Fake News is Not New

As a term fake news has largely only been around since 2015. The left said that Donald Trump and his campaign was spreading fake news. Trump then turned it around and labelled the major news channels with it.

But the fact is that fake news has been around as long as news has been around.

Before it was called fake news, it was known by other names, such as propaganda. And since that term fell out of favor mostly around its use in in the first world war, it’s largely known as public relations or spin.

Of course, there are degrees of fake news. There are omissions. There are exaggerations. There are outright lies. Unfortunately, all of it stands against what journalism, what the fourth estate, should really be about.

This is an exaggeration. It is making news more so than reporting on it. What should have happened is that Cooper would be laughed out of the journalism business by his colleagues and the public after this stunt. But no. Instead he’s considered one of the most trustworthy leaders of a major news channel. Why is that? Keep reading for a strong clue…

Freedom of the press was a critically important part of the USA. That’s why it was the first amendment in the Bill of Rights. The press was there to keep government honest. To keep businesses honest. (To keep other journalists honest?) While there has always been fake news it has certainly accelerated in recent history for reasons that will become clear.

The problem is that the press is no longer honest by and large.

Why does this matter today? It’s extremely relevant.

For example, here is Sky News from Italy showing the pandemic inside the hospital aired March 19^th.

And here is CBS This Morning using that same footage to show the pandemic in New York City on March 25th.

Is that just lazy reporting and an honest mistake…or criminally deceptive to create hysteria?

In My Weird Journey Down the Rabbit Hole, I shared a similar use of Kentucky gun-range footage as the “slaughter in Syria”, from ABC News, the same people who said their story about Jeffrey Epstein wasn’t credibly enough to air.

What follows is a slice of history that you must understand in order to even conceive of what is happening today.

Edward Bernays, the father of propaganda (and nephew to Sigmund Freud) wrote this about the topic:

 “The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of this country.”

…and…

“Propaganda is the executive arm of the invisible government. Universal literacy was supposed to educate the common man to control his environment. Once he could read and write he would have a mind fit to rule. So ran the democratic doctrine. But instead of a mind, universal literacy has given him rubber stamps, rubber stamps inked with advertising slogans, with editorials, with published scientific data, with the trivialities of the tabloids and the platitude of history, but quite innocent of originals thought…It may seem an exaggeration to say that the American public gets most of its ideas in this wholesale fashion.”

No, it’s not an exaggeration. If you’re not familiar with Bernays, he was one of the greatest propagandists ever to live.

Bernays accomplished many things with propaganda such as getting women to smoke by calling them “liberty torches,” tapping into the burgeoning women’s movement.

Another of his more infamous propaganda campaigns was turning the democratically elected leader of Guatemala, Arbenz, into a communist threat to the USA. He did this on behalf of the CIA, the State Department and the business, United Fruit, which all had close ties. After the coup, we installed the military dictator Carlos Castillo Armas who led death squads against the people but supported US political and business interests.

This eight and a half minute video gives a quick overview.

This is not a conspiracy theory. It is public knowledge. You can find details about it in Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1954_Guatemalan_coup_d%27%C3%A9tat

Did you know that press connections are something the CIA has always been involved in?

Here’s a New York Times article from 1977. “In its persistent efforts to shape world opinion, the C.I.A. has been able to call upon a separate and far more extensive network of newspapers, news services, magazines, publishing houses, broadcasting stations and other entities over which it has at various times had some control.” https://www.nytimes.com/1977/12/26/archives/worldwide-propaganda-network-built-by-the-cia-a-worldwide-network.html

It’s a fascinating read…yet it is a limited hangout. Why? Because the CIA had connections into the New York Times!

The only reason they published anything was to attempt to control the narrative once this was leaked out. You see, around that time other information came out, including this article by Carl Bernstein, published in Rolling Stone in 1977 which discloses such and much more. I absolutely recommend reading this whole thing! But here are a few quotes: http://www.carlbernstein.com/magazine_cia_and_media.php

“In most instances, Agency files show, officials at the highest levels of the CIA usually director or deputy director) dealt personally with a single designated individual in the top management of the cooperating news organization.”

Understand that top management can kill or change stories done by the investigators themselves. It’s a powerful position to have influence over.

