From: orwell@erich.triumf.ca (BALDEN, RON)
Newsgroups: alt.conspiracy
Subject: Re: CIA Now Plotting a Coup D'etat Against the Government of Cuba
Date: 16 Dec 1992 20:55 PST
Organization: TRIUMF: Tri-University Meson Facility
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In article <BzBL88.ADq@news.cso.uiuc.edu>, 
met48546@uxa.cso.uiuc.edu (Marc E. Talbot) writes...

>gardabr@unix1 (Gard Eggesbo Abrahamsen) writes:

>>With the CIA controlling the news organizations around the world, and perhaps
>>making CNN contradict the plan if news organizations wanted to check with 
>>them, the story will never break.

>Could you give me any documentation for this?  I find it hard to belive that
>any single organization could effectively censor the entire media.  If they
>did, you'd think that they could do a better job of it and stop any negative
>information about the US government from leaking through the press.  Think
>about it.  How many independently owned newspapers are there in the US?  How
>does any one organization keep all of them quiet?  A reporter with a good story
>at a major newspaper who can't get published can always sell his story to
>someone else.  Surely you're not suggesting that the CIA owns controlling 
>interests in every paper in the US?  Or do they just lean on people?  What,
>anytime someone buys a Newspaper (read - the company publishing, not the thing
>you pay 50 cents for), the CIA sends Nunzio and Guido over to their house to
>make sure they know what to publish and what not to?  

>I'll grant that the federal government does have some control over television
>media, which is heavily regulated by the FCC, but there's no such licensing
>organization for the printed press.

>Please elaborate if you have further details. I'd really like to hear them.

Marc, it doesn't work quite like the quotation from Gard Abrahamsen 
might imply, although the end effect is not much different than if it
did work that way.  One of the most important things to keep in mind
is that AT LEAST 70 percent of all "news" appearing in the mass
media is a PURE PRESS RELEASE (whether written by government agencies
or businesses), perhaps slightly rewritten.  There is a special,
SMALL class of "investigative reporters" who do what one naively
might have gotten the impression that ALL reporters do --- namely
follow a story, cross-check different sources, etc. The function of most
reporters is simply to go around and gather up the press releases of
those who have enough power to push their views.  Thus, they can easily
be led on a leash (irrespective of other powerful institutional 
constraints and filters); to quote from Mark Hertsgaard's interviews with the
media managers of the Reagan Administration: 
[from his book,   On Bended Knee:  The Press and the Reagan Presidency
 Farrar Straus Giroux, New York, 1988
Library of Congress classification number  E875.H46; the book
is now out in paperback with a new preface)

[page 52]
""... "As opposed to Kissinger and Haldeman and that crowd, whose view 
was that you control the media by giving them bits and pieces [of 
information], the Reagan White House came to the totally opposite 
conclusion that the media will take what we feed them," explained 
Leslie Janka, who worked as a press officer in both administrations.  
"They've got to write their story every day.  You give them their 
story, they'll go away.  As long as you come in there every day, hand 
them a well-packaged, premasticated story in the format they want, 
they'll go away.  The phrase is `manipulation by inundation.' You give 
them the line of the day, you give them press briefings, you give them 
facts, access to people who will speak on the record ....[ellipsis
in original] And you do that long enough, they're going to stop 
bringing their own stories, and stop being investigative reporters of 
any kind, even modestly so."  

"I think that's true," added Deaver.  "The only day I worried about 
was Friday, because it's a slow news day.  That was the day that 
always bothered me the most, because if you didn't have anything, 
they'd go **find**  something." [emphasis in original]
  [Hertsgaard quoting Leslie Janka and Michael Deaver]

With regards to `actions of the U.S. with respect to foreign countries'
news the major supplier of this news worldwide is in fact the
U.S. CIA-Pentagon-State Department archipelago.  Former CIA officer
John Stockwell -- Director of the CIA's Angola Task Force in the 1970's --
has described how this works from his own personal experience.
To quote from his book "The Praetorian Guard: The U.S. Role in
the New World Order" (South End Press, Boston, 1991, pg. 97):

""In my own earlier book, "In Search of Enemies", I outlined how we in
the CIA's Angola program created a mechanism whereby we could feed
stories to the media like an intravenous needle and tube in a patient's
arm.  One has no difficulty finding journalists who will cooperate.  The
problem is how they will explain their stories, say about what is
happening inside Angola, to their fiercely competitive colleagues while
in fact residing in Paris or New York.  To solve this problem, we put
CIA officers who were media specialists at key locations around Angola. 
We obtained approval from the presidents of two countries to plant,
through UNITA and FNLA cut-outs, our stories in their primary
newspapers.  Then -- the key -- we recruited and hired local stringers
who would telex the articles to our controlled agents in Europe and
elsewhere.  The latter had solid, visible proof of the source of our
propagandistic articles.  Note, this system would nevertheless not
withstand intense scrutiny.  It would work as long as we were writing on
acceptable themes, like (fictional) Cuban rapists inside Angola, but not
if we were skinning any of the establishment's sacred cows."" 
[John Stockwell] 

Another thing you must realize is that the propaganda system of the U.S. is
often "hide in plain sight".  Various significant facts about the dirty
dealings of the U.S. government *do* appear frequently in the U.S. mass
media -- perhaps on page 17, wrapped in a blanket of obfuscation and
official denial. Along these lines, it is noteworthy that when Fidel Castro
-- some eight months before the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, in a televised
speech at the United Nations -- made the perfectly accurate charge that the
C.I.A. was training a group of Cuban expatriates in Guatemala for a planned
counterrevolutionary invasion of Cuba, his charge was treated by the U.S.
press as the ravings of a madman.  (This story is told in Erik Barnouw's
history of television, "Tube of Plenty"; I have the second edition, circa
1980; there is now a third edition circa 1990.) 

The best single reference that I know of to start understanding
the structure and control of the U.S. mass media is:
"Unreliable Sources:  A Guide to Detecting Bias in News Media"
by Martin Lee and Norman Solomon, 1990. (Lyle Stuart/Carol Publishing Group)

"Inventing Reality: the Politics of the Mass Media" by
Michael Parenti, St. Martin's Press, 1986 is another
useful general introduction. 

On the various constraints that prevent accurate coverage of "foreign
news", see the case study of U.S. press coverage of Iran during the reign
of the Shah: 

"The U.S. Press and Iran: Foreign Policy and the Journalism of
Deference" by William Dorman and Mansour Farhang, University of
California Press, Berkeley, 1987.  

Specific references to U.S. terrorism against Cuba are:

"The Fish is Red: the story of the secret war against Castro"
by Warren Hinckle and William W. Turner, Harper and Row, 1981
(Library of Congress catalogue number: E 183.8 C9 H56).

also "The *Real* Terror Network" by Edward S. Herman
(South End Press, 1982; reprinted by Black Rose Books, Montreal, 1985).

The "industry" of U.S. mass media "terrorism experts" is explored in
"The "Terrorism" Industry: The experts and institutions that shape
our view of terror" by Edward S. Herman and Gerry O'Sullivan,
Pantheon Books/Random House, 1989.  One of the means by which stories
are planted in the media is the "echo chamber" effect 
of a loose-knit network of right-wing commentators -- Claire Sterling
says something in Reader's Digest which she got from Robert Moss;
it is picked up by Michael Ledeen, repeated by Jeane Kirkpatrick 
and Maurice Tugwell and then incorporated into "studies" by the
Heritage Foundation or the Jonathan Insitute.  It seems to the
unwary that the original "story" is being confirmed by several
independent sources. 

Ron Balden