An article in The Daily Bell notes that CNN — one of the mainstream news outlets covering Facebook and Google’s recent announcements to begin blacklisting publishers of material deemed to be ‘fake news’ — was itself under fire for pro-government censorship as recently as 2013. Its staff had investigated and produced an exposé of the US-backed Bahraini government’s human rights abuses, but the documentary was suppressed by CNN, which had sold advertising spots to the Bahraini government’s economic development arm.
After an acrimonious 2016 election, the assertion has lingered that a majority of US voters in a majority of states chose Trump for US president only because they were misinformed on the Internet and did not pay enough attention to the mainstream media’s perspective. The solution is therefore seen as for tech companies, who overwhelmingly supported Hillary Clinton’s candidacy, to eliminate the economic incentive to produce material that a sufficient number of user accounts react with disagreement towards.
However, history provides reason for skepticism towards the motives behind the tech companies’ new anti-‘fake news’ initiative, since with its announcement comes no audible acknowledgement of the fake news and sock-puppet personas that the US government and Deep State insiders have planted in the media over the past two generations.
From Wikipedia:
Operation Mockingbird was a campaign by the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to influence media during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. Begun in the 1950s, it was initially organized by Cord Meyer and Allen W. Dulles, and was later led by Frank Wisner after Dulles became the head of the CIA. The organization recruited leading American journalists into a propaganda network to help present the CIA’s views. It funded some student and cultural organizations and magazines as fronts. As it developed, it also worked to influence foreign media and political campaigns, in addition to activities by other operating units of the CIA. The CIA’s use of journalists continued unabated until 1973, when the program was scaled back, finally coming to a halt in 1976 when George H.W. Bush took over as director.
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The usual methodology was placing reports developed from intelligence provided by the CIA to witting or unwitting reporters. Those reports would then be repeated or cited by the preceding reporters which in turn would then be cited throughout the media wire services.
In 2005, the Pentagon paid millions of dollars to plant fake news in Iraqi newspapers.
In 2008, a network of shadowy “military analysts” was exposed for a quid-pro-quo scheme that “generated favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance”:
To the public, these men are members of a familiar fraternity, presented tens of thousands of times on television and radio as “military analysts” whose long service has equipped them to give authoritative and unfettered judgments about the most pressing issues of the post-Sept. 11 world.
Hidden behind that appearance of objectivity, though, is a Pentagon information apparatus that has used those analysts in a campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance, an examination by The New York Times has found.
The effort, which began with the buildup to the Iraq war and continues to this day, has sought to exploit ideological and military allegiances, and also a powerful financial dynamic: Most of the analysts have ties to military contractors vested in the very war policies they are asked to assess on air.
Those business relationships are hardly ever disclosed to the viewers, and sometimes not even to the networks themselves. But collectively, the men on the plane and several dozen other military analysts represent more than 150 military contractors either as lobbyists, senior executives, board members or consultants. The companies include defense heavyweights, but also scores of smaller companies, all part of a vast assemblage of contractors scrambling for hundreds of billions in military business generated by the administration’s war on terror. It is a furious competition, one in which inside information and easy access to senior officials are highly prized.
Records and interviews show how the Bush administration has used its control over access and information in an effort to transform the analysts into a kind of media Trojan horse — an instrument intended to shape terrorism coverage from inside the major TV and radio networks.
Analysts have been wooed in hundreds of private briefings with senior military leaders, including officials with significant influence over contracting and budget matters, records show. They have been taken on tours of Iraq and given access to classified intelligence. They have been briefed by officials from the White House, State Department and Justice Department, including Mr. Cheney, Alberto R. Gonzales and Stephen J. Hadley.
In turn, members of this group have echoed administration talking points, sometimes even when they suspected the information was false or inflated. Some analysts acknowledge they suppressed doubts because they feared jeopardizing their access.
A few expressed regret for participating in what they regarded as an effort to dupe the American public with propaganda dressed as independent military analysis.
In 2008, the Pentagon announced that it was setting up foreign news websites designed to look like independent media sources.
In 2010, former CIA officials admitted to having created a fake Osama bin Laden video for propaganda purposes.
In 2011, a project was launched by the US military to “secretly manipulate social media sites by using fake online personas to influence internet conversations and spread pro-American propaganda.”
In 2012, USA Today reporters investigating waste, fraud and abuse in a Pentagon propaganda program suddenly found themselves targeted by a smear campaign involving “fake websites, Facebook and Twitter accounts and Wikipedia entries”. In 2014, Glenn Greenwald and NBC News published files from the Edward Snowden leaks showing that Western intelligence agencies provide training to “discredit a target” online:
Among the core self-identified purposes of JTRIG are two tactics: (1) to inject all sorts of false material onto the internet in order to destroy the reputation of its targets; and (2) to use social sciences and other techniques to manipulate online discourse and activism to generate outcomes it considers desirable. To see how extremist these programs are, just consider the tactics they boast of using to achieve those ends: “false flag operations” (posting material to the internet and falsely attributing it to someone else), fake victim blog posts (pretending to be a victim of the individual whose reputation they want to destroy), and posting “negative information” on various forums.
In 2014, a Freedom of Information Act request brought emails from 2012 to light that demonstrated that “a prominent national security reporter for the Los Angeles Times routinely submitted drafts and detailed summaries of his stories to CIA press handlers prior to publication”.
In 2016, it was reported that the U.S. government had paid a British PR firm over $500 million to create fake al-Qaida videos as well as “fake news stories that looked as though they were produced by Arab media outlets”.
For more revelations and historical background on the relationship between the Deep State and the mainstream media, see the following links:
The mainstream media outlets lamenting ‘fake news’ on the internet cannot escape the visibility the internet has placed on their ownership arrangements: after all, just six companies control the vast majority of content viewed by Americans, and are in an unprecedentedly powerful position to shape opinion:
Unless Facebook and Google place the same sanctions on state-sponsored propaganda as they will place on private-sector ‘fake news’, the unfortunate conclusion to be drawn is that these policies are designed to favor state messaging and disfavor the revisionism, opposing views, and even unsubstantiated gossip that, taken together, fully inform public discourse.
