Corporate media/Deep state control

Corporate media/Deep state control (Media manipulation,  statecraft)
George Orwell had a long association with the BBC and was familiar with its editorial loyalties, oversight and methods
Interest of	• Australian Strategic Policy Institute • Project Censored • Swiss Policy Research
On important topics, control of the corporate media by the deep state is the rule, not the exception.

Deep state control of the corporate media is increasingly clear in the 21^st century, as the internet has facilitated widespread dissemination of primary documents and eyewitness testimony that would seem to contradict its long held claims. Moreover, the egregiousness of the fraud surrounding COVID-19 alerted many people to its brazenness.

“In reality, in times of crisis, mainstream media organizations will always report the news in a way that is beneficial to the ruling elite.”
John Simkin

As an extension of the establishment, the corporate media is infiltrated with spooks who can, within their normal job remit, push certain narratives while quietly removing or modifying others. The hierarchical system of editorial control might have been designed to facilitate this, but overt censorship is rarely needed, since the language, culture and the broader traditions all work together to form a more subtle and flexible matrix of control.

Staff

The hierarchical system of corporate employment means that owners and editors are the most important staff in exerting control over corporate media output. Most of the leaders popular media outlets have secret affiliations, such as being members of the Bilderberg, Trilateral Commission, CFR or or other deep state milieux. Others can be bought off, are compromised through blackmail of one kind or another.

Journalists can of course be threatened with the sack if they disobey their bosses, and unwanted output could get caught by editors in any case. However, such explicit control is heavy handed and generally superfluous; Pulitzer prize winning journalist, Gary Webb, who used the emerging WWW to broke the story of the CIA's cocaine trafficking in his Dark Alliance series, recalled:

“The reason I'd enjoyed such smooth sailing for so long hadn’t been, as I’d assumed, because I was careful and diligent and good at my job... The truth was that, in all those years, I hadn’t written anything important enough to suppress.”
Gary Webb

Webb's compellingly documented story was first ignored by Washington, then minimised and finally disavowed by his own newspaper who caved under pressure from the establishment. The tragic fate of Gary Webb illustrates what can happen to those who are more loyal to the truth than the establishment. Many journalists are steeped in official narratives about "Terrorism", "Globalisation", "Economic growth, "Free trade" etc. Some never touch on such sensitive topics, and so remain blissfully unaware of the strictly enforced limits to their writing. Some have learned to subconsciously self-censor, perhaps after a few words or facial expressions from an editor, perhaps after a colleague is sacked for speaking or writing out of turn.

Means

Soon after it was formally established, the CIA initiated Operation Mockingbird to control the US media. While subversion of individual established journalists is certainly possible, plants are potentially more reliable. One group through which the modern UK Deep state has influenced corporate media is the Integrity Initiative/Institute for Statecraft Euan Grant wrote that the (UK government-funded) IfS has “particular links with the Times, Telegraph, Guardian and BBC TV and radio” but says that it needs to “strengthen” its relationship with the Mail.

Topics

Naturally, the corporate structure of media corporations resonates with certain value sets more than with others. For example, those organisations (such as corporations or spooks) with large budgets, can expect to influence the output of corporate media. Topic selection reflects this, so that those who work within the corporate media system may find it natural to report on topics of interest to those atop large commercial hierarchies.

Fictitious narratives

Wikipedia cites reporting of an event by corporate media as an indication that it is important. Similarly, corporate media outlets cite other corporate media outlets, reporting on their reporting, even for ideas which have little or no evidential backing. This simple strategy is used to promote fictitious memes, for example, to the narrative of the so-called "War on terror" and the dangers of Islamic extremism. Corporate media massively over-emphasise the dangerous of "terrorism" as opposed to other dangers and portray its perpetrators as overwhelmingly Muslim, when the reality according to Europol is that <1% of terrorist incidents in Europe are by Islamic terrorists. Rebecca Gordon details how since 9/11 the "war on terror" has been used to keep the US population in a state of fear, and how public acceptance of their government's policy of torture has risen as a result.

Several promoted topics are transparently useful to the deep state - such as the idea of "Lone nuts" who provide cover for otherwise difficult to explain assassinations, or the claim the mass surveillance of the internet makes people safer.

In 2005 the case of Steve Wilson and Jane Akre established that there is no law against distorting or falsifying the news in the United States. The mendacious testimony of 'Nurse Nayirah' was a highly influential piece of war propaganda because it was uncritically echoed by corporate media. Although the deception — which lead up to a war that killed over a million people - has now been unmasked, as of 2017, no one has been held accountable.

"Fake News"

Full article: “Fake News”

In November 2016, the corporate media proclaimed a phenomenon of "Fake News". This was used as a perjorative exonym - never applied to the corporate media themselves, and no effort was made to address the fact that the corporate media in US can legally lie. Instead, it was targeted at websites, including Wikispooks, which was next to Wikileaks on a spooky list of 200 outlets of "Russian propaganda". This appears to be part of an ongoing effort to try to stem the general public's increasing shift away from corporate media to the more ideologically diverse (and thus harder to control) source of the internet. It is also associated with increasing internet censorship.

Censorship

Full article: Corporate media/Censorship

Corporate media is censored, although it sometimes pretends not to be. Wikipedia, makes much of its lack of censorship, but its own policies now tie it to corporate media, since news is not "notable" unless it appears in corporate media. Non-corporate sources are deemed "unreliable". This reached new heights in 2020 as regards COVID-19.

Monitoring

Deep state groups closely monitor the output of commercially-controlled media, as revealed by the Integrity Initiative Leak, which included a review of reporting on the Skripal Affair by corporate media in Bosnia Herzegovina, Montenegro, Lithuania, Estonia, Moldova, Jordan, France and Italy

Language

The corporate media community reveals its loyalties by the language it uses. Muammar Gaddafi was almost always referred to as "Colonel Gaddafi" by the Western media, and his government was referred to as a "regime". The Pentagon doesn't use drones to murder or assassinate people, it carries out "targeted killings". The CIA doesn't kidnap and torture people, it "renders" them subject to "enhanced interrogation".

Project Censored reported in 2014 that although forced sexual intercourse is legally recognized as “rape”, corporate media journalists often "downplay the humiliation and cruelty entailed in these acts" by using milder sounding alternatives. Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting cited an an example from the Los Angeles Times: In January 2013, "the Times published an important story addressing how two Los Angeles police officers were accused of using the threat of imprisonment to force several women they previously arrested to have sex with them. This is recognized under law as “rape.” “But the Times avoided using that term,” FAIR noted, “inexplicably employing every other word and phrase imaginable — including ‘sex crimes,’ ‘sexual favors’ and ‘forced sex’ — to describe what the officers were accused of.”"

Media

Television

Full article: Television

Television has functioned since its inception as a propaganda tool. Its popularity has been in steady decline since internet-capable computers came into widespread use. The Deep State as of 2022 has been unsuccessful in reversing this trend and during COVID-19 it resorted to an old tactic, unprecedented levels of censorship.

Websites

Websites are cheaper to operate and harder to censor than legacy media, which raised the concern of the supranational deep state. One notoriously unsuccessful project to try to smear websites (including this one) was the "fake news website" project, which backfired and alerted many of the less savvy readership of newspapers to what came to be called "fake news". Victor Madeira suggested in mid March 2018 that the Institute for Statecraft

“Expand the network of IfS associates and partner organisations to include e.g. DarthPutin, GlasnostGone, StopFake, European Values, Saper Vedere, and coordinate their efforts to mirror and amplify what IfS is already doing where possible.”
Victor Madeira (16 March 2018) 

 

