specifically should stick with misinformation and disinformation as related to cybersecurity issues.”

It’s clear too that despite CISA’s deep and cohering ties to major tech firms, not all were on board with its mission. In May 2022, due to public outcry over the DHS’ “Disinformation Governance Board”, CISA emailed high-ranking employees at professional networking site LinkedIn, informing them the company “can always reach out to CISA should you have any questions.” One recipient duly forwarded the email internally, eliciting a sardonic response from a coworker:

“Hey LinkedIn friends, if you ever want to know what the Regime considers to be true or false, just drop a line. We have connections…”

The next month, there were even anxieties expressed by members of the Subcommittee’s parent Cybersecurity Advisory Committee, about its ever-growing power. At a meeting, Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince “flagged his concerns with the MDM Subcommittee and the perception that CISA is influencing narratives.”

These comments were made right when members of the Subcommittee were increasingly worried that the recent closure of the Disinformation Governance Board, just three weeks after its inauspicious launch, would have negative implications for them. On May 20th, former CIA legal apparatchik Spaulding emailed Starbird, cautioning, “It’s only a matter of time before someone realizes we exist and starts asking about our work.” The latter concurred, noting the Subcommittee had “pretty obvious vulnerabilities.”

The pair went on to discuss methods by which to preemptively counter the controversy that would erupt if and when the Subcommittee’s activities were subject to external scrutiny. One idea outlined by Spaulding was to “socialize” its existence – “recruit subject matter experts to support the Subcommittee’s efforts, solicit different perspectives, and apply creditability to the Subcommittee’s work with a broader audience.” A senior CISA officer firmly rejected the proposal.

Fast forward to February this year, public concerns about CISA’s activities were ratcheting steadily, and the Judiciary Committee fired off subpoenas to major tech firms with which the Agency colluded in censorship, including Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and Meta. The Agency struck upon a novel strategy for dealing with this unwanted, negative attention – it simply purged its website of all references to domestic “disinformation” work.

Watch this space…

To date, the Judiciary Committee’s findings have gone almost universally unmentioned by US news outlets. This omertà is understandable, given the Senate probe was launched in response to the #TwitterFiles. A series of extended tweet threads, posted by journalists such as Matt Taibbi and Lee Fang on the social network from December 2022 onwards, it exposed in granular detail how Twitter was systematically co-opted and infiltrated by the US national security state for malign ends.

Previously confidential company communications revealed that for many years, Twitter wittingly and willingly acted as a dedicated, dependable censorship wing of America’s spying and “security” agency alphabet soup, and the Democratic party. At the direct behest of entities such as the FBI, DHS, and even Joe Biden’s presidential campaign, high-ranking staffers unquestioningly suppressed or removed content arbitrarily deemed to be “disinformation”, and shadow-banned or outright suspended troublesome users. This was all despite frequent internal concerns the requests were unreasonable and illegitimate.

Bombshell stuff, which one might reasonably expect journalists to eagerly pounce upon. Yet, the media’s lockstep response has been to determinedly discredit and diminish the #TwitterFiles by; criticizing the personalities and political persuasions of those reporting on them, and how they were reported; unilaterally declaring the content to be inconsequential and unworthy of attention, scrutiny, or the public’s time; or simply ignoring their existence entirely.

It would be highly unforthcoming for those same sources to now acknowledge the Judiciary Committee report conclusively confirms, and adds considerable color, contour and clarity to, the core contentions of the #TwitterFiles. There is also the obvious, open question of whether mainstream US journalists were contemporaneously cognisant of CISA’s censorship machinations, but kept quiet as they and their employers materially benefited as a result.

After all, CISA’s “disinformation” busting activities served to systematically malign independent journalists and alternative media platforms, while reinforcing established news outlets as monopolies of truth. Leaked documents related to the short-lived DHS Disinformation Governance Board, which was intended to serve as the friendly, public face of CISA censorship connivances, repeatedly referred to the need to “pre-socialize” the Board prior to its launch with civil society voices, to ensure a friendly, smooth liftoff. It is highly likely mainstream reporters were among them.

Future Judiciary Committee investigations may lay this reality bare. As the report states, its work “is not done” – CISA “still has not adequately complied with a subpoena for relevant documents.” So it is, “much more fact finding is necessary,” and the Senate “will continue to investigate CISA’s and other executive branch agencies’ entanglement with social media platforms.” In other words, watch this space.

