From: met48546@uxa.cso.uiuc.edu (Marc E. Talbot)
Subject: Re: CIA Now Plotting a Coup D'etat Against the Government of Cuba
Organization: University of Illinois at Urbana
Date: Thu, 17 Dec 1992 15:35:38 GMT

orwell@erich.triumf.ca (BALDEN, RON) writes:

>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

I'll agree that this is the way most newspaper's work, but if the CIA were
warping their press releases, you'd think that the "investigative reporters"
would be pointing out a lot of anomilies in their stories.  I'm not saying
that US Govt press releases aren't slanted, and may sometimes be outright
lies, but I don't think that makes it accurate to say that the CIA controls
the world's media.

>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)

BTW, thank you for providing references.  I appreciate it.

>[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."  

To a certain extent, yes.  You can tie up a lot of journalists by 
'inundation', but when you start actually lying to them, you start running
big risks of being caught, which is then a bigger story than what you were
probably trying to cover up.  You might be able to tie up a big portion
of various news agencies, but you still have to deal with the reporters who
are stilling doing their jobs.

>"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] 

I don't think it's fair to use a third world country as an example of the
CIA controlling the world media. I'd be more interested in documentation
of CIA or US govt influence over what gets published in other major western
papers (ie london, Paris, Frankfurt).

>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 US government could also get away with a whole lot more in the 60's than
it could today.  The advent of high power mass-media devices, plus the more
intense competition between news media, make it more difficult for the US
govt to shove things under the rug.

>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

Thanks again for a well-documented post.

Marc Talbot