Transfer of Files on Psychological Operations

[Ed Jewett]

The Newsweek Owner's Intelligence Connection

by Tim Shorrock

Sidney Harman, who just bought Newsweek magazine, has for years been influential in the area of national security—and not just through his marriage to Rep. Jane Harman.

It’s well-known that Sidney Harman, the electronics mogul who just bought Newsweek, is married to Rep. Jane Harman, one of Washington’s heavyweights on intelligence.

Rep. Harman, a Democrat, spent eight years on the House Intelligence Committee and is chairwoman of the Homeland Security Subcommittee on Intelligence & Terrorism. She has had an intimate, and sometimes controversial, relationship to America’s spy agencies during her eight terms in Congress.

But few in Washington are aware that the real intelligence insider of the Harman family may be Sidney himself, through his connections to an obscure but highly influential organization known as Business Executives for National Security.

Few in Washington are aware that the real intelligence insider of the Harman family may be Sidney himself, through his connections to an obscure but highly influential organization known as Business Executives for National Security.

In many ways, BENS can be considered the godfather of the contracting revolution that transformed the U.S. government into a vast, $600 billion market for corporate America and made national security—and spying in particular—a gross vehicle for private enterprise. Over the past 28 years, BENS has participated in dozens of high-level commissions that have altered the way the Pentagon and the intelligence community do business, and has become a favored perch for former high-ranking officials and generals, from Henry Kissinger to Gen. Peter Pace.

Its leaders have historically been quite conservative; barely two months after the 9/11 attacks, founding BENS Chairman Stanley Weiss called on the Bush administration to remove Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq in the pages of the International Herald Tribune.

But it can also be pragmatic and run against the grain, as it did last year when it sent a delegation of American executives, including Ross Perot, to North Korea to meet with the government of Kim Jong Il to use the incentive of U.S. investments to convince North Korea to abandon its nuclear program.

Founded by Weiss, a mining and chemical executive who for years served as a director of Harman’s audio-equipment company, BENS today represents about 350 of the country’s largest manufacturing, transportation, information technology, communications, and national-security firms.

Harman himself chaired the organization’s executive committee from 1982 to 2009 and “contributed over $1 million over the years” to the organization, Weiss told The Daily Beast in an email from Indonesia. Although its CEO, retired Army General Montgomery C. Meigs, manages the organization, its corporate members, led by Harman, have set the pace. “Dr. Harman played an important role [in BENS] for a quarter century,” Weiss told me. “He was deeply involved in all aspects of BENS’ work.” Harman could not be reached for comment.

• Jacob Bernstein: Newsweek's New Owner: The 92-Year-Old WunderkindOriginally, it was a kind of liberal alternative to the hawkish business organizations that flourished during the Cold War, and its early efforts focused on arms treaties. But it has evolved into a full-time consultant to the Pentagon on business practices, functioning as a liaison between government and industry. (Weiss, speaking for the organization, said BENS' efforts in defense, intelligence and homeland security are aimed at "helping the country deal with the very bloated element of the miltary-industrial-congressional complex.")

In its advisory role, BENS has been a driving force in the privatization of U.S. defense capabilities, including the outsourcing of the precious intelligence assets that Rep. Harman had direct oversight over for eight years as the senior Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee.

Since 2001, it has expanded its ties with the intelligence community; last year, it elected Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the former director of the CIA and the National Security Agency (and now a contractor himself), to its advisory council.

One of BENS’ biggest advisory projects came during the “reinventing government” days of the Clinton administration. The Tail-to-Tooth Commission, which included Harman and numerous defense contractors and privatization advocates, proposed a sweeping array of policy changes, and its recommendations were enthusiastically embraced by both the Clinton and Bush administrations.

Thus began a massive push toward outsourcing—and a new era defined by companies like Halliburton, and later, Blackwater.

After the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and the intensified support for privatization under George W. Bush, logistics, security, and intelligence contracting grew by leaps and bounds. Despite attempts by the Obama administration to rein in outsourcing and reduce the government’s reliance on contractors, they still play an enormous role at the Pentagon. That’s especially true in intelligence, where they eat up more than 70 percent of the budget.

BENS is still at it: Just last month it was asked by Obama’s Defense Department to review its recommendations for reducing the cost of military business operations. It came up with a dense, three-page list of suggested changes, among them: outsourcing more “non-core functions” and a recommendation that the Pentagon eliminate “the practice of treating ‘excessive profits’ as improper.”

The organization has also worked with the CIA, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the Defense Intelligence Agency as a consultant on acquisition, procurement, and investment. And as the U.S. has stepped up drone warfare in Afghanistan and Pakistan, it has become a close adviser to the most secretive of all military intelligence branches, the U.S. Special Operations Command, or SOCOM.

Since 2007, BENS has participated in more than two dozen events with SOCOM. At a June 2010 luncheon in Houston, for example, SOCOM commander Adm. Eric Olson updated 40 BENS members on the role of Special Forces in U.S. wars and thanked them for their contributions to the war effort.

Ken McGraw, a public-affairs officer with SOCOM, told The Daily Beast that the organization provides “information about areas terrorist groups and networks can use and exploit to finance and facilitate their operations.” The military doesn’t have expertise in finance and emerging technologies, he added, but these are subjects where “some members of BENS do have a great deal of expertise.”

Some of SOCOM’s activities—including its reliance on contractors—would have had to come to the attention of Rep. Harman when she had authority over intelligence programs. Plus she has often been at her husband’s side when he held court at BENS’ glitzy Eisenhower Award dinners over the years. In 2004, for example, Rep. Harman delivered a speech to the organization’s gala in San Francisco for Carly Fiorina, then-CEO of Hewlett-Packard. Fiorina, now a Republican Senatorial candidate, also sits on BENS’ board.

So it’s fair to ask if Rep. Harman has had any conflict of interest with BENS’ involvement in intelligence activities. The congresswoman was traveling last week and unable to comment, but Pamela Hess, her spokeswoman, said the Harmans always “keep business and politics separate.” And it’s clear from the public record that the California lawmaker has said very little about the intelligence community’s employment of contractors. “I've never seen her weigh in on the issue,” says Marcy Wheeler, who blogs about intelligence at Emptywheel.

Tim Shorrock is a Washington-based investigative journalist and the author of Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing, published in 2008 by Simon & Schuster. His articles have appeared in The Atlantic, Salon, Mother Jones, The Nation and many other publications at home and abroad. He can be reached through his website at timshorrock.com.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-s...vertical:r

[Ed Jewett]

How propagandists function: Exhibit A

Posted on August 14, 2010 by willyloman
by Glenn Greenwald, Salon
Jeffrey Goldberg, in the new cover story in The Atlantic, on an Israeli attack on Iran:

Israel has twice before successfully attacked and destroyed an enemy’s nuclear program. In 1981, Israeli warplanes bombed the Iraqi reactor at Osirak, halting — forever, as it turned out — Saddam Hussein’s nuclear ambitions; and in 2007, Israeli planes destroyed a North Korean-built reactor in Syria. An attack on Iran, then, would be unprecedented only in scope and complexity.

Good news! Israel can successfully end a country’s nuclear program by bombing them, as proven by its 1981 attack on Iraq, which, says Goldberg, halted “forever, as it turned out — Saddam Hussein’s nuclear ambitions.”
Jeffrey Goldberg, The New Yorker, 2002, trying to convince Americans to fear Iraq:

Saddam Hussein never gave up his hope of turning Iraq into a nuclear power. After the Osirak attack, he rebuilt, redoubled his efforts, and dispersed his facilities. Those who have followed Saddam’s progress believe that no single strike today would eradicate his nuclear program.

When it suited him back then, Goldberg made the exact opposite claim, literally, of the one he makes today. Back then, Goldberg wouldn’t possibly claim what he claims now — that the 1981 strike permanently halted Saddam’s “nuclear ambitions” — because, back then, his goal was to scare Americans about The Threat of Saddam. So in 2002, Goldberg warned Americans that Saddam had “redoubled” his efforts to turn Iraq into a nuclear power after the Israeli attack, i.e., that Saddam had a scarier nuclear program than ever before after the 1981 bombing raid. But now, Goldberg has a different goal: to convince Americans of the efficacy of bombing Iran, and thus, without batting an eye, he simply asserts the exact opposite factual premise: that the Israelis successfully and permanently ended Saddam’s nuclear ambition back in 1981 by bombing it out of existence (and, therefore, we can do something similar now to Iran).
This is what a propagandist, by definition, does: asserts any claim as fact in service of a concealed agenda without the slightest concern for whether it’s true.

Will the existence of a vast and menacing Iraqi nuclear program help my cause (getting Americans to attack Iraq)? Fine, then I’ll trumpet that. Now, however, it will help my cause (mainstreaming an attack on Iran) to claim that the Israelis permanently ended Iraq’s nuclear efforts in 1981, thus showing how well these attacks can work. No problem: I’ll go with that. How can anyone take seriously — as a Middle East expert and especially as a journalist — someone with this blatant and thorough of an estrangement from any concern for truth? Can anyone reconcile these factual claims?
Jonathan Schwarz, who flagged this contradiction, documents how Goldberg’s dishonest propaganda begins in the very first sentence of his new Atlantic article, which reads: ”It is possible that at some point in the next 12 months, the imposition of devastating economic sanctions on the Islamic Republic of Iran will persuade its leaders to cease their pursuit of nuclear weapons.” Schwarz explains the obvious:

The official position of the U.S. intelligence community about this remains the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate. And it said Iran stopped pursuing nuclear weapons in 2003. Maybe it was wrong, or maybe something’s changed since then. But it is the essence of Goldberg-itude to simply ignore this and assert the opposite as unquestionable fact.

In other words, the core premise of Goldberg’s article — that Iran is currently pursuing nuclear weapons — is asserted, in the very first sentence, as indisputable fact without so much as acknowledging, let alone resolving, the substantial evidence casting serious doubt on that scary claim. Sound familiar? Moreover, as Schwarz compellingly documents, Goldberg’s latest historical assertion — that the 1981 Israeli attack ended Saddam’s nuclear efforts — is the precise opposite of reality: Iraq had no genuine nuclear weapons program prior to 1981, but it was the Israeli attack which caused Saddam to conclude that he needed one. That is what spawned the very substantial Iraqi efforts from 1981 to 1991 to develop nuclear weapons: efforts which were actually ended by Operation Desert Storm and the subsequent U.N. inspection regime (which is what Scott Ritter relentlessly — and, thanks to the likes of Goldberg, with futility — attempted to point out in the run-up to the American attack on Iraq).
Goldberg wants to obfuscate those facts lest one conclude: just as happened with Iraq, nothing would spur an Iranian desire for nuclear weapons more than a bombing campaign against their country. If you were an Iranian, is there anything that would convince you of the need for nuclear weapons more than watching Israel bomb your country? I always thought it was difficult to imagine anything that could be more effective in convincing rational Iranians to proliferate than watching the U.S. invade and bomb at will nations that lack nuclear weapons while treating with the utmost respect those which have them. What could possibly incentivize countries in general — and Iran in particular — to want to acquire nuclear weapons more than that behavior? If anything could, it would be an Israeli (or American) attack on Iran.
More important than these specific factual contradictions, Schwarz very astutely describes Goldberg’s role in the propaganda effort concerning Iran. Goldberg is not Bill Kristol or Charles Krauthammer, at least in terms of function. He’s not going to run around overtly beating his chest demanding that the U.S. attack Iran (or that the U.S. support Israel’s attack): at least not yet. Although Goldberg did precisely that in the run-up to the attack on Iraq, his function now is more subtle, and more insidious. He’s nothing if not shrewd, and certainly shrewd enough to know that if he spouts nakedly bellicose demands for a war with Iran, he’ll be quickly dismissed as a neocon fanatic, especially in light of his discredited and falsehood-filled campaign to persuade Americans to attack Iraq. Indeed, Goldberg himself notes that even George Bush derided Kristol and Krauthammer as “the bomber boys.” He’s much too smart to let himself be consigned to the lowly and limited (though important) role of fanning the flames of right-wing fanaticism; he’s intent on re-branding himself after what he did in 2002 and 2003 and preserving his mainstream influence.
Thus, his pose is objective journalist. He’ll feign “ambivalence” about whether Iran should be bombed — thus showing how thoughtful and non-ideological he is — while infecting the discourse with the kinds of factual falsehoods documented here, all in service of skewing the debate towards ensuring an attack happens. At its core, it’s only a slightly modified version of what he did with Iraq (I’m merely “reporting” on Saddam’s extensive relationship with Al Qaeda and his nuclear program/I’m merely “reporting” on the view of Israeli leaders that ”a nuclear Iran poses the gravest threat since Hitler to the physical survival of the Jewish people”).

It’s really one of the strangest and most revealing facts that the “objective journalist” to whom America’s political elites most faithfully turn for “reporting” on the Middle East is someone whose loyalty to Israel is so overarching that he actually went and joined the IDF (just try to imagine an American journalist reporting on this conflict for a large media outlet who previously joined the Iranian military or the military of any predominantly Muslim country). There’s nothing wrong per se with his doing so or with maintaining loyalty to other countries; many Americans do so with all sorts of countries and for all sorts of reasons. It’s also true that Goldberg’s intense, Israel-devoted agenda doesn’t preclude some good reporting; there are interesting and even revealing aspects in his article about how Israeli leaders think about Iran, or at least how they want Americans to believe they think about Iran.
But Jeffrey Goldberg is no more of an objective reporter on such matters than Benjamin Netanyahu is, and the fact that so many are willing to treat him as though he is provides a valuable testament to the ongoing vitality of the Supreme Law of Beltway Life: Seriousness credentials, once vested, can never be revoked, no matter how grave one’s past sins of falsehood and error are. The purpose of this Atlantic article is as obvious as it is odious: to mainstream the debate over an Israeli or American attack on Iran by defending its rationale, all masquerading as objective reporting (I’m merely describing the substantial possibility that it could happen and, if it does, why it would be justifiable). I’m tempted to say that anyone who falls for Jeffrey Goldberg’s act again deserves what they get, except that — as always — they’re not the ones who will pay the price for the fallout.
* * * * *
Goldberg’s article is, needless to say, suffused with comparisons of Iran to Nazi Germany — one after the next like this:

“The only reason Bibi [Netanyahu] would place Israel’s relationship with America in total jeopardy is if he thinks that Iran represents a threat like the Shoah,” an Israeli official who spends considerable time with the prime minister told me. “In World War II, the Jews had no power to stop Hitler from annihilating us. Six million were slaughtered. Today, 6 million Jews live in Israel, and someone is threatening them with annihilation. But now we have the power to stop them. Bibi knows that this is the choice.”

No discussion of any of this is complete without noting that it was endlessly claimed that it was Saddam who was the New Hitler in order ratchet up fear levels and justify an attack that country, too. How many times can we be persuaded to attack the New Hitler?

[Ed Jewett]

Psyoperator job listing: Counterpropagandist wanted
https://jobs.chenega.com/?adata=q4xlFCf ... ADDvbTTL5h

10160058JA: Counter-Propaganda Analyst
Work Location Florida
Position Schedule Regular, Full Time
Clearance TS / SCI
Recruiter's eMail cfsrecruiting@chenegafederal.com

Job Responsibilities
CHENEGA FEDERAL SYSTEMS, LLC.

Company Job Title: Counter-Propaganda Analyst (Contingent)
Chenega Job Title: Intelligence Analyst IV
Clearance: TS/SCI
Location: Tampa, FL
Reports To: Program Manager
FLSA Status: Exempt
Prepared Date: 06/11/2010
Approved Date: 06/11/2010

Summary:
The Counter-Propaganda Analyst will provide support to the JMISC mission. This position is contingent on contract award.

Essential Duties and Responsibilities:
Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions of this position.

• Evaluate enemy media campaign influence operations and their effectiveness on key target audiences throughout the world with emphasis on internet, video, TV/Radio broadcasting and other new influence tool technologies.
• Focus is primarily on the AQ Network, messaging from AQ leadership and those having strategic impact, and counter-messaging for strategic trans-regional effect.
• Conduct counter propaganda and Source Content Audience Media Effects (SCAME) analysis, review and analyze video/internet and conduct campaign interpretation and analysis.
• Examine enemy propaganda (techniques, dissemination, themes and messaging) and identify key target audiences to counter enemy messaging and propaganda.
• Analyze terrorist and anti-US regional and strategic messaging and effectiveness throughout the world.
• Other duties may be assigned to meet business needs.

Supervision:
This position does not have formal supervisory responsibilities.

Minimum Qualifications:
To perform this job successfully, an individual must be able to perform each essential duty satisfactorily. The requirements listed below are representative of the knowledge, skill, and/or ability required.

Education and/or Experience:
Position requires a minimum of a bachelor’s degree. This SME should have extensive experience in intelligence analysis; regional/cultural knowledge of at least one GCC Area of Responsibility (AOR). In country experience (CENTCOM AOR); military PSYOP experience and knowledge of Al Qaeda and associated terrorists movements and ideology are preferred but not required.

Computer Skills:
Must have advanced working knowledge of a variety of Microsoft applications (MSWord, Excel, Access, PowerPoint, and Outlook).

Certificates, Licenses, Registrations: N/A

Clearance:
TS/SCI

Competencies - To perform the job successfully, an individual should demonstrate the following competencies:

Problem Solving - Identify and resolve problems in a timely manner; gather and analyze information skillfully; develop alternative solutions; work well in group problem solving situations; use reason even when dealing with emotional topics.

Written Communication - Write clearly and informatively; edit work for spelling and grammar errors; vary writing styles to meet needs; present numerical data effectively; read and interpret written information.

Diversity - Demonstrate knowledge of EEO policy; show respect and sensitivity for cultural differences; educate others on the value of diversity; promote a harassment-free environment; build a diverse workforce.

Ethics - Treat people with respect; keep commitments; inspire the trust of others; work with integrity and ethically; uphold organizational values.

Strategic Thinking - Develop strategies to achieve organizational goals; understand organization's strengths & weaknesses; analyze market and competition; identify external threats and opportunities; adapt strategy to changing conditions.

Planning/Organizing - Prioritize and plan work activities; use time efficiently; plan for additional resources; set goals and objectives; organize or schedule other people and their tasks; develop realistic action plans.

Professionalism - Approach others in a tactful manner; react well under pressure; treat others with respect and consideration regardless of their status or position; accept responsibility for own actions; follow through on commitments.

Innovation - Display original thinking and creativity; meet challenges with resourcefulness; generate suggestions for improving work; develop innovative approaches and ideas; present ideas and information in a manner that gets others' attention.

Qualifications - To perform this job successfully, an individual must be able to perform each essential duty satisfactorily. The requirements listed below are representative of the knowledge, skill, and/or ability required. Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions.

Language Skills - Ability to read, analyze, and interpret general business periodicals, professional journals, technical procedures, or governmental regulations. Write reports, proposals, business correspondence, and procedure manuals. Effectively present information and respond to questions from groups of managers, clients, customers, and the general public.

Mathematical Skills - Apply concepts such as fractions, percentages, ratios, and proportions to practical situations.

Reasoning Ability - Define problems, collect data, establish facts, and draw valid conclusions. Question activities and issues in all functional areas and make sound business decisions based on that data.

Physical Demands - The physical demands described here are representative of those that must be met by an employee to successfully perform the essential functions of this job. Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions.

While performing the duties of this job, the employee is regularly required to sit and talk or hear. The employee is frequently required to walk; use hands to finger, handle, or feel and reach with hands and arms. The employee is occasionally required to stand; climb or balance and stoop, kneel, crouch, or crawl. The employee must occasionally lift and/or move up to 25 pounds. Specific vision abilities required by this job include close vision.

Work Environment - The work environment characteristics described here are representative of those an employee encounters while performing the essential functions of this job. Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions.

The employee will normally work in a temperature-controlled office environment, with frequent exposure to electronic office equipment. The noise level in the work environment is usually moderate.

Chenega Corporation is an EOE. AA/M/F/D/V. Native preference under PL 93-638. We participate in the E-Verify Employment Verification Program.

[Ed Jewett]

GIYUS Targets Christian Science Monitor Message Board
Eli Clifton, June 20, 2010
Email This | Print This | Share This | Comment | Antiwar Forum

Last week I wrote about GIYUS — the “online public diplomacy platform of Israel” as the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Word document) describes it—and the powerful role it can play in shaping the results of online polls and changing the direction of message board discussions.

Yesterday GIYUS sent out an alert about a forum on The Christian Science Monitor’s website. GIYUS appears to have driven a lot of traffic to the discussion–which is titled “Israeli blockade of Gaza: What would you change?“–and has inundated the forum with pro-blockade comments.

Comments in favor of the blockade are consistently receiving “thumbs up” votes and those in opposition to the blockade, and the IDF’s lethal attack on the flotilla, are getting voted down.

As an example, here is the comment which is currently the most highly ranked.

“Johnny Gee” wrote:

I would stress the strongest support as possible for the beleaguered Israelis, who are threatened from every direction and by every mode, including missles [sic], suicide murderers, and of course arms from the sea. Remember, the Israelis are the canary in the coalmine – the real target of the Islamic fundamentalist murderers is the US, Europe, and the world.

“Sam from Oregon” didn’t have the same appeal to GIYUS users and has found his comment voted to the bottom of the thread.

Sam wrote:

I would eliminate all US financial and military support to Israel. Israel is not “too big to fail”, and if they can’t figure out a way to make nice with their neighbors, then they deserve to fail. The US habit of unconditional support for everything Israeli is the primary cause of middle east unrest. It’s time for US military adventures to come to an end. Bring home the troops, and use all the money for improving US infrastructure, education, and health care.

Visit Lobelog.com for the latest news analysis and commentary from Inter Press News Service’s Washington bureau chief Jim Lobe.

[Ed Jewett]

Computers that Read Minds Are Being Developed by Intel
August 26th, 2010

This is from, Operation Mind Control by Walter Bowart, published in 1978 (look around online and you can find it for substantially less than the used copies are going for on Amazon *wink*):

In 1975 a primitive “mind-reading machine” was tested at the Stanford Research Institute. The machine is a computer which can recognize a limited amount of words by monitoring a person’s silent thoughts. This technique relies upon the discovery that brain wave tracings taken with an electroencephalograph (EEG) show distinctive patterns that correlate with individual words—whether the words are spoken aloud or merely subvocalized (thought of).

The computer initially used audio equipment to listen to the words the subject spoke. (At first the vocabulary was limited to “up,” “down,” “left,” and “right.”) At the same time the computer heard the words, it monitored the EEG impulses coming from electrodes pasted to the subject’s head and responded by turning a camera in the direction indicated. After a few repetitions of the procedure, the computer’s hearing was turned off and it responded solely to the EEG “thoughts.” It moved a television camera in the directions ordered by the subject’s thoughts alone!

This “mind-reading machine” was the creation of psychologist Lawrence Pinneo and computer experts Daniel Wolf and David Hall. Their stated goal was eventually to put a highly skilled computer programmer into direct communication with the computer. Their research indicated that a nonsymbolic language—brain-wave patterns—did exist. By teaching computers this language, the timeconsuming practice of speaking or writing computer instructions could be abandoned. Faster programming would result in an information explosion whose effects could cause a transformation of our civilization unlike anything that has happened since the Industrial Revolution.

Many beneficial effects of the Stanford “mind-reading machine” may eventually accrue. Physically handicapped people may be able to use mini-computers to interpret signals from their environment and compensate for the loss of some bodily functions. The deaf may be able to hear; the blind to see; the paralyzed to walk.

Military applications of a “mind-reading machine” will someday allow faster computer input and output of information, remote control of war machines, and even the creation of animal or human robots to do the bidding of the military.

And now…

Via: Telegraph:

New technology could allow people to dictate letters and search the internet simply by thinking, according to researchers at Intel who are behind the project.

Unlike current brain-controlled computers, which require users to imagine making physical movements to control a cursor on a screen, the new technology will be capable of directly interpreting words as they are thought.

Intel’s scientists are creating detailed maps of the activity in the brain for individual words which can then be matched against the brain activity of someone using the computer, allowing the machine to determine the word they are thinking.

http://cryptogon.com/?p=17262

[Ed Jewett]

Psywar: The Real Battlefield is the Mind
by grtv

This film explores the evolution of propaganda and public relations in the United States, with an emphasis on the “elitist theory of democracy” and the relationship between war, propaganda and class.

Includes original interviews with a number of dissident scholars including Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Michael Parenti, Peter Phillips (“Project Censored”), John Stauber (“PR Watch”), Christopher Simpson (“The Science of Coercion”) and others.

WATCH THE FULL-LENGTH FILM ONLINE:
http://exposureroom.com/members/Durruti/...d16d53d55/

[Ed Jewett]

Flying the flag, faking the news

September 2, 2010 By John Pilger

John Pilger's ZSpace Page / ZSpace

Edward Bernays, the American nephew of Sigmund Freud, is said to have invented modern propaganda. During the first world war, he was one of a group of influential liberals who mounted a secret government campaign to persuade reluctant Americans to send an army to the bloodbath in Europe. In his book, Propaganda, published in 1928, Bernays wrote that the “intelligent manipulation of the organised habits and opinions of the masses was an important element in democratic society” and that the manipulators “constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power in our country”. Instead of propaganda, he coined the euphemism “public relations”.

The American tobacco industry hired Bernays to convince women they should smoke in public. By associating smoking with women’s liberation, he made cigarettes “torches of freedom”. In 1954, he conjured a communist menace in Guatemala as an excuse for overthrowing the democratically-elected government, whose social reforms were threatening the United Fruit company’s monopoly of the banana trade. He called it a “liberation”.

Bernays was no rabid right-winger. He was an elitist liberal who believed that “engineering public consent” was for the greater good. This was achieved by the creation of “false realities” which then became “news events”. Here are examples of how it is done these days:

False reality The last US combat troops have left Iraq “as promised, on schedule”, according to President Barack Obama. TV screens have filled with cinematic images of the “last US soldiers” silhouetted against the dawn light, crossing the border into Kuwait.

Fact They are still there. At least 50,000 troops will continue to operate from 94 bases. American air assaults are unchanged, as are special forces’ assassinations. The number of “military contractors” is currently 100,000 and rising. Most Iraqi oil is now under direct foreign control.

False reality BBC presenters and reporters have described the departing US troops as a “sort of victorious army” that has achieved “a remarkable change in [Iraq’s] fortunes”. Their commander, General David Petraeus, is a “celebrity”, “charming”, “savvy” and “remarkable”.

Fact There is no victory of any sort. There is a catastrophic disaster; and attempts to present it as otherwise are a model of Bernays’ campaign to “re-brand” the slaughter of the first world war as “necessary” and “noble”. In 1980, Ronald Reagan, running for president, re-branded the invasion of Vietnam, in which up to three million people died, as a “noble cause”, a theme taken up enthusiastically by Hollywood. