Ted Turner made his professionally-fatal mistake of merging CNN with Time Warner in 1996. Turner resigned as vice chairman of the merged AOL Time Warner in 2003. Turner lost some $7 billion in stock after the merger in 1996 but his financial losses would soon grow larger.
In 1998, Time Warner, according to our Atlanta sources, convinced CNN to run a story about Operation Tailwind, a covert U.S. military and South Vietnamese Montagnard incursion into Laos from September 11 to 13, 1970, that was designed to put pressure on North Vietnamese troops during a Laotian Army offensive. CNN ran a "Newstand CNN & Time" story called "Valley of Death." The piece was narrated by CNN correspondent Peter Arnett with lead CNN producer being April Oliver. The investigation was conducted in cooperation with Time magazine. CNN reported that US forces used sarin gas in Laos between 9/11 and 9/13, 1970. CNN also reported that 100 Laotian villagers were killed by a US sarin gas attack.
WMR has learned that in an operation similar to the setting up of CBS News's Dan Rather in the George W. Bush Texas Air National Guard AWOL story, bogus elements were introduced into an otherwise legitimate story on Operation Tailwind. Moreover, according to our sources in Atlanta, the false elements were known to certain executives of CNN and Time Warner with the intention of weakening CNN to the point where its executive management could be fired and replaced with those who would steer the pre-eminent news network to the right in all respects, including strong support for Israel in its Middle East coverage. It was CNN-US President Rick Kaplan who pushed the Tailwind story over the objections of several CNN news veterans. Kaplan is now the executive producer of the CBS Evening News with Katie Couric in the anchor chair once occupied by Rather.
As with the CBS 60 Minutes story on Bush's AWOL status that was reported by Rather, CNN named an investigation panel to examine the facts of the story after the Pentagon stated that no sarin gas was ever used and the story was false. Ultimately, CNN agreed that there were several factual errors in the story and issued a retraction. Some military experts suggested that while CS tear gas may have been used in Tailwind, sarin was somehow substituted in the story, resulting in the controversy and retraction. Former Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Admiral Thomas Moorer claimed he was erroneously quoted about sarin being used in Laos.
Producers Oliver and Jack Smith were fired after the retraction and Arnett left the network after being formally reprimanded. Arnett briefly joined HDNet, the same network that hired Rather after his departure from CBS News. CNN President Tom Johnson left CNN a few years later.
CNN was faced with law suits from Tailwind veterans. Turner, who lost several billions in stock after the merger with Time Warner in 1996, saw the company's stock take a further hit as a result of the Tailwind debacle. The stock value loss weakened Turner's financial interest in the firm, making it more vulnerable for a buyout. Turner would see Time Warner and its chairman Gerald Levin, a heavy donor to Jewish causes, exercise more control over the editorial direction of CNN. After the disastrous Time Warner merger with AOL in 2000, CNN, as it was originally envisaged by Turner when he founded the world's first global cable news network, was a thing of the past. CNN's editorial direction saw correspondent Wolf Blitzer, formerly a public affairs spokesman for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), assume dominant anchor responsibilities for CNN's influential Washington bureau after first becoming a CNN anchor in 1999 and moving up the ranks to hosting the three-hour Situation Room in 2005.
The recent firings of CNN Middle East editor Octavia Nasr and news anchor Rick Sanchez capped off the slow drift of CNN to becoming a propaganda outlet for Israel and the Israel Lobby in the United States. CNN announced that in its move to help rehabilitate former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer, forced from office over a prostitution scandal, he would co-host a program in Sanchez's time slot. CNN Washington is now essentially a Blitzer and Spitzer operation.
The lesson of the demise of CNN is a textbook case of how special interests have and will continue to dictate news content and reporting in the United States. After the recent verbal attack by Broadcasting Board of Governors chairman Walter Isaacson, the managing editor of Time during the Tailwind episode and, from 2001 to 2003, the chairman and CEO of CNN, on the expanding independent global news networks of RT [Russia Today], Telesur of Venezuela, Iran's Press TV, and a planned Chinese network as "enemies" of America, these and other embryonic networks like Turkey's TRT English network, should take note of the downfall of CNN and the players who engineered it. Forewarned is forearmed.
Source: WayneMadsenReport.com
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Declassified: Massive Israeli manipulation of US media exposed
Israeli Spying: The Mother of all Scandals
CNN's Wolf Blitzer - agent of Zionism and CNN's Larry King and "femme sioniste" Christiane Amanpour
By Freedom Research, May 2009 | radioislam.org
CNN:s anchor Wolf Blitzer has for years been one of their main media profiles in charge of explaning the news flow for the millions of CNN viewers.
Some people have understood that Mr. Blitzer - although he doesn´t carry the Jewish skullcap/yarmulke - is a Jew. But that he also is an ardent follower of the state ideology of Israel, Zionism, is perhaps not so well known. The facts are even more compromizing as mr. Blitzer has a background as an open and even paid Zionist propagandist.
From the 1970s Blitzer worked for the pro-Israel lobby organization the American Israel Public Affairs Committee where he had the position as the editor of their monthly in house publication, the "Near East Report". In 1973 Blitzer was hired as a a journalist for the English language Israeli Newspaper Jerusalem Post where he worked as their Washington correspondent/Bureau Chief until 1990, when he quit for CNN.
In CNN Blitzer has been involved in programs such as the "Late Edition" and "The World Today", as CNN:s man to cover the 2004 and 2008 US presidential elections and "The Situation Room", a three-hour afternoon/early evening program.
One can hear Blitzer in his advertisement trailer for the "The Situation Room" as regularly aired on CNN, calling his show "An American perspective on US politics".
An "American" perspective? This makes grim irony when knowing his Zionist agenda.