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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Mon Jul 10, 2023 2:25 pm

Today In War Propaganda

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The New York Times has a new article out with the headline “Cluster Weapons U.S. Is Sending Ukraine Often Fail to Detonate” and the subheading “The Pentagon’s statements indicate that the cluster munitions that will be sent to Ukraine contain older grenades known to have a failure rate of 14 percent or more.”

If you only read the headline — as the majority of people do — you would come away with the impression that the news story being reported here is that the US is giving Ukraine weapons that are sometimes defective. That sounds like a newsworthy story by itself, and it’s the only information provided in the headline.

If you read the subheading in addition to the headline, you would come away with the same impression. You could even read the entire first paragraph and the first part of the second and still think you were reading a story about the US sending Ukraine sub-par cluster munitions.

Not until you get to the final sentence of the second paragraph would you get to the vital piece of information which explains why the world is criticizing the Biden administration for sending Ukraine these weapons:

“Years or even decades later, they can kill adults and children who stumble on them.”
The New York Times
@nytimes
The Pentagon’s statements indicate that the cluster munitions that will be sent to Ukraine contain older grenades known to have a failure rate of 14% or more.
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nytimes.com
Cluster Weapons U.S. Is Sending Ukraine Often Fail to Detonate
The Pentagon’s statements indicate that the cluster munitions that will be sent to Ukraine contain older grenades known to have a failure rate of 14%


The real story of course isn’t that the US has failed to send Ukraine its primo mint-condition cluster bombs, the story is that undetonated munitions will kill civilians and keep killing them even long after the fighting stops.

A correct headline for this report would have been something along the lines of “Cluster Weapons U.S. Is Sending Ukraine Will Kill Civilians for Years to Come,” but because The New York Times is a US propaganda outlet, we get a headline saying “Oopsie, sometimes the little bombies don’t go boom!”

We saw another interesting instance of war propaganda in the mass media on Saturday with two separate articles advocating NATO membership for Ukraine, one in The Washington Post and one in The Guardian.

In a Washington Post piece titled “Only NATO membership can guarantee peace for Ukraine,” Marc Thiessen and Stephen Biegun argue that once the war is over Ukraine must be added to the controversial western military alliance. They make the absurd claim that “Almost 75 years after NATO’s founding, the record is clear. NATO doesn’t provoke war; it guarantees peace,” which would certainly come as a surprise to the survivors of disastrous NATO military interventions in nations like Libya and Afghanistan.

“No serious person advocates NATO membership for Ukraine while the current fighting continues,” write Thiessen and Biegun. “That would be tantamount to a declaration of war with Russia. But it is equally true that after a cease-fire, a durable peace cannot be achieved unless that peace is guaranteed by NATO membership.”


This position in The Washington Post that “No serious person advocates NATO membership for Ukraine while the current fighting continues” was published just hours apart from a Guardian article by war propagandist Simon Tisdall explicitly advocating NATO membership for Ukraine while the current fighting continues.

Tisdall writes the following:

The main objection to this argument was summarised by the former US Nato ambassador Ivo Daalder. “The problem confronting Nato countries is that as long as the conflict continues, bringing Ukraine into the alliance is tantamount to joining the war,” he warned.

But there are precedents. West Germany gained Nato protection in 1955 even though, like Ukraine, it was in dispute over occupied sovereign territory — held by East Germany, a Soviet puppet. In similar fashion, Nato’s defensive umbrella could reasonably be extended to cover the roughly 85% of Ukrainian territory Kyiv currently controls.


Tisdall makes no attempt to address the glaring plot hole here that West Germany was not at war in 1955, or to explain how placing a NATO “umbrella” over 85 percent of a nation currently at war would be safeguarded against being drawn into the war.


Lastly we’ve got an article from The Hill titled “Bolton hails Biden decision to send cluster bombs to Ukraine as ‘an excellent idea’” about professional warmonger John Bolton’s enthusiastic support for the latest cluster munitions development.

And to be clear, this is not a news story. Reporting that John Bolton likes cluster bombs is like reporting that Snoop Dogg likes weed, or that Flava Flav is fond of clock necklaces. Obviously he’s going to be as enthusiastic about the prospect of children being killed by military explosives as a cartoon mascot for children’s breakfast cereal is for its company’s brand of sweetened starch. He’s cuckoo for war crimes.

