"Propaganda, Facts and Fake News" - Page 18 - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

Wandering the information superhighway, he came upon the last refuge of civilization, PoFo, the only forum on the internet ...

All general discussion about politics that doesn't belong in any of the other forums.

Moderator: PoFo Political Circus Mods

#14975919
The Georgetown Set

The Georgetown set was made up of journalists, politicians and diplomats and senior figures in the CIA. As Sally Reston pointed out: "James Angleton turned up at almost every Georgetown party... I used to see him all the time at the homes of Evangeline Bruce and Lorraine Cooper, busily assaying the lay of the land, taking mental notes, listening in on conversations, issuing directives, gathering intelligence. It was no different for Frank Wisner, Dick Bissell, Allen Dulles, or any of the other CIA bigwigs."

After the Second World War a small group of people began meeting on a regular basis. The group. living in Washington, became known as the Georgetown Set or the Wisner Gang. At the first the key members of the group were former members of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). This included Frank Wisner, Philip Graham, David Bruce, Tom Braden, Stewart Alsop and Walt Rostow. Over the next few years others like George Kennan, Dean Acheson, Richard Bissell, Joseph Alsop, Eugene Rostow, Chip Bohlen, Desmond FitzGerald, Tracy Barnes, Cord Meyer, James Angleton, William Averill Harriman, John McCloy, Felix Frankfurter, John Sherman Cooper, James Reston, Allen W. Dulles and Paul Nitze joined their regular parties. Some like Bruce, Braden, Bohlen, McCloy, Meyer and Harriman spent a lot of their time working in other countries. However, they would always attend these parties when in Georgetown.

Most men brought their wives to these gatherings. Members of what was later called the Georgetown Ladies' Social Club included Katharine Graham, Mary Pinchot Meyer, Sally Reston, Polly Wisner, Joan Braden, Lorraine Cooper, Evangeline Bruce, Avis Bohlen, Janet Barnes, Tish Alsop, Cynthia Helms, Marietta FitzGerald, Phyllis Nitze and Annie Bissell.

It was members of the Georgetown Set that began lobbying for a new intelligence agency. The main figure in this was Frank Wisner. With the help of another member, George Kennan, the Office of Special Projects was created in 1948. Wisner was appointed director of the organization. Soon afterwards it was renamed the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC). This later became the espionage and counter-intelligence branch of the Central Intelligence Agency.

The OPC concentrated on "propaganda, economic warfare; preventive direct action, including sabotage, anti-sabotage, demolition and evacuation measures; subversion against hostile states, including assistance to underground resistance groups, and support of indigenous anti-Communist elements in threatened countries of the free world."

Wisner also established Operation Mockingbird, a program to influence the American media. Wisner persuaded Philip Graham (Washington Post) to run the project within the industry. Graham himself recruited others who had worked for military intelligence during the war. This included James Truitt, Russell Wiggins, Phil Geyelin, John Hayes and Alan Barth. Others like Stewart Alsop, Joseph Alsop and James Reston, were recruited from within the Georgetown Set. According to Deborah Davis (Katharine the Great): "By the early 1950s, Wisner 'owned' respected members of the New York Times, Newsweek, CBS and other communications vehicles."
https://spartacus-educational.com/JFKgeorgetown.htm
#14975932
Tabloid-generated trash is likely to increase in the UK. Especially as the May Government is considering a bailout for the private media sector with public money. Yeah! (my emphasis in bold!)

The Tories could soon be handing £millions of YOUR money to The Daily Mail and The Sun
By Tom D. Rogers - 29th August 2018

A government-led consultation is currently underway that could soon see millions of pounds of British public money handed over to the billionaire media barons in charge of some of the country’s most controversial newspapers, such as Rupert Murdoch of The Sun, and Lord Rothermere of The Daily Mail.

The little-publicised public consultation, titled The Cairncross Review, was launched by the Tory government on June 28th 2018 with the aim of obtaining evidence and ideas that might help “sustain the production and distribution of high-quality journalism in a changing market.”
Among other factors – such as looking at the “overall state of the news media market” and the “role and impact of digital search engines and social media platforms” – the Cairncross Review will also be placing a focus on “Threats to [the] financial sustainability” of the British media.

The Cairncross review is being led by the former Senior Editor of The Economist, Dame Frances Cairncross, and among the names appointed to the Consultation panel include a certain Peter Wright, the current Editor Emeritus of Associated Newspapers, the organisation who publish The Daily Mail, the Mail on Sunday, MailOnline and the Metro.

With a Consultation Panel absolutely jam-packed with representatives of the British corporate media – and precisely nobody representing the wide array of truly independent media outlets throughout the country – it is patently obvious that the main beneficiaries of the process with be the mainstream press.

According to Byline Media, the outcome of the process will almost certainly involve a proposal to hand public money to the likes of Rupert Murdoch and Lord Rothermere (Jonathan Harmsworth)
#14977330
I just got back from two weeks in Cuba where my TV worked and I got to watch an hour of Telesur almost every evening (to practice my Spanish comprehension).

