Has The American Mass Media Turned Itself Into An Arm Of A Government Propaganda Machine?

One month ago, to the day, we looked at a fascinating bit of interaction, billed as a HARDtalk interview, between Glenn Greenwald and a British government stooge who broadcasts propaganda on the BBC, Stephen Sackur, the voice of Establishment Group Think. You can hit that link above and watch the interview if you'd like because Greenwald refrerred to it Friday in a German computer conference, Hamburg's 30th annual Chaos Communication Congress on Friday. Greenwald's keynote address accused the media establishment of being "guilty of failing significantly with respect to accomplishing its most crucial role: keeping governments in check." Obviously Greenwald and the other journalists who took part in the Ed Snowden whistleblower episode strayed far from the propaganda role the mainstream media has been drifting into.

“It really is the case that the United States and British governments are not only willing but able to engage in any conduct no matter how grotesque,” Greenwald said. Nevertheless, he added, journalists tasked with reporting on those issues have all too often been compliant with the blatant lies made by officials from those governments.

...“[A]t one point I made what I thought was the very unremarkable and uncontroversial observation that the reason why we have a free press is because national security officials routinely lie to the population in order to shield their power and get their agenda advanced,” recalled Greenwald, who said it is both the “the goal and duty of a journalist is to be adversarial to those people in power.”

[Sackur:] “I just cannot believe that you would suggest that senior officials, generals in the US and the British government, are actually making false claims to the public,” he remembered being told on-air.

“It really is the central view of certainly American and British media stars, that when-- especially people with medals on their chest who are called generals, but also high officials in the government-- make claims that those claims are presumptively treated as true without evidence. And that it’s almost immoral to call them into question or to question their voracity,” he said.

“Obviously we went through the Iraq War, in which those very two same governments specifically and deliberately lied repeatedly to the government, to their people, over the course of two years to justify an aggressive war that destroyed a country of 26 million people. But we’ve seen it continuously over the last six months as well.”

From there, he went on to cite the example of US Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, who earlier this year made remarks to Congress that were quickly proved false by documents leaked to Greenwald by Mr. Snowden. The very first National Security Agency document he was shown, Greenwald said, “revealed that the Obama administration had succeeded in convincing court, a secret court, to compel phone companies to turn over to the NSA every single phone record of every single telephone call.”

Clapper “went to the Senate and lied to their faces...which is at least as serious of a crime as anything Edward Snowden is accused of," Greenwald added.

But DNI Clapper aside, Greenwald said that the established media continues to reject the notion that government officials spew lies. Snowden’s NSA documents have exposed those fibs on more than one occasion, he noted, yet reporters around the world continue to take the word of officials as fact rather than dig from the truth.

“Their role is not to be adversarial. Their role is to be loyal spokespeople to those powerful factions that they pretend to exercise oversight,” Greenwald said.

But as the US, UK and other governments continue to feed the media lies, Greenwald said their operations are far from being single-pronged. The US “knows that its only hope for continuing to maintain its regiment of secrecy behind which it engages with radical and corrupt acts is to intimidate and deter and threaten people who are would-be whistleblowers and transparency activists from coming forward and doing what it is that they do by showing them that they’ll be subjected to even the most extreme punishments and there’s nothing that they can do about it,” he said. “And it’s an effective tactic.”

...The NSA’s goal, Greenwald said, is to “ensure that all forms of human communication... are collected, monitored, stored and analyzed by that agency and by their allies.”

I just happen to be reading Stephen Kinzer's great new book on John Foster and Allen Dulles, The Brothers and Kinzer provides ample examples throughout the chapters dealing with Allen Dulles' role as CIA director of how he inaugurated the policies of subverting and coopting the media. Thursday we saw how he was able to get a NY Times reporter fired for reporting the inconvenient truth about Guatemala, just as the CIA was about the launch a covert war against that country and replace the democratically-elected president with a brutal fascist dictator more in line with CIA ideals. As Kinzer explained, the Dulles brothers, under the protection of President Eisenhower, were able to create "a nexus of power unmatched in American history."

Law prohibited the CIA from operating within the United States, but Allen interpreted it loosely. He sought to shape coverage of world events in the American press through calls to editors and publishers... Perhaps the most imaginative media operation was taking control of the animated film version of George Orwell's anti-totalitarian classic Animal Farm. The book's ending, in which animals realize that both ruling groups in the barnyard are equally corrupt, is a trenchant rejection of the binary worldview. Allen realized that this message implicitly contradicted much of what the United States was saying about the Cold War. By investing in the film and influencing its content through a team of operatives who included E. Howard Hunt... he arranged for the film version to end quite differenty. Only the pigs are corrupt, and ultimately patriotic rebels overthrow them. Orwell's widow was disgusted, but the film reached a wide audience. The United States Information Agency distributed it around the world.

Republicans always seek to fight totalitarianism-- or at least the kind that endangers American corporate profits-- with... what elese? totalitarianism. The Dulles brothers may have made it standard operating procedure for the American government, but Obama sure isn't doing anything to ameliorate a problem that got very much out of control under the Cheney-Bush administration.