As we’ve discussed previously, John Bolton’s presence in the mass media proves our entire civilization is diseased. We shouldn’t be looking to such monsters for analysis and expert punditry, we should be chasing them out of every town they try to enter with pitchforks and torches. The fact that we see his opinion mentioned as valid and relevant any time there’s an opportunity to kill more human beings with military violence shows that we are trapped in a madhouse that is run by the craziest among us.

https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2023/07/09 ... ropaganda/

*******

NYT Worries Brazil Goes Too Far to Fight Far Right
BRIAN MIER
NYT Worries Brazil Goes Too Far to Fight Far Right
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Describing the differences in how Brazil and the US treated candidates who tried to seize power after losing the election, the New York Times (7/1/23) highlighted “widespread claims of overreach” in Brazil, noting criticisms that the Brazilian system is “prone to more abuse” and that its courts may be “in a repressive mode.”
Former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro was convicted on June 30 of the first of 16 charges of election fraud levied against him in Brazil’s Superior Electoral Court, and sentenced to an eight-year ban from running for political office.

A July 1 New York Times article, headlined “Why Bolsonaro Was Barred in Brazil but Trump Can Run in the US,” does a fine job of explaining the differences in the two nations’ electoral systems. However it also further develops a narrative it has been building since Brazil’s 2022 election season of an authoritarian court system that engages in judicial overreach to persecute political enemies.

To an average news consumer who hasn’t paid much attention to the last eight years of Brazilian history and is unfamiliar with Brazilian law, the Times’ claims that courts may be overstepping their boundaries may look legitimate. When compared to the way the Times portrayed the Lava Jato (or “Car Wash”) anti-corruption investigation, and its political persecution of (then former) President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and other members of the leftist Workers Party, however, it looks like as though the Times is using its traditional double standard of going soft on right-wing extremists while portraying leftist Latin American governments as authoritarian.

Judicial abuses of a ‘hero’
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The New York Times (8/25/17) depicted Judge Sergio Moro as “the face of the national reckoning for Brazil’s ruling class.”
In 37 New York Times articles published between January 2015 and April 2018 about the US DoJ-backed Lava Jato operation, which culminated in Lula’s illegitimate election-year arrest, judicial overreach was barely alluded to at all.

One rare reference occurred in Simon Romero’s 2016 article “Tempers Flare in Brazil Over Intercepts of Calls by Ex-President ‘Lula’” (3/17/16). Twenty-four paragraphs into the piece, after labeling now-disgraced Lava Jato Judge Sergio Moro as a “hero,” and giving space to his allies to falsely claim it isn’t illegal in Brazil to wiretap a standing president and leak the conversations to the press, a voice of criticism creeps in:

“He was not acting as a judge,” said Ronaldo Lemos, a law professor at Rio de Janeiro State University and one of the creators of the legislation covering freedom of speech and privacy on the Internet. “He was acting as a politician. That’s what concerns me.”

This voice of reason, however, is immediately debunked in a subsequent paragraph quoting conservative law professor Fernando Castelo Branco, “I don’t think there was a single illegal act in what Judge Sergio Moro did.”

The same day of the Times article, Moro submitted a 31-page apology to the Brazilian Supreme Court for illegally leaking the conversation, but this was skipped over by the New York Times. Nor did the Times cover the episode when he broke the law again by wiretapping all telephone conversations in Lula’s defense lawyers’ law firm for 30 days, sharing the conversations with the prosecution team so that it could preemptively map out and develop strategies against future motions from the defense team.

Shortly after Moro admitted to breaking the law, a group of his cronies in Brazil’s TRF-4 regional court in Porto Alegre made an unprecedented ruling, allowing the Lava Jato investigation to operate outside of the law. The New York Times didn’t identify this as a warning sign of judicial overreach, however, as it continued to publish article after article praising Lava Jato. This led up to Lula’s April 2018 arrest for “indeterminate acts of corruption,” based on one coerced plea bargain testimony with no material evidence.

Lula was released from prison, due a finding of illegal forum-shopping for a sympathetic court, and his convictions were reversed and all pending Lava Jato charges dropped due to collusion between the judge and prosecutors. The Times nevertheless failed to engage in any self-criticism on its role in normalizing the presidential candidate’s arrest and Bolsonaro’s subsequent rise to power.

