Spooked: How the CIA Manipulates the Media, Part 2

The post Spooked: How the CIA Manipulates the Media, Part 2 appeared first on WhoWhatWhy.

Americans are under almost constant bombardment with propaganda. Everyone who wants our money is trying in overt and more subtle ways to shape our views and our spending decisions. We kind of get that.

But we don’t understand very well, or even recognize at all, the constant efforts by elements of our own government to shape how we see things.

Perhaps the most insidious aspect of this is efforts by American intelligence services to influence our media, our cultural, and our storytelling institutions. The goal is to present a version of historical events that suits the purposes of these murky power centers.

WhoWhatWhy has started to take back ownership of our vital information pipelines.

A new book, from which we excerpt below, provides important insights into how the news, movies and other forms of dissemination are quietly shaped to “help” us know what to think.

— WhoWhatWhy introduction by Russ Baker

This is the second and last installment from Spooked: How the CIA Manipulates the Media and Hoodwinks Hollywood by Nicholas Schou. (Published by Hot Books, June 2016)  Chapter One: “I Eat Pretty Much Anything”  (truncated). To see the first installment, please go here.

On December 23, 2013, in response to a pair of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, the Central Intelligence Agency released 574 pages of emails between various national security reporters and the agency’s public affairs office. The massive trove of material remained out of the public eye for a year, but in late 2014, it finally surfaced in a series of articles published by the online investigative magazine, The Intercept.

The articles landed like a bombshell, revealing how some of America’s most prominent national security reporters were functioning essentially as unpaid CIA assets, sending the agency detailed story notes and, in at least one case, entire drafts of articles prior to publication.

“Since Snowden, we are unsuccessful 90% of the time,” one CIA spokesperson glumly estimated, in reference to his efforts to convince reporters to either kill a story or delay it, at least long enough for the agency to protect its undercover assets and operations — or to protect Langley’s ass.

Roughly half of the released emails concerned just one reporter, Siobhan Gorman, who recently left the Wall Street Journal for a better paying job with Brunswick, a privately held global communications company.