I was also able to get CNN International (a competing 24h news service, but commercial, and with lots of SUV ads) so I watched a bit to compare and contrast with Telesur.

There's no comparison. Telesur is around the clock, around the world revolution, 24h a day, with lots of analysis and history. I saw parts of a documentary on Thomas Sankara, along with some pretty good analysis on seemingly ordinary news events.

CNN, meanwhile, has overly made-up talking heads repeating the same talking points over and over, in lieu of any perspective or wide-ranging analysis. At one point, Chris Cuomo and Don Lemon were both "freaking out" that Trump "threatened" to pull US troops out of a few of its current Vietnam War-style Wars. They (and other hosts of other programs during the day) repeated the same talking points, and used the same empty metaphors (at the end of the day, it's two birds with one stone if you fool me once...bla bla bla). The whole point of CNN seems to be to block the human mind and make it incapable of thinking for itelf.

Don Lemon stands out for robotic, mindless delivery of canned material, and for eyebrows that look like the work of a makeup artist that needs to cut down on cocaine. And Chris Cuomo is also very plastic and mean looking. All the hosts survive on tired metaphors and gotch-a one-liners.

What a waste to use one of the five channels on my Cuban TV to show this! The most intersting politics were the Brazilian SUV ads.
#14977371
skinster wrote:I like Telesur English. I should read/watch it in Spanish, someone recommended I do that before...

I recommend you watch FOX News in English for the truth.
Praise the Lord.
#14977619
skinster wrote:I used to watch it for comedy purposes.

Watch this:

Of course FOX News is still conservative because it is needed, since ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, and CNN are all liberal. By the way Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes are gone from FOX News.
#14979226
Longtime Reporter Leaves NBC Saying Media Is “Trump Circus” That Encourages Perpetual War

“Prisoners of Donald Trump.” That’s how longtime NBC reporter and analyst William Arkin described the mainstream media in a scathing letter last week announcing he would be leaving the network, accusing the media of warmongering while ignoring the “creeping fascism of homeland security.” He issued the blistering critique after a 30-year relationship with NBC, calling for “Trump-free” media days and a reckoning about how the network encourages a state of perpetual warfare. We speak with Arkin, whose award-winning reporting has appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post. He is the author of many books, including “Top Secret America: The Rise of the New American Security State.”

William Arkin On Homeland Security’s Creeping Fascism and Why the CIA & FBI Won’t Save Us From Trump

Longtime NBC reporter and analyst William Arkin announced he was leaving the network last week in a blistering letter that took aim at the mainstream media for encouraging perpetual warfare and bolstering the national security state. In his letter, Arkin writes of Trump, “Of course he is an ignorant and incompetent impostor. And yet I’m alarmed at how quick NBC is to mechanically argue the contrary, to be in favor of policies that just spell more conflict and more war. Really? We shouldn’t get out Syria? We shouldn’t go for the bold move of denuclearizing the Korean peninsula? Even on Russia, though we should be concerned about the brittleness of our democracy that it is so vulnerable to manipulation, do we really yearn for the Cold War? And don’t even get me started with the FBI: What? We now lionize this historically destructive institution?” We speak with Arkin in New York City. He is the author of many books, including “Top Secret America: The Rise of the New American Security State.”

Veteran NBC/MSNBC Journalist Blasts the Network for Being Captive to the National Security State and Reflexively Pro-War to Stop Trump
Glenn Greenwald
January 3 2019, 7:27 a.m.

That MSNBC and NBC have become Security State Central has been obvious for quite some time. The network consists of little more than former CIA, NSA, and Pentagon officials as news “analysts”; ex-Bush-Cheney national security and communications officials as hosts and commentators; and the most extremists pro-war neocons constantly bashing Trump (and critics of Democrats generally) from the right, using the Cheney-Rove playbook on which they built their careers to accuse Democratic Party critics and enemies of being insufficiently patriotic, traitors for America’s official enemies, and abandoning America’s hegemonic role in the world.

MSNBC’s star national security reporter Ken Dilanian was widely mocked by media outlets for years for being an uncritical CIA stenographer before he became a beloved NBC/MSNBC reporter (where his mindless servitude to his CIA masters has produced some of the network’s most humiliating debacles). The cable network’s key anchor, Rachel Maddow, once wrote a book on the evils of endless wars without congressional authorization, but now routinely depicts anyone who wants to end those illegal wars as reckless weaklings and traitors.

Some of the most beloved and frequently featured MSNBC commentators are the most bloodthirsty pro-war militarists from the war on terror: David Frum, Jennifer Rubin, Ralph Peters, and Bill Kristol (who was just giddily and affectionately celebrated with a playful nickname bestowed on him: “Lil Bill”). In early 2018, NBC hired former CIA chief John Brennan to serve as a “senior national security and intelligence analyst,” where the rendition and torture advocate joined — as Politico’s Jack Shafer noted — a long litany of former security state officials at the network, including “Chuck Rosenberg, former acting DEA administrator, chief of staff for FBI Director James B. Comey, and counselor to former FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III; Frank Figliuzzi, former chief of FBI counterintelligence; Juan Zarate, deputy national security adviser under Bush.”