Crimes on live TV
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Making false claims about the electoral system in Brazil can get you banned from selections—maybe especially when it’s done in front of dozens of foreign diplomats (Guardian, 7/19/22).
Both-sidesing Lula’s FBI-backed political persecution and Bolsonaro’s guilty verdict as examples of judicial overreach is an act of bad faith. Unlike Lula—who was declared guilty during an election year, based on a single witness with a coercive plea bargain, by a judge who went on to serve as justice minister for his electoral opponent—Bolsonaro committed the crimes he was convicted of on live national television.

In a publicly funded event inside the president’s official residence, over 100 foreign officials were subjected to a slide show presented by Bolsonaro, during which he attacked the integrity of Brazil’s electoral system without providing any evidence to support his claims. Three months before the elections, at a moment when he was trailing Lula in double digits in the polls, millions of people watched him on TV Brasil and in his social media accounts, as he claimed that his enemies were going to defraud Brazil’s electronic voting system. In Brazil, this constitutes abuse of authority, election fraud and misuse of public funds.

Bolsonaro’s guilty conviction in the electoral court has opened the door to a federal audit that could result in him being charged for the estimated R$12,000 in public funds he spent to host the event, and a criminal investigation that could result in jail time.

‘Going too far?’
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After Brazil’s Supreme Court investigated associates of a business leader who called for a coup against Lula, the New York Times (9/26/22) reported that, “according to experts in law and government, the court has taken its own repressive turn.”
Judicial overreach in Brazil never seemed to bother the Times when it was used in a kangaroo court procedure against Brazil’s largest progressive political party, but one week before the 2022 presidential elections it insinuated that right-wing extremist President Jair Bolsonaro and his followers were the real victims, with “To Defend Democracy, Is Brazil’s Top Court Going Too Far?” (9/26/22). It continued in January with “He Is Brazil’s Defender of Democracy. Is He Actually Good for Democracy?” (1/22/23), which ran with the subhead:

Alexandre de Moraes, a Brazilian Supreme Court justice, was crucial to Brazil’s transfer of power. But his aggressive tactics are prompting debate: Can one go too far to fight the far right?

Why would the New York Times wait to complain about judicial overreach until a leftist government in Latin America attempts to enforce the rule of law to punish people guilty of fomenting a neofascist military coup? Brazil’s case is hardly unique. After the Nicaraguan government began prosecuting participants in the failed 2018 right-wing coup attempt that left 253 people dead, the New York Times (3/2/23) compared the government to Nazi Germany. When Bolivian courts ordered the arrest of the leader of the 2019 right-wing coup, during which police massacred dozens of nonviolent protesters, the Times (6/10/22) raised concerns about “politicians’ use of the justice system to target opponents.”

Bolsonaro’s close ties to Donald Trump and Steve Bannon created the first convergence of interests between the Brazilian left and the US Democratic Party in decades, leading the Biden administration to quickly recognize Brazil’s election results and support Lula’s inauguration in January. However, a series of moves Lula has taken since then—from refusing to send ammunition to Ukraine, to giving the red-carpet treatment to Nicolas Maduro, to de-dollarization plans for trade with China—must have some people in the State Department thinking about the possibilities of fostering another coup in Brazil.

This is where the New York Times‘ “judicial overreach” narrative can be helpful. If the US does decide to move in that direction, Times readers are already being groomed for an “authoritarian Latin American strongman” narrative.

https://fair.org/home/nyt-worries-brazi ... far-right/
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blindpig
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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Fri Jul 14, 2023 3:02 pm

EU threatens to block social media during mass protests
July 13, 21:35

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Do you remember how during the protests in Iran and Turkey, in Europe they drew cartoons of Khamenei and Erdogan for blocking access to social networks during the protests. And they called it manifestations of dictatorship. Similarly, China was blamed for blocking social media during the protests in Hong Kong.
And now here in Europe. About themselves, they will not draw caricatures, you need to understand. And they will not be accused of dictatorship either.
Because it's different. Although this is exactly the same thing that the EU liked to blame others for so much.

But what happened?
The reason is trivial - the protest potential in Europe is growing. At the moment France is ahead.
But the continuing decline in living standards, inflation and rising interest rates increase the likelihood of mass protests against the socio-economic policies of EU countries in the near future. The EU authorities understand this and are already ready to openly apply the same measures that China, Iran and Turkey used to suppress protests. Those countries that the EU likes to call "undemocratic".

https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/8488844.html

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"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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