The clip bellow from a 8th of November 1989 debate at the Penn State University is particularly revealing, where Wolf Blitzer is acting as an advocate of Israel and confronted by anti-Zionist Jewish writer Norman Finkelstein.
Here we can hear the Zionist Blitzer rant:
"Israel has all the justifications in the world to exist."These are the opinions of a man who for millions of viewers worldwide - especially the so-called "elites" who boast that they regularly view CNN to keep themselves "informed" - has the enormous privilege of choosing which news should be divulged and how they should be interpreted, who chooses who to interview and which questions to pose. A racist Zionist deeply entangled both emotionally and professionally with the state of Apartheid Israel.
"Thank God that there is at least one Israel."
"And I think, as I said before, all of us should be delighted that we happen to be around at a time in this world when there is this Israel."
"Zionism is an ideology, its the national liberation movement, of the Jewish people. To deny Zionism, to reject Zionism, is about as racist an element as you can get."
Endnotes - two other famous CNN faces with Zionist connections
Larry King (actual name Lawrence Zeiger) hosting the show "Larry King Live" is another Jew who has a prominent position in CNN since the start of his show in 1985.
Larry - King of CNN
The Jewish Journal.com writes in its article "Q & A With Larry King" by Gaby Wenig, November 13, 2003:
"Larry King is as known for sitting hunched over a microphone, schmoozing with everyone who is anyone, as he is for wearing big black glasses and suspenders over shirt sleeves. But as the TV icon approaches the big 7-0 (his birthday is Nov. 19), he's increasingly wearing something else on his sleeve: his Judaism.Larry King also contributed with a chapter in What Israel Means to Me: By 80 Prominent Writers, Performers, Scholars, Politicians, and Journalists, compilated by arch-Zionist Alan Dershowitz, published by John Wiley and Sons, 2007.
Viewers are as likely to spy him at a benefit for the State of Israel Bonds or the Jewish Braille Institute as they are to see him interviewing the Duchess of York or Barbara Bush on CNN's 'Larry King Live.'"
In it we can read some revealing Larry King statements on the state of modern Apartheid, Israel. King writes (pages 223, 224)
"There is something uplifting and breathtaking about the way Israel was born."
"Visionary Zionists had been working for a Jewish state for some sixty years before Israel´s birth."
"The establishment of the state of Israel was an awesome historical event."
"Israel isn´t a symbol. Israel is the practical manifestation of hope, freedom, and self-determination.CNN's Christiane Amanpour is CNN's Chief International Correspondent and well embedded/in-bedded in the Zionist establishment as she since 1998 is married to James Rubin, whose jewish, who at the time was an Assistant Secretary of State and spokesman for the US State Department during the Clinton regime. The couple Amanpour-Rubin even have a son together.
I´ve never been a particularly observant Jew, but when I look upon Israel´s achievements, its strength and its vibrant democracy, I feel tremendous pride to be a Jew."
The New York Times, August 9, 1998 (page 6 of the New York edition), reported on their half-Jewish wedding:
"Christiane Amanpour, the chief international correspondent for CNN, was married yesterday to James Phillip Rubin, the Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs.In the Clinton times, Rubin was considered the likewise Jewish Secretary of State Madeleine Albright's right-hand man. Rubin has since worked for Jewish Presidential Candidates General Wesley Clark and John Kerry but also as anchor at the TV show "World News Tonight" on Zionist Rupert Murdoch´s "Sky News".
The Rev. Ambrose O'Farrell, a Roman Catholic priest, performed the ceremony at the Church of Santo Stefano in Bracciano, Italy. Later in the day, Rabbi Guy D. Hall performed a Jewish ceremony at Castello Orsini-Odescalchi."
An article by James Rubin (The Huffington Post, September 4, 2008) on Mr. Joe Biden, who became the Vice-President of the US, reveals Amanpour´s husband´s Zionist affiliations. Rubin writes:
"As far as Israel is concerned, having worked as his senior foreign policy adviser for five years, I know Senator Biden is one of Israel's staunchest supporters in the Senate. In fact, during the time I worked for him, Israel was one of the few subjects we rarely spoke about because his views were so clear and long-standing there wasn't much to say.Again proof that Zionists in the political and media establishment of non-Jewish majority "Gentile" host-states, use their connections to promote Jewish networks and the influence of the Jewish state of Israel.
He did tell me how support for Israel and Jewish causes was one of the first positions he adopted in the Senate -- initially after talks with a close friend from Delaware and then as a result of his first trip abroad in 1973 when he met Prime Minister Golda Meir and her young military aide, Yitzhak Rabin. He also told me how much he learned from the late Tom Lantos, a Holocaust survivor and until recently Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, who worked as an adviser to Senator Biden in the 1970s. Podhoretz's story about an exchange with Menachem Begin is more than anything else a reminder of how long-standing and close the Senator's relationship is with the state of Israel and how much he has fought for Israel over the years, leading the fight in Congress against the sale of F-15s and AWACs to Saudi Arabia in the 1980s and taking on semi-official anti-semitism in the Middle East and Europe."
"Uzi Safanov, a writer at the Seawanhaka newspaper of Long Island University in New York, agreed. 'I'm a Jew before being a journalist, before someone pays me to write,' he said. 'If I find a negative thing about Israel, I will not print it and I will sink into why did it happen and what can I do to change it.' Safanov said that even if he eventually wrote about negative incidents that happen in Israel, he would try to find the way 'to shift the blame.' "- Jewish Bulletin of Northern California, November 23, 2001, in an article reporting on a Jewish journalist meeting at "Do the Write Thing", a special program for student journalists sponsored by the Jewish Agency for Israel and the World Zionist Organization at the General Assembly of the United Jewish Communities.
Isn't Fascism wonderful?