November 12th, 2006

The Major News Media

news

The following are some quotes I collected during a presentation last night by Ken Bowers on the subject of the mainstream media. I think it’s no surprise to anybody that news organizations often carry a bias and slant, one way or the other. In order to understand their purpose and control, one must also understand the history of these organizations as well as who owns them. Those who have been looking into these things I post about should recognize the name of David Rockefeller… well, he owns pretty much all of the media. So, a conspiratorial latter-day gadianton is in charge of our public opinion-making machine. Nice. Anywho, here are the quotes:


It is difficult for them to see whose paycheck depends on them not seeing.
Upton Sinclair

The enormous gap between what US leaders do in the world and what Americans think their leaders are doing is one of the great propaganda accomplishments of the dominant political mythology.
Michael Parenti, “Democracy For the Few”

And it came to pass that there arose a mist of darkness; yea, even an exceedingly great mist of darkness, insomuch that they who had commenced in the path did lose their way, that they wandered off and were lost.” —(1 Nephi 8:23)

I have the greatest admiration for your propaganda. Propaganda in the West is carried out by experts who have had the best training in the world – in the field of advertising – and have mastered the techniques with exceptional proficiency… Yours are subtle and persuasive; ours are crude and obvious… I think that the fundamental difference between our worlds, with respect to propaganda, is quite simple. You tend to believe yours… and we tend to disbelieve yours.
a Soviet correspondent based five years in the US

Such as it is, the press has become the greatest power within the Western World, more powerful than the legislature, the executive and judiciary. One would like to ask: by whom has it been elected, and to whom is it responsible?
Alexandr Solzhenitsyn

And now it came to pass that, as soon as Amalickiah had obtained the kingdom he began to inspire the hearts of the Lamanites against hte people of Nephi; yeah, he did appoint men to speak unto the Lamanites from their towers, against the Nephites. …Therefore he had accomplished his design, for he had hardened the hearts of the Lamanites and blinded their minds… insomuch that he had gathered together a numerous host to go to battle against the Nephites. —Alma 48: 1,3

The open and covert management of the news in this country is frightening in its implications. One high government official has made the appalling statement to the effect that it is all right for the government to lie to the people if it serves the government’s purpose to lie. Certainly lies can take place by omission as well as commission.
Ezra Taft Benson, TETB p. 681

Mr. Bernays was one of the first people to expand… a narrow concept of press agentry, or working to influence government policy, into a far more ambitious and controversial realm of seeking to influence and change public opinion and behavior.
Edward Bernays, ‘Father of Public Relations’ and Leader in Opinion Making, Dies at 103

The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country… we’re dominated by the relatively small number of persons… it is they who pull the wires which control the public mind, who harness old social forces and contrive new ways to bind and guide the world.
Edward Bernays, Propaganda, excerpts from pp. 9-19

A presidential candidate may be ‘drafted’ in response to ‘overwhelming popular demand.’ but it is well known that his name may be decided upon by half a dozen men sitting around a table in a hotel room.. There are invisible rulers who control the destinies of millions. It is not generally realized to what extent the words and actions of our most influential public men are dictated by shrewd persons operating behind the scenes.
Propaganda pp. 60-1

After several months had passed, I began to realize the 1932 Democratic ‘platform’ prepared for the voters was merely something… to forget after the ballots had been counted. Instead of… implementing the platform.. out popped a so-called ‘Brain Trust.’ This was a small group of men.. who advanced some political ideas of the advisors, (who were) some CFR leaders, a few bankers and other internationalists, to the administration for legislative action.
Curtis Dall, FDR: My Exploited Father-in-Law, p. 91

From 1936 through 1960 the Republican presidential nominee was selected by a small group of secret kingmakers who are the most powerful opinion makers in the world. They dictated the choice of the Republican presidential nominee just as completely as the Paris dressmakers control the length of women’s skirts.
Phyllis Schlafly, A Choice Not an Echo, p. 6

Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle.
Thomas Jefferson

There is no such thing in America as an independent press, unless it is in the country towns.
You know it and I know it. There is not one of you who dares to writes (sic) his honest opinions, and if you did you know beforehand that it would never appear in print.
I am paid one hundred and fifty dollars a week for keeping my honest opinions out of the paper I am connected with–others of you are paid similar salaries for similar things–and any of you who would be so foolish as to write his honest opinions would be out on the streets looking for another job.
The business of the New York journalist is to destroy the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the feet of Mammon, and to sell his race and his country for his daily bread.
You know this and I know it, and what folly is this to be 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, editor of NY Times, in 1880 at a banquet in his honor

