The American paper of record just provided a major example of the symbiotic relationship between U.S. corporate media and the government, Ben Norton writes for Grayzone.By Ben Norton
Grayzone
The New York Times has publicly acknowledged that it sent a story to the U.S. government for approval from “national security officials” before publication.
This confirms what veteran New York Times correspondents such as James Risen have said: The American newspaper of record regularly collaborates with the U.S. government, suppressing reporting that top officials don’t want made public.
On June 15, the Times reported that the U.S. government is escalating its cyber attacks on Russia’s power grid. According to the article, “the Trump administration is using new authorities to deploy cybertools more aggressively,” as part of a larger “digital Cold War between Washington and Moscow.”
In response to the report, President Donald Trump attacked the Times on Twitter, calling the article “a virtual act of Treason.”
The New York Times’ PR office replied to Trump from its official Twitter account, defending the story and noting that it had, in fact, been cleared with the U.S. government before being printed.
“Accusing the press of treason is dangerous,” the Times communications team said. “We described the article to the government before publication.”
“As our story notes, President Trump’s own national security officials said there were no concerns,” the Times added.
Do you believe that the Failing New York Times just did a story stating that the United States is substantially increasing Cyber Attacks on Russia. This is a virtual act of Treason by a once great paper so desperate for a story, any story, even if bad for our Country…..
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 16, 2019
Indeed, the Times report on the escalating American cyberattacks against Russia is attributed to “current and former [US] government officials.” The scoop in fact came from these apparatchiks, not from a leak or the dogged investigation of an intrepid reporter.
‘Real’ Journalists Get Approval
The neoliberal self-declared “Resistance” jumped on Trump’s reckless accusation of treason (the Democratic Coalition, which boasts, “We help run #TheResistance,” responded by calling Trump “Putin’s puppet”). The rest of the corporate media went wild.
But what was entirely overlooked was the most revealing thing in The New York Times’ statement: The newspaper of record was essentially admitting that it has a symbiotic relationship with the government.
In fact, some prominent American pundits have gone so far as to insist that this symbiotic relationship is precisely what makes someone a journalist.
In May, neoconservative Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen — a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush — declared that WikiLeaks publisher and political prisoner Julian Assange is “not a journalist;” rather, he is a “spy” who “deserves prison.” (Thiessen also once called Assange “the devil.”)
What was the Post columnist’s rationale for revoking Assange’s journalistic credentials?
Unlike “reputable news organizations, Assange did not give the U.S. government an opportunity to review the classified information WikiLeaks was planning to release so they could raise national security objections,” Thiessen wrote. “So responsible journalists have nothing to fear.”
In other words, this former U.S. government speechwriter turned corporate media pundit insists that collaborating with the government, and censoring your reporting to protect “national security,” is definitionally what makes you a journalist.
This is the express ideology of the American commentariat.
Julian Assange is no hero. He is the devil. https://t.co/LCXdRlTLKG
— Marc Thiessen (@marcthiessen) October 24, 2016
NYT Editors ‘Quite Willing’ to Cooperate
The symbiotic relationship between the U.S. corporate media and the government has been known for some time. American intelligence agencies play the press like a musical instrument, using it to selectively leak information at opportune moments to push U.S. soft power and advance Washington’s interests.
But rarely is this symbiotic relationship so casually and publicly acknowledged.
In 2018, former New York Times reporter James Risen published a 15,000-word article in The Intercept providing further insight into how this unspoken alliance operates.
1. #JamesRisen: "A top CIA official once told me that his rule of thumb for whether a covert operation should be approved was, “How will this look on the front page of the New York Times?” https://t.co/YIUtpTthe8
— stefania maurizi (@SMaurizi) May 8, 2018
Risen detailed how his editors had been “quite willing to cooperate with the government.” In fact, a top CIA official even told Risen that his rule of thumb for approving a covert operation was, “How will this look on the front page of the New York Times?”
There is an “informal arrangement” between the state and the press, Risen explained, where U.S. government officials “regularly engaged in quiet negotiations with the press to try to stop the publication of sensitive national security stories.”
“At the time, I usually went along with these negotiations,” the former New York Times reporter said. He recalled an example of a story he was writing on Afghanistan just prior to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Then-CIA Director George Tenet called Risen personally and asked him to kill the story.
“He told me the disclosure would threaten the safety of the CIA officers in Afghanistan,” Risen said. “I agreed.”
Risen said he later questioned whether or not this was the right decision. “If I had reported the story before 9/11, the CIA would have been angry, but it might have led to a public debate about whether the United States was doing enough to capture or kill bin Laden,” he wrote. “That public debate might have forced the CIA to take the effort to get bin Laden more seriously.”
This dilemma led Risen to reconsider responding to U.S. government requests to censor stories. “And that ultimately set me on a collision course with the editors at The New York Times,” he said.
“After the 9/11 attacks, the Bush administration began asking the press to kill stories more frequently,” Risen continued. “They did it so often that I became convinced the administration was invoking national security to quash stories that were merely politically embarrassing.”
In the lead-up to the Iraq War, Risen frequently “clashed” with Times editors because he raised questions about the U.S. government’s lies. His stories “raising questions about the intelligence, particularly the administration’s claims of a link between Iraq and Al Qaeda, were being cut, buried, or held out of the paper altogether.”
The Times’ executive editor Howell Raines “was believed by many at the paper to prefer stories that supported the case for war,” Risen said.
In another anecdote, the former Times journalist recalled a scoop he had uncovered on a botched CIA plot. The Bush administration got wind of it and called him to the White House, where then-National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice ordered the Times to bury the story.
Risen said Rice told him “to forget about the story, destroy my notes, and never make another phone call to discuss the matter with anyone.”
“The Bush administration was successfully convincing the press to hold or kill national security stories,” Risen wrote. And the Barack Obama administration subsequently accelerated the “war on the press.”
The New York Times newsroom in 2008, shortly after moving to its current location. (Bpaulh, Wikimedia Commons)
CIA Infiltration and Manufacturing Consent
In their renowned study of U.S. media, “Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media,” Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky articulated a “propaganda model,” showing how “the media serve, and propagandize on behalf of, the powerful societal interests that control and finance them,” through “the selection of right-thinking personnel and by the editors’ and working journalists’ internalization of priorities and definitions of newsworthiness that conform to the institution’s policy.”
But in some cases, the relationship between U.S. intelligence agencies and the corporate media is not just one of mere ideological policing, indirect pressure, or friendship, but rather one of employment.
In the 1950s, the CIA launched a covert operation called Project Mockingbird, in which it surveilled, influenced, and manipulated American journalists and media coverage, explicitly in order to direct public opinion against the Soviet Union, China, and the growing international communist movement.
Legendary journalist Carl Bernstein, a former Washington Postreporter who helped uncover the Watergate scandal, published a major cover story for Rolling Stone in 1977 titled “The CIA and the Media: How America’s Most Powerful News Media Worked Hand in Glove with the Central Intelligence Agency and Why the Church Committee Covered It Up.”
Bernstein obtained CIA documents that revealed that more than 400 American journalists in the previous 25 years had “secretly carried out assignments for the Central Intelligence Agency.”
Bernstein wrote: “Some of these journalists’ relationships with the Agency were tacit; some were explicit. There was cooperation, accommodation and overlap. Journalists provided a full range of clandestine services — from simple intelligence gathering to serving as go?betweens with spies in Communist countries. Reporters shared their notebooks with the CIA. Editors shared their staffs. Some of the journalists were Pulitzer Prize winners, distinguished reporters who considered themselves ambassadors without portfolio for their country. Most were less exalted: foreign correspondents who found that their association with the Agency helped their work; stringers and freelancers who were as interested in the derring do of the spy business as in filing articles; and, the smallest category, full-time CIA employees masquerading as journalists abroad. In many instances, CIA documents show, journalists were engaged to perform tasks for the CIA with the consent of the managements of America’s leading news organizations.”
Virtually all major U.S. media outlets cooperated with the CIA, Bernstein revealed, including ABC, NBC, the AP, UPI, Reuters, Newsweek, Hearst newspapers, The Miami Herald, The Saturday Evening Post, and The New York Herald Tribune.
However, he added, “By far the most valuable of these associations, according to CIA officials, have been with The New York Times, CBS and Time Inc.”
These layers of state manipulation, censorship, and even direct crafting of the news media show that, as much as they claim to be independent, The New York Times and other outlets effectively serve as de facto spokespeople for the government — or at least for the U.S. national security state.
Ben Norton is a journalist and writer. He is a reporter for The Grayzone, and the producer of the “Moderate Rebels podcast,” which he co-hosts with Max Blumenthal. His website is BenNorton.com, and he tweets at @BenjaminNorton.
This article is from Grayzone.
wow a wonderful blog .. thank you dear keep it up.
Bobby Fischer did quiet well accept being cought by the Canadian U.S.A. Border Tax pay hh gngn chess master.
The NYT isn’t run by idiots. They know that if they failed to preclear sensitive national security stories, they would be prosecuted under the Espionage Act. And unlike Assange, they wouldn’t be able to hide in foreign embassies. The NYT offices would be raided by hundreds of armed and trigger happy cops, all computers and documents would be confiscated, and staff might get killed – and this is before a trial that would certainly result in conviction and long sentences. The death penalty might even be imposed by the US Courts. The NYT wants to appear brave, but they really aren’t when it comes to the US Federal Government. NYT will mess with State Governments, but never with the Feds.
Yup, Miami Herald, I see that. Met with a reporter, showed docs, sent info, then nothing … CIA OUT of UM, OUT of all schools.
In February of 2015 a U.S. citizen went into a coma while being subdued by Tokyo police. He died in a Tokyo hospital less than a month later. It was reported in the Japanese press, including in the Japanese language edition of the Wall Street Journal, but not in the U.S. or other foreign press. We still have no idea who this man was or exactly what happened. I tipped off multiple major mainstream news outlets, thinking that perhaps they were unaware of this incident. They all apparently decided this was not news, as none of them responded, but Tokyo Weekender magazine did respond and ran a story on it: “English Teacher Dies after Being Restrained by Police” March 5, 2015 by Alec Jordan.
I filed a FOIA request in April 2015 for the victim’s name and details about the incident. I’m still waiting for that information.
In July 2016 I filed a second FOIA request for all State Department and U.S. Embassy correspondence related to this incident. The State Department claims they did not receive it.
Just compare the news coverage of Otto Warmbier’s death in North Korea and the news coverage of the death of this unnamed American in Japan. Something is going on here.
Actually, Warmbier died in the U.S. after being returned. I suspect it was a suicide attempt, but who knows. It doesn’t seem like North Korea had a motive to brutally torture him, they just wanted a bargaining chip/ransom hostage.
And yet, almost every Hollyweird movie where the villain is a government employee the solution presented is to get the information to “the press”, who will bravely expose the evildoers. People are brought up on that along with their Similac and Gerber baby food. The refutation to every mention of plots or conspiracy is, “If that were real the press would have exposed them, so you’re just another nutty conspiracy theorist.”
Those who read and understand what they read have know for years that a symbiotic relationship between news outlets and the U.S.
government. Some of the things that the main stream media do is censor the news. The NYT and other major papers and all the
electronic media have consistently censored news from the Middle East.
I am aware that such statements immediately stamp the originators as some sort of “conspiracy’ nut. This write may be a nut, but he avows that he is not a conspiracy nut. Just an ordinary nut who reads and is angered by the MSM and the U.S. government working
in tandem to shape public opinion.
I don’t think you understand how the stamping works. Once labelled, nothing will change that – by design. People behave there’s some sort of divinity at work here in an ironically psychotic twist on what’s going on.
Well, that is very interesting, even though anyone who ever read the New York Times for a period understood that it consistently supported the American government in just about everything, including national tragedies like the Kennedy assassination, and especially wars, every single one of them.
