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Is the CIA editing your newspaper? Here is a
great overview by Ed Jones of OpenDemocracyUK of why corporate media are the arch-exponents of "fake news". The media are overwhelming owned and controlled by billionaires and gargantuan corporations, who depend on the support of other corporations for ad revenue, and employ journalists from a narrow, privileged class whose careers depend on maintaining access to elite sources. It would be simply astounding in these circumstances if we had anything resembling a pluralistic media.
The data concerns UK outlets, but the same principles apply in the US.One section makes especially disturbing reading.
It is the little-discussed matter of the intelligence services' deep penetration of most western, and in some cases non-western, media organisations. In short, US intelligence services - and to a lesser extent British ones - have for many decades fed information to sympathetic journalists in key positions inside the "free" media, working with them hand in glove. Additionally, the CIA has sought to put its own people into publications to shape directly editorial content and influence public opinion. In some cases, these people may have reached very senior positions.
Nick Davies, of the
Guardian, dedicated a whole chapter of his book
Flat Earth News to documenting these practices. Strangely, that chapter is rarely mentioned. Journalists who praise the book instead concentrate on his less revealing concept of "churnalism" - journalism compromised by constraints of time and resources.
Jones adds other sources who make much the same point: Richard Keeble, professor of journalism at the University of Lincoln, ... has written on the history of the links between journalists and the intelligence services. ... He quotes Roy Greenslade, who has been a media specialist for both the
Telegraph and the
Guardian [and is a former editor of the
Mirror newspaper], as saying:
"Most tabloid newspapers - or even newspapers in general - are playthings of MI5 [Britain's FBI]." Keeble goes on to say:
"Bloch and Fitzgerald, in their examination of covert UK warfare, report the editor of 'one of Britain's most distinguished journals' as believing that more than half its foreign correspondents were on the MI6 payroll [the British equivalent of the CIA - my emphasis]. And in 1991, Richard Norton-Taylor revealed in the Guardian that 500 prominent Britons paid by the CIA and the now defunct Bank of Commerce and Credit International, included 90 journalists."
Keeble has given many more examples in his book chapter of the intelligence services infiltrating the media and changing the politics of the time, including around the miners strikes and Arthur Scargill in the 1980s and during the lead-up to the Iraq war in 2003. ...
Comment: Further reading: Ukraine nationalizes Kolomoisky's PrivatBank that holds 36% of all domestic deposits