In March, 1852, the J.P. Morgan interests, the steel, shipbuilding, and powder interest, and their subsidiary organizations, got together 12 men high up in the newspaper world and employed them to select the most influential newspapers in the United States and sufficient number of them to control generally the policy of the daily press….They found it was only necessary to purchase the control of 25 of the greatest papers… An agreement was reached; the policy of the papers was bought, to be paid for by the month; an editor was furnished for each paper to properly supervise and edit information regarding the questions of preparedness, militarism, financial policies, and other things of national and international nature considered vital to the interests of the purchasers.
US Congressman Oscar Calloway, The Congressional Record, Feb 9 1917, Vol 54, pp. 2947-2948

A July 1968 report, issued by a House Banking subcommittee, revealed that Chase Manhattan Bank alone controlled 5.9% of the stock in CBS and that it has gained interlocking directorates with ABC. A later report issued by Congress in 1974 indicated that Chase Manhattan’s stake in CBS had risen to 14.1%, and that it had made major inroads toward control of NBC. The same report disclosed that cChase held stocks in 28 broadcasting firms.. yet another study revealed that Chase had gained control of 6.7% of ABC’s stock as well.
Gary Kah, En Route to Global Occupation, 1992, p. 56

…in America, we have achieved the Orwellian prediction-enslaved, the people have been programmed to love their bondage and are left to clutch only mirage-like images of freedom, its fables and fictions. The new slaves are linked together by vast electronic chains of television that imprison not their bodies but their minds. Their desires are programmed, their tastes manipulated, their values set for them
Jerry Spence, From Freedom to Slavery, book jacket cover

If we are to avoid that catastrophe (nuclear war), a system of world order – is mandatory. The proud nations someday will see the light and… yield up their precious sovereignty, just as America’s thirteen colonies did two centuries ago… There is going to be a social and political and economic evolution, which will explode with such suddenness as to have the character of a revolution. The revolutionary forces are already at work today, and they have humankind’s dreams on their side. We don’t want to be on the other side.
Walter Cronkite, A Reporter’s Life, p. 128, 384

We are grateful to the Washington Post, The New York Times, Time Magazine and other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected their promises of discretion for almost forty years. It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subjected to the lights of publicity during those years. But, the world is now more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world government. The supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national auto-determination practiced in past centuries.
David Rockefeller, founder of Trilateral Commission in an address to a meeting of the TLC June 1991

Cases of Sentator Joe McCarthy, smeared by the media and news, even coining a new word “McCarthyism” to describe his “horrible” actions. The Venona project later proved that he was absolutely correct in all his assertions – every single person he named was later shown to indeed by a Communist.

The NY Times today is deliberately pitched to the so-called liberal point of view.. Positively and negatively, the weight of the Times has generally fallen on the side of the communists since the end of World War II.
Henry Dinsmore, former foreign editor of the NY Times, in his book All The News That Fits, 1969

Our job is to give people not what they want, but what we decide they ought to have.
Richard Salant, Former Pres. CBS News

The Founders didn’t count on the rise of the mega-media. They didn’t count on huge private corporations that would own not only the means of journalism but also vast swaths of the territory that journalism should be covering.
Bill Moyers, “Journalism and Democracy”, in The Nation, May 7, 2001

10 Responses to “The Major News Media”

  1. Naiah Earhart
    November 13, 2006 at 9:27 am #

    So in a democratic society, where ‘We the People’ supposedly have a voice by vote, and therefore must be as informed as we can to be enabled to use that voice, where is ‘truth’ to be had?

    [This is a sincere question, not a bait. I know that people get very passionate about MSM debates. I have typically tuned them out. You see, I’ve been something of an ostrich in regards to news for the last 5 years or so, and am simply ignorant of the alternatives as they have come to light.]

  2. Connor
    November 13, 2006 at 10:47 pm #

    …where is ‘truth’ to be had?

    This is a very important question and I’m glad you’re asking it. I have unplugged myself from all major media news outlets. It’s amazing how they craft and sway public opinion. For example, the example with Senator McCarthy is telling – the media turned American against him, calling him all sorts of vitriolic names and such.. and he was right all along. It gives me pause when the media is so against men such as the Presidents of Venezuela and Iran. I think precedence dictates that we need to try and figure out if there’s more to the picture than what we’re led to believe. And I won’t even touch the subject of the Iraq War…

    I’ve enjoyed such “alternative” news sources such as the John Birch Society (I can already see a few of you critics rolling your eyes!), World Net Daily (most of the time), and the Information Clearinghouse (more often than not). When big events happen I’ll still read CNN or Fox News, but I take a huge grain of salt with anything they write, as it usually waters down to partisan politics which I’m fed up with and gets us nowhere. Anywho..

  3. Jeff
    November 14, 2006 at 12:00 am #

    “the example with Senator McCarthy is telling – the media turned American against him, calling him all sorts of vitriolic names and such.. and he was right all along.”

    You’ve been reading Ann Coulter too much. McCarthy was right? How?