I recall a bizarre business back at the time of the invasion of Iraq, an entirely criminal act from beginning to end, when the Times made an effort to bring back the WWII sentimental expression for citizen soldiers,” GIs” in its reports.
It was pure, obvious propaganda, but it was almost laughable, too, because it fit the situation so poorly.
Here were professional mercenary troops involved in an illegal invasion, one that ultimately killed about a million people and saw many atrocities and disgraceful behaviors such as the looting of the precious antiquities’ museum, being referred to as “GIs,” like something from a tearful old Jimmy Stewart movie.
That anecdote is very revealing of the Times’ traditional imperial bias. There never has been a war or conflict it didn’t essentially support. And all of those wars, every one of them since WWII, have been imperial enterprises having absolutely nothing to do with defending the United States.
Also, it was not a terribly long time ago that the Times admitted something many had suspected for years. Every story involving Israel is submitted to the official Israeli censor before being published.
Some journalism. Some brave free speech. Some liberal spirit.
Someone once described the New York Times as the official house organ for America’s establishment. No description has ever suited it better.
This breach of trust between the any news-provider caught working with the government should have the editor and journalist fined and jailed. The irony that the US plans to convince Julian Assange under the draconian Espionage Act has proven to this reader democracy is dead in America. No country will resist corruption if the press is their mouthpiece. Gay Talese covered The New York Times fall from grace in his brilliant book, The Kingdom and the Power.
This not surprising, yet put so explicitly and in a breadth that hints to the depth of the iceberg, its deeply disturbing. Complicity in multilevel falsehood of these dimensions destroy the possibility of credibility, belief and of course trust. What can we know than we can know to be true.
Can anyone here define journalist or journalism?
Now and then I used to write travelogues that were paid for by motels, hotels, guidelines without mentioning they paid me.
Of course I added fluff, sights restaurants, some who paid, was I a journalist.
I wrote short 750 or less by lines for Conservative rags on wether laws, rules, codes, Vietnam conflict, by government were Constitutionaly correct, conduct and viewpoints majority of Americans declared treasonous and un american; was that journalism?
All art is propaganda, it is what is seen by creators to be the cause of reactions by viewers.
Journalism is an art form, words into visual imagery, it can be pornographic, fantacy, truth or outright lie, no matter intent it is still journalism.
It is up to the viewers to determine what form it is, and that takes minds that function outside the box of what passes for an educated public; shall we say more in line with a not educated but a well trained and indoctrinated public.
Two of US greatest journalism examples before and after becoming a Republic, was Thomas Pained pamphlets and the Federalist Papers; history shows Paine dies a broken man while the Federalist papers laid the basis fora strong central vovernment.
Both went beyond mere facts into cause and effects, one against what Pained ideas of mans self rule and The Federalist views of who and how to rule.
Until right after the Civil war the populace at large could exist in spite of Government not because of it, and ever since then American democracy became Democracy by government decree.
Democracy is always wrong, and always late after the fact, constantly needing corrections which eventually destroys the Spirit of laws, Into minor, or as in todays US, major loss of man being even usefully unto himself.
Journalism in the form of propaganda will keep them useless to themselves but usefully to those who write propaganda.
Most Americans are useless as tests on a boar hog!
Interesting. Risen was complaining about being forced to follow CIA’s line, but his own thinking followed CIA’s line without question. He thought CIA should be doing more to capture Osama. CIA wanted us to think that Osama was the enemy, and Risen never asked himself if this made sense.
Simple public facts show the opposite. Osama was empowered and funded by CIA. He wasn’t the enemy, he was an employee.
The NY Times has good articles about culture & the arts, a good crossword, a decent sports section, and generally that’s it, though they still occasionally have a real news story. Last one I remember was about Obama’s drone assassination program, and his weekly meetings to go over the “hit list”. When was that, 7 or 8 years ago?
Why it is called the “paper of record” amazes me;-no wonder Chomsky, with all his research, understanding, brainpower, experience is able to make such errors as we see in his latest interview (blaming Assad and Russia in Syria); he admits to reading the NYT every day!!is this some sort of punishment for his good deeds?!