“During the 1976 investigation of the CIA by the Senate Intelligence Committee, chaired by Senator Frank Church, the dimensions of the Agency’s involvement with the press became apparent to several members of the panel, as well as to two or three investigators on the staff. But top officials of the CIA, including former directors William Colby and George Bush, persuaded the committee to restrict its inquiry into the matter and to deliberately misrepresent the actual scope of the activities in its final report. The multivolume report contains nine pages in which the use of journalists is discussed in deliberately vague and sometimes misleading terms.”

Here’s clips from those hearings.

“The Agency’s relationship with the [New York] Times was by far its most valuable among newspapers, according to CIA officials. From 1950 to 1966, about ten CIA employees were provided Times cover under arrangements approved by the newspaper’s late publisher, Arthur Hays Sulzberger. The cover arrangements were part of a general Times policy—set by Sulzberger—to provide assistance to the CIA whenever possible. Sulzberger was especially close to [CIA Director] Allen Dulles.”

All the News That’s Fit to Print

All the News That’s Approved By the CIA to Print

This was allegedly part of Operation Mockingbird. The only CIA document that exists that discusses Mockingbird shows that they wiretapped phones of journalists, but people talk about it being much more. https://documents.theblackvault.com/documents/cia/operationmockingbirdCIA.pdf

The propaganda even bleeds into Hollywood. “Are you an aspiring filmmaker who wants to produce a spy thriller? Well, you’re in luck because the CIA has a pile of script ideas lying around. Ironic, you say, that an organization known for secrecy is doling out helpful hints to Hollywood? The CIA doesn’t think so. For them it’s all about image control.” https://www.wired.com/2011/09/cia-pitches-hollywood/

I started this off talking about Anderson Cooper. Yep, he worked for the CIA. Whether or not that still occurs is speculation, of course…though there is the saying once CIA, always CIA. https://www.informationliberation.com/?id=15416

Take a look at this, potentially the most damning of all evidence. A CIA document from 1991, released in 2010, stated that the CIA’s public affairs office, “now has relationships with reporters from every major wire service, newspaper, news weekly, and television network in the nation. This has helped us turn some ‘intelligence failure’ stories into ‘intelligence success’ stories, and it has contributed to the accuracy of countless others. In many instances, we have persuaded reporters to postpone, change, hold, or even scrap stories.” https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/DOC_0005524009.pdf

EVERY…MAJOR…NEWS…SERVICE. Change or scrap stories. In an earlier post, I mentioned the news being weaponized against us. This is what I mean.

The CIA may not be able to get rid of every single damaging story out there. There certainly are good and true journalists and editors. But what if they could get rid of half the stories you didn’t want? What if they could spin the narrative in their favor 90% of the time? Do you see where this leads, especially when compounded over decades?

“The term ‘conspiracy theory’ did not exist as a phrase in everyday American conversation before 1964. The conspiracy-theory label entered the American lexicon of political speech as a catchall for criticism of the Warren Commission’s conclusion that President Kennedy was assassinated by a lone gunman with no assistance from, or foreknowledge by, any element of the United States government.” –  Lance deHaven-Smith

How did this term enter the lexicon? The CIA of course, through their propaganda assets (aka relationships with reporters.) https://steemit.com/history/@thelastheretik/cia-coined-and-weaponized-the-label-conspiracy-theory

You cannot possibly understand what is going on today if you do not understand history. And not the history they teach you in school (because history is written by the winner…or better explained, the winner’s propagandist).

And I have only just barely scratched the surface. This covers the CIA. That is a single agency (albeit certainly one of the biggest and most successful). Just how pervasive are these methods of influencing the news among government agencies, political parties, businesses and more?

Remember that the US government has classified its meetings for the coronavirus response. https://loganchristopher.com/this-is-not-a-black-swan-event/

And we have seen one example of the media feeding into the hysteria.

Let me be clear. I’m not saying CBS News did that as a result of CIA direction. But something fishy is going on and has been for a long, long time.

In future posts, I’ll share more recent examples, share a wide variety of tactics used, as well as discuss how this bleeds into the online world of big tech censorship which is clamping down tighter as we speak.