  4. Connor
    November 14, 2006 at 6:28 am #

    You’ve been reading Ann Coulter too much.

    Ha! Now there’s a funny accusation…

    McCarthy was right? How?

    I suppose you’re not aware of the exonerating evidence in the Venona intercepts and declassified Soviet reports? Do you doubt the fact that the (liberal) mass media pounced on this man to smear his name? Have you studied another similar example in Ray Donovan?

  5. Kelly Winterton
    November 14, 2006 at 11:14 am #

    The elite will be deceived in the last days (because they know not where to find the truth) – so say the scriptures. Need we have more proof than the scriptures?

    I must say that my own personal opinion tells me that the media was responsible for OVERBLOWING the red scare during the Cold War, just to support the MI complex. So, I take your comments about McCarthy with a grain of salt.

    LDS must search elsewhere for the truth. It is not found in the MSM. (In fact, not only is the truth not there, it is filled with lies.) I am astounded at the replies of LDS people when I prove to them 9/11 was an inside job. Their repies are all the same: “I’ll believe that when I read it and see it in the MSM.”

  6. Kelly Winterton
    November 14, 2006 at 1:43 pm #

    re: where to find the truth:

    There is no “one” place to find the truth. During the run-up to the Iraq War, even before the bombs started dropping on Baghdad in the “shock and awe” demonstration of our military might, the German press was already proclaiming that there would NOT be any WMD found. Yet USA’s MSM was parroting Cheney’s lines that “without a doubt Saddam Hussein has the world’s worst WMD and is going to use them on us and our allies.” As time went forward, it was found out that Germany’s press was correct – there were no WMD found. The US press was wrong about WMD. The press then again parrotted Cheney’s lines of “massive intelligence failure.”

    Well, there was, in reality, no massive intelligence failure at all. Cheney and the complicit press had told us blatant lies. The truth was that the White House knew there were no WMD, the Germans also knew it. There was no massive intelligence failure, because the intel said there were no WMD.

    So, in answer to the question “where do you find the truth?”, there is not one simple answer. But, if you will take the time to chart which sources have consistently told lies (as in WMD) and which sources consistently turn out correct, you will start to be able to KNOW THEM BY THEIR FRUITS.

  7. Robert
    November 14, 2006 at 8:14 pm #

    I nearly threw up seeing McCarthy defended. Have anyone of you ever actually watched the Edward R. Murrow show on the man? He wasted tax dollars, ruined careers and never a “communist” was found. It was a dark period in American history, and I lived through the aftermath.

    However, juding from the post on WalMart, I can see why McCarthy would be a hero to some. Anything that we disagree with, we must destory. Thank God for the liberal media that put an end to that man. You know, he drank himself to death shortly afterwards. Oh, and remember Ray Cohn? He was his counsel. Ray was later disbarred.

  8. jeff
    November 14, 2006 at 11:03 pm #

    “Have anyone of you ever actually watched the Edward R. Murrow show on the man?”

    Absolutely. The movie Good Night, and Good Luck is excellent as well. That’s why I posted my comment above. As for the Ann Coulter comment, she’s the only person I’ve ever heard crazy enough to defend McCarthy and his antics. It’s sad that people’s fear will lead them to that type of witch hunt.

    As for Connor’s defense of him, that surprised me. I’ve read where Connor has blasted politicians for misusing their power. I guess not in this case.

    Thanks for the extra info on McCarthy, Robert.

  9. Robert
    November 15, 2006 at 8:30 am #

    Well, Joe McCarthy did inspire art. The play “The Crucible” came out of Arthur Miller’s experience with the House on UnAmerican Acitivities. And many, many “liberal” writers, actors and directors were blacklisted. He did great damage to “Voice of America” by claiming engineers for the radio sites were “communist”. Again, there never was any truth to his accusations. I hesitate to remind people that his chief counsel, Ray Cohn, was not only disbarred, but was a closeted homosexual who died of AIDS. I don’t want to feed Connor’s rampant homophobia.

    And let’s thank the liberal media for brining down Nixon, a man who obstructed justice. And let’s not forget the civil rights movement, which was covered by the same liberal media.

  10. dovetail
    November 20, 2007 at 12:56 pm #

    I think you should read Ann Coulter before you judge. But as far as what is positively true and what is not, only God knows. You think you haven’t been brainwashed by the media? We all have, even if we don’t think so and tried not to be swayed. They’ve been working on us since we were babies. How could we not? I see some are drastically extreme one direction and some are extreme the other direction. In all history, I’d guess the truth lies somewhere in the middle, and you can bet none of us knows for sure. Is it not possible that McCarthy was right, but he was made to look foolish by the press as a coverup? We know Alger Hiss was a communist and had Truman’s ear. That has been proven by documentation revealed years later.

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