I find the “media guard” to warn you of questionable websites to be immensely ironic and a prime example of government propaganda. Britain’s “integrity initiative is the same prime bullshit. When I hear the phrase “fake news”, I want to ask the question, official fake news or unofficial fake news.
Not even to line my parrot’s cage would I spend money on the NYT.
The gov has UTTER CONTEMPT for democracy and the people. All the lies…….up / down / up /down nonsense, all the while the lobby groups get ahead unimpeded.
Marc A. Thiessen, a columnist for the Washington Post known for his advocacy of controversial foreign and defense policies, as well as his at times misleading characterizations of current affairs, is a visiting fellow at a leading pro-Israel Lobby “think tank”, the American Enterprise Institute (AEI).
A speechwriter in the Bush White House and Donald Rumsfeld Pentagon, Thiessen has a lengthy track record working for right-wing political figures and hardline nationalist organizations, and for vigorously defending Israeli “intelligence” interests in the name of US national security.
For example, in a 2017 op-ed piece in the Washington Post, Thiessen claimed that it was “time for decisive action to close the sieve of classified intelligence appearing in the press” because anonymous leakers did “incalculable” damage by exposing “intelligence-sharing between the United States and Israel”.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/leakers-who-revealed-israel-as-intelligence-source-did-far-more-damage-than-trump/2017/05/22/ac2621da-3ef5-11e7-8c25-44d09ff5a4a8_story.html
Thiessen insisted that leaks of “sensitive intelligence” either about Israel or sourced from Israel somehow did “far more damage” to US “national security” than the revelation of “Trump’s apparently inadvertent disclosures to the Russians”.
Thiessen specifically cited Obama administration leaks of “highly classified intelligence” that exposed “Israel’s role” in the “Stuxnet” cyberattack on Iran’s nuclear program as “evidence that leakers committed crimes”.
Loudly insisting that anonymous leakers who exposed the “involvement of our liaison partner” [Israel] “need to be brought to task”, Thiessen reveals that his real concern is the “security” of Israel, not the United States.
Not to worry, nobody except a few exceptional idiots believe anything that MSM prints or airs on TV. Anything read in printed media is inherently out of date and TV news is so basis it worthless.
Not at all so, Greg. Some highly educated – not a few, either – listen to, watch and read the MSM and swallow the Orwellian/Huxleyan propaganda.
This reality came as a shock to me when I learnt that my late husband’s FB “friends” – all very definitely highly and expensively educated and all considering themselves “progressive,” “leftist” (whatever these terms mean for these people) and all, so far as I can tell, believing the Russophobia crap. But then most of them are bourgeois, capitalist oriented, consumer eager… I think that my late life-love partner would be shocked to know just how deluded they allow themselves to be.
The trait of any democracy is that it becomes a dictatorship of some degree of the two top classes the moment the become set up.
Alas, I don’t know how many people espy this fact, but so far I have not read or heard that even one member of the two ruling classes acknowledged this fact.
The history of the corporate MSM in America has seen the rise of national news corporations working hand in hand with the government to support wars and advance the agenda of the wealthy who stood to gain a great deal of wealth from our foreign wars. Early on there were major media pushes to get the US into wars for imperialistic motives. The Spanish American war is the die that was cast in the cooperation between the US media and the government to foment war. William Randolph Hearst and his media empire engaged in Yellow Journalism to cast the Spanish in the media spotlight as responsible for the sinking of the US Maine in Havana Harbor and Hearst’s papers of note ran stories with catchy titles like , “To Heck with Spain, Remember The Maine” in order to call up the ranks and sign up young men to go to war with Spain. The result was more than they ever hoped for and it was said that our little war against Spain netted the USA more territory than any other war with the span and reach of the US Military reaching out across both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans as the result of the land grabs that netted us territories that spanned the globe.
These were the heady days of imperialist expansion into foreign territories and it was a signal that God had ordained that our Manifest Destiny to conquer the World was a success. I think we never got off that train of thought throughout the intervening decades. We also never got off the train that media complicity in inventing reasons for US aggression would always net us more lands more resources and more money. Our actions had replicated the imperialist expansionism of Europe including the imperialist control over the colonies in America that England had won.
We won our independence from England only to become just like England in our expansion and military dominance in other regions of the World.
Fast forward to The Project for the New American Century (PNAC) in 1997 which had as its founding principle that the US was the new empire in the world. We were the new hegemonic power that had as it aim to claim its due from the rest of the World. The new century (the 21st century) was a new era where American military power would dominate the planet and control the World in the same way that England controlled the World during their reign as the most expansive empire on the globe. If the Sun never set on the British Empire then just as surely it was our time to grow an empire in which the sun never set. The 21st Century was to be our time in the Sun.
The PNAC folks also published a military plan for dominance that incorporated a strategy for dealing with our external threats. The strategy was to build up our military strength in order to wage multiple simultaneous theater wars against several targeted nations chiefly being Iraq, Syria, Iran and North Korea which President Bush later dubbed the “Axis of Evil”.
In hind sight we can see through the lens of history that the major US media corporations have all cooperated in supplying the speech that got us involved in military actions against all of these countries. Just like William Randolph Hearst and his Yellow Journalism the fabric of the media which netted us such a large haul back a century ago is still in full tilt supplying the Yellow Journalism of our modern era.
Now comes the difficult part to accept but accept it we must because the form and the nature of the propaganda then is the same as the form and the nature of the propaganda today. The MSM is engaged in the service of the empire just as it was back over a century ago to wage wars of conquest for territories and resources. It does not care if the reasons for war are contrived and made up based on a bunch of BS like the sinking of the USS Maine or Saddam’s WMDs. It has as its goals domination of these countries for its own purposes and the MSM will fill in the rest of the story for us.
There is a story about how William Randolph Hearst sent a reporter down to Havana to get the scoop about how a Spanish mine was responsible for the sinking of the USS Maine. As the story goes, the reporter wired Hearst that he could find no evidence of Spanish involvement. Hearst famously replied, “You supply the photographs, I’ll supply the war”. And so it was.
It is eerily similar to the present crisis with Iran where Iran is blamed for attacking oil tankers with mines and the US MSM supplies the photographs supplied by the military to support the case for war with Iran.
I’ll close with where I started. The history of the corporate MSM in America has seen the rise of national news corporations working hand in hand with the government to support wars and advance the agenda of the wealthy who stood to gain a great deal of wealth from our foreign wars.
Superb comment, CitizenOne.
Teddy Roosevelt referred to that war as “Our splendid little war.”
Somehow, the next one will likely neither be little nor splendid.
However, it is anticipated to be profitable.
it is kind of interesting that everyone here is ragging on the NYT. Why would that be? I get my news from the intercept, crooks and liars, politico, the wapo, the milwaukeejournalsentinel, fox news, aljezeera, TMZ, the daily news England, Sinclair News, Fox News. Believe me, the NYT have the worst journalists, they just spew lies. No self respecting individual would ever believe one word the NYT’s prints. The NYT are total liars.
TMZ? Fox news?
Wow. That’s like bashing smart cars for shoddy craftsmanship while driving a fiat 500.
Quite. We (now I alone) only listened to the news: NPR and BBC world service. Not from fealty, and not from the belief that what or how they relate as news is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, but because you’ve gotta have some idea about what the mainstream propaganda is. Then you turn to other sources (and I don’t mean more of the same).
Actually I grew up with the Beeb on the radio (no television in the house till I was 10, in 1958; and then only the Beeb). So I prefer to listen to or read my news or what passes for it.
Without MoA, Consortium News, RT, SC, MPN, BA etc., etc., what would one do? (Can’t look at Truthout etc., nowadays – they went with the Demrat flow.)
(Not a Dumpster either – hardly. They’re all cut from the same cloth, both sides of the aisle.)
“Why would that be?” The REAL question is, why would you say “why would that be?” at such a site as CN?! Shows your lack of depth of comprehension, even after posting here for some time.
Ben is one of the good guys, as is Max Blumenthal.
This just in, just when you though the story had finally died, it is Mueller Time once again:
https://intelligence.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=671
Only this time the Republicans will be asking about the Obama administration spying, the Steel Dossier especially related to FISA warrants, all the pro-Hillary and anti-Trump shenanigans going on at top levels of the FBI (the insurance policy etc).
The Democrats must like stepping in it.
The NYT sat on their story until after the election about how the Bush administration was spying on us. After Bush won a second term we finally found out about that. Imagine what the outcome might have been if we had known about it before hand. This was of course back when people cared about their rights. Today not so much.
Ben, good to see you here, at CN.
Frankly, I do not read this statement from The NY Times as an admission, for it is not, by any stretch, a contrite, apologetic, accounting of error or lapsed journalistic ethics. It is far more a boast, an assertion of purest rectitude, their “position” as the “Paper of Note, now bolstered, vindicated by authority with a righteous stamp of official approval, proof of service in the Times continuing “resistance” efforts and crusade for TRUTH, justice, and leaping speeding bulletins in a single bound, who, fitting the news … to policies,as mild-mannered sycophants sexed up to building, stronger than a locomotive, narratives that cannot fail to please. And, if you buy the print edition, you can wrap fishy things in it.
It is but a harbinger, a forerunner, announcing a new, improved, giant-sized comity between government power and corporate propaganda.
Will new “revolving doors” now pop into existence between power and those “who talk truth to power” to be signed off on BY power?
For years, ex-officials have found their way, from government or military, to positions of “expert” punditry. Will deserving pundits now have greater and more lucrative opportunities to become “public servants” for the “greater good”?
This was a two-for.
Stick it to the Ruskies and make a chump of Trump.
No, it ain’t “treason”, just the Art of the Deal. All very crafty.
Always a valuable contribution from Ben Norton. Interesting choices of citations, though: Risen, the faux hero; Chomsky, the controlled opposition philosopher; and Bernstein, the long lost reporter who never connected the dots on his former-ONI, Mockingbird partner on the so-called ‘scoop of the century’, a plot concocted and executed by Langley to silence a once-trusted official who eventually asked too many questions about “that Bay of Pigs thing.” These are some of the elite-approved ‘dissenting voices’ of our time. How fortunate for we mere mortals.
Still, enjoyable to see the obvious in print, namely that state propaganda is transmitted over the airwaves and into our homes and personal spaces via the printed word incessantly, on the unfurled banners of the most well known names in media.
Now, appreciate how few persons actually comprehend how manipulated their information has always been and continues to be, and consider how many of those mistakenly consider their choices, decisions, and opinions informed.
Scary stuff.
Nice article thank you
Wait a second…
People are saying Trump is a “Putin Puppet” for being upset that a cyber spying and sabotage program against Putin’s Russia was revealed by the New York Times? A “Putin Puppet” would rather that Putin not be aware of this, rather it all remain covert?
This just doesn’t make sense.
No Miranda, it doesn’t make sense. And there are “people” in this article that make me fume or want to vomit (sorry) with their asinine attitude (Marc Thiessen) Also, the caption underneath the NYT pic makes no sense to me. “The NYT newsroom in 2008, shortly after moving to its current location”. Why not “The current NYT newsroom”? I cannot see journalism in any of this. And I do understand some of the pressures they are under. Carl’s 1977 piece (wow, it was that long ago) is worth archiving.
Ms Keefe – It isn’t meant to make sense, surely? Anything can be twisted to suggest whatever you wish it to, apparently. And if your audience/readership are already more or less in your “court” (as the bourgeoisie tends to be, except, perhaps, for the occasional quirk) you’re on a pretty safe bet that they’ll accept contradictions as proof positives.
It boggles my mind that anyone (who is not professionally required to do so) still reads NYT. For me personally, it lost all credibility after its Saddam’s WMD story, including Judy Miller’s reports.