Related Quotations

Page	Quote	Author	Date
"Fake news website"	“The mainstream corporate media is desperate. They want to suppress independent and alternative online media, which it categorizes as “fake news”. Readers on social media are warned not to go onto certain sites. The intent of this initiative is to smear honest reporting and Truth in Media. Our analysis confirms that the corporate media are routinely involved in distorting the facts and turning realities upside down. They are the unspoken architects of “Fake News”.”	Michel Chossudovsky	24 November 2016
Gerard Batten	“Thank you, Mr. President. The [European] Commission have recently replied to my written question confirming that Commissioners [Joaquin] Almunia and [Neelie] Kroes attended the Bilderberg meeting in St. Moritz in June. The Commission cannot tell me details of what was discussed, but that surely the Bilderberg meetings do not take decisions. If Bilderberg meetings are just talking shops, why do the most powerful figures from around the world, including George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, bother to attend? What other summit of world leaders in politics, finance and business would go completely unreported in the mainstream media such as the BBC? It’s impossible not to reach the conclusion that the non-reporting of these events is anything other than a conspiracy between the [Bilderberg] organisers and the media. It merely confirms the belief of many that the hidden agenda and purpose of the Bilderberg Group is to bring about undemocratic world government. It’s a disgrace that the European Commission is colluding in that.”	Gerard Batten	12 September 2011
George Carlin	“Now, to balance the scale, I'd like to talk about some things that bring us together, things that point out our similarities instead of our differences. 'Cause that's all you ever hear about in this country. It's our differences. That's all the media and the politicians are ever talking about—the things that separate us, things that make us different from one another. That's the way the ruling class operates in any society. They try to divide the rest of the people. They keep the lower and the middle classes fighting with each other so that they, the rich, can run off with all the fucking money! Fairly simple thing. Happens to work. You know? Anything different—that's what they're gonna talk about—race, religion, ethnic and national background, jobs, income, education, social status, sexuality, anything they can do to keep us fighting with each other, so that they can keep going to the bank! You know how I define the economic and social classes in this country? The upper class keeps all of the money, pays none of the taxes. The middle class pays all of the taxes, does all of the work. The poor are there just to scare the shit out of the middle class. Keep 'em showing up at those jobs.”	George Carlin
Corporate media/Censorship	“would through a lurid light of distrust and disbelief onto our entire electoral system, political system and basically our democracy”	Jonathan Simon	24 November 2016
Corporate media/Logic	“Now, to balance the scale, I'd like to talk about some things that bring us together, things that point out our similarities instead of our differences. 'Cause that's all you ever hear about in this country. It's our differences. That's all the media and the politicians are ever talking about—the things that separate us, things that make us different from one another. That's the way the ruling class operates in any society. They try to divide the rest of the people. They keep the lower and the middle classes fighting with each other so that they, the rich, can run off with all the fucking money! Fairly simple thing. Happens to work. You know? Anything different—that's what they're gonna talk about—race, religion, ethnic and national background, jobs, income, education, social status, sexuality, anything they can do to keep us fighting with each other, so that they can keep going to the bank! You know how I define the economic and social classes in this country? The upper class keeps all of the money, pays none of the taxes. The middle class pays all of the taxes, does all of the work. The poor are there just to scare the shit out of the middle class. Keep 'em showing up at those jobs.”	George Carlin
Corporate media/Mendacity	“More and more we are seeing narratives about cyber-threats being used to advance reports of “attacks” and “acts of war” being perpetrated which, as far as the public is concerned, consist of nothing other than the authoritative assertions of confident-sounding media pundits. There was a recent NBC exclusive which was co-authored by Ken Dilanian, who is an actual, literal CIA asset, about the threat of hackers working for the Iranian government. The alleged Russian interference in the 2016 US elections is now routinely compared to Pearl Harbor and 9/11, despite no hard, verifiable evidence that that interference even took place ever being presented to the public.”	Caitlin Johnstone	11 August 2018
Katharine Graham	“We live in a dirty and dangerous world. There are some things the general public does not need to know and shouldn't. I think democracy flourishes when the government can take legitimate steps to keep its secrets and when the press can decide whether to print what it knows.”	Katharine Graham	1988
Institute for Statecraft/Secrecy	“Was there a ‘D Notice’ issued by the British government forbidding mainstream media outlets from reporting on the embarrassing leak of this clandestine propaganda operation?”
Integrity Initiative	“offers us a glimpse into the very dirty world of surveillance and official disinformation. If we actually had a free media, it would be the biggest story of the day.”	Craig Murray	December 2018
Journalist	“If we had met five years ago, you wouldn't have found a more staunch defender of the newspaper industry than me ... I was winning awards, getting raises, lecturing college classes, appearing on TV shows, and judging journalism contests. So how could I possibly agree with people like Noam Chomsky and Ben Bagdikian, who were claiming the system didn't work, that it was steered by powerful special interests and corporations, and existed to protect the power elite? And then I wrote some stories that made me realize how sadly misplaced my bliss had been. The reason I'd enjoyed such smooth sailing for so long hadn't been, as I'd assumed, because I was careful and diligent and good at my job ... The truth was that, in all those years, I hadn't written anything important enough to suppress.”	Gary Webb
Journalist	“There is no such a thing in America as an independent press, unless it is out in country towns. You are all slaves. You know it, and I know it. There is not one of you who dares to express an honest opinion. If you expressed it, you would know beforehand that it would never appear in print. I am paid $150 for keeping honest opinions out of the paper I am connected with. Others of you are paid similar salaries for doing similar things. If I should allow honest opinions to be printed in one issue of my paper, I would be like Othello before twenty-four hours: my occupation would be gone. The man who would be so foolish as to write honest opinions would be out on the street hunting for another job. The business of a New York journalist is to distort the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to villify, to fawn at the feet of Mammon, and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread, or for what is about the same — his salary. You know this, and I know it; and what foolery to be toasting an "Independent Press"! We are the tools and vassals of rich men behind the scenes. We are jumping-jacks. They pull the string and we dance. Our time, our talents, our lives, our possibilities, are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes.”	John Swinton
Journalist	“This story of CIA drug dealing became a sensation because of the website, not because of the story, but because people could get to it. And they could never have gotten to it before because the San Jose Mercury News is a small regional newspaper in Northern California that you couldn't read if you lived in New York or you couldn't read if you lived in L.A.. But this story you could read anywhere in the world.”	Gary Webb	2003
Operation Gladio/B	“I am confident that there is conversation inside the Government as to ‘How do we deal with Sibel [Edmonds]? The first line of defense is to ensure that she doesn’t get into the [corporate] media. I think any outlet that thought of using her materials would go to to the government and they would be told "don’t touch this..."”	Daniel Ellsberg
Operation Gladio/B	“A journalist with the Sunday Times‘ investigative unit told this author he had interviewed former Special Agent in Charge, Dennis Saccher, who had moved to the FBI’s Colorado office. Saccher reportedly confirmed the veracity of Edmonds’ allegations of espionage, telling him that Edmonds’ story “should have been front page news” because it was “a scandal bigger than Watergate.””	Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed
Operation Gladio/B	“[The] investigation based on Edmonds’ information was supposed to have four parts, but was inexplicably dropped. “The story was pulled half-way, suddenly, without any warning”, the journalist said. “I wasn’t party to the editorial decision to drop the story, but there was a belief in the office amongst several journalists who were part of the Insight investigative unit that the decision was made under pressure from the U.S. State Department, because the story might cause a diplomatic incident... The way the story was dropped was unusual, but the belief amongst my colleagues this happened under political pressure is plausible.” He cryptically described an “editorial mechanism, linked to the paper but not formally part of it, which could however exert control on stories when necessary, linked to certain interests.” When asked which interests, the journalist said, “I can’t say. I can’t talk about that.”	An unnamed "lead reporter" on Edmonds' series at the Sunday Times.
Sunday Times	“The Sunday Times was a serious, respectable newspaper until Andrew Neil became its editor in the mid-1980s and turned it into a mouth-piece for MI5 and the MOD to run their rubbish through.”	Robin Ramsay	8 November 2000
John Swinton	“There is no such thing, at this date of the world's history, in America, as an independent press. You know it and I know it. There is not one of you who dares to write your honest opinions, and if you did, you know beforehand that it would never appear in print. I am paid weekly for keeping my honest opinion out of the paper I am connected with. Others of you are paid similar weekly salaries for similar things, and any of you who would be so foolish as to write honest opinions would be out on the streets looking for another job. If I allowed my honest opinions to appear in one issue of my paper, before twenty-four hours my occupation would be gone. The business of the journalists is to destroy the truth; to lie outright; to pervert; to vilify; to fawn at the feet of mammon, and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread. You know it and I know it, and what folly is this toasting an independent press? We are the tools and vassals of rich men behind the scenes. We are the jumping jacks, they pull the strings and we dance. Our talents, our possibilities, and our lives are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes.”	John Swinton	1880
Washington Conference on International Terrorism	“Given terrorism's unique dependence on publicity and amplification, the media have a crucial role in either facilitating or obstructing the spread of terrorism against the West... manipulation of public opinion is in fact, central to the terrorist strategy. For this purpose, access to the media, indeed their domination, is indispensable.”

 

Related Documents

Title	Type	Publication date	Author(s)	Description
Document:Hacks and Spooks	article	3 March 2006	Richard Keeble
Document:Objectives, Tasks and Cluster activities and Relationships	Wikispooks Page		Euan Grant	Euan Grant lists an extensive list of willing collaborators. Intelligence people, non-fiction authors and lots and lots of media.
Document:The CIA Makes the News	article	August 1976	Steve Weissman
Document:The Propaganda Multiplier	media analysis	2016	Swiss Policy Research

Rating

28 February 2022 Robin  An important set of observations
Good explanation of how the corporate media is controlled by agents of the deep state.

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