As Shafer noted, filling your news and analyst slots with former security state officials as MSNBC and NBC have done is tantamount to becoming state TV, since “their first loyalty — and this is no slam — is to the agency from which they hail.” As he put it: “Imagine a TV network covering the auto industry through the eyes of dozens of paid former auto executives and you begin to appreciate the current peculiarities.”
https://theintercept.com/2019/01/03/vet ... top-trump/

#14979230
skinster wrote:I like Telesur English. I should read/watch it in Spanish, someone recommended I do that before...


I watch Telesur but it's just as slanted as FOX. If we're just picking our bullshit based on nothing but our political leanings without any regard for truth or reality then you can't really criticize Hindsite for preferring FOX to Telesur. When we abandon truth and reality it just becomes a power game called politics and I guarantee you the left is going to lose that game every single time.
#14979476
Sivad wrote:Arkin writes of Trump, “Of course he is an ignorant and incompetent impostor...

Being ignorant and incompetent is just an opinion; but since President Trump is the duly elected President, how is it that he is an impostor?
#14979477
Hindsite wrote:Being ignorant and incompetent is just an opinion; but since President Trump is the duly elected President, how is it that he is an impostor?



I don't know what that means either, he's just saying it to establish his credibility with the lib progressive set. You always have to preface every criticism of the media and the deep state with a denunciation of Trump or the idlibs will just write you off as a Trump defender. Most people are too stupid to walk and chew gum at the same time so you have spell every little thing out for them, every statement has to be explicitly qualified so they don't get confused and tune out.
#14979479
How a NeoCon-Backed “Fact Checker” Plans to Wage War on Independent Media

As Newsguard’s project advances, it will soon become almost impossible to avoid this neocon-approved news site’s ranking systems on any technological device sold in the United States.

Soon after the social media “purge” of independent media sites and pages this past October, a top neoconservative insider — Jamie Fly — was caught stating that the mass deletion of anti-establishment and anti-war pages on Facebook and Twitter was “just the beginning” of a concerted effort by the U.S. government and powerful corporations to silence online dissent within the United States and beyond.

While a few, relatively uneventful months in the online news sphere have come and gone since Fly made this ominous warning, it appears that the neoconservatives and other standard bearers of the military-industrial complex and the U.S. oligarchy are now poised to let loose their latest digital offensive against independent media outlets that seek to expose wrongdoing in both the private and public sectors.

As MintPress News Editor-in-Chief Mnar Muhawesh recently wrote, MintPress was informed that it was under review by an organization called Newsguard Technologies, which described itself to MintPress as simply a “news rating agency” and asked Muhawesh to comment on a series of allegations, several of which were blatantly untrue. However, further examination of this organization reveals that it is funded by and deeply connected to the U.S. government, neo-conservatives, and powerful monied interests, all of whom have been working overtime since the 2016 election to silence dissent to American forever-wars and corporate-led oligarchy.

More troubling still, Newsguard — by virtue of its deep connections to government and Silicon Valley — is lobbying to have its rankings of news sites installed by default on computers in U.S. public libraries, schools, and universities as well as on all smartphones and computers sold in the United States.

In other words, as Newsguard’s project advances, it will soon become almost impossible to avoid this neocon-approved news site’s ranking systems on any technological device sold in the United States. Worse still, if its efforts to quash dissenting voices in the U.S. are successful, Newsguard promises that its next move will be to take its system global.

Red light, green light . . .

Newsguard has received considerable attention in the mainstream media of late, having been the subject of a slew of articles in the Washington Post, the Hill, the Boston Globe, Politico, Bloomberg, Wired, and many others just over the past few months. Those articles portray Newsguard as using “old-school journalism” to fight “fake news” through its reliance on nine criteria allegedly intended to separate the wheat from the chaff when it comes to online news.

Newsguard separates sites it deems worthy and sites it considers unreliable by using a color-coded rating — green, yellow, or red — and more detailed “nutrition labels” regarding a site’s credibility or lack thereof. Rankings are created by Newsguard’s team of “trained analysts.” The color-coding system may remind some readers of the color-coded terror threat-level warning system that was created after 9/11, making it worth noting that Tom Ridge, the former secretary of Homeland Security who oversaw the implementation of that system under George W. Bush, is on Newsguard’s advisory board.
https://www.mintpressnews.com/newsguard ... ia/253687/
  • 1
  • 16
  • 17
  • 18
  • 19
  • 20
  • 31

Helping Ukraine to defeat the Russian invasion an[…]

https://twitter.com/huwaidaarraf/status/1773389663[…]

Israel-Palestinian War 2023

What wat0n is trying to distract from: https://tw[…]

Russia-Ukraine War 2022

https://twitter.com/KimDotcom/status/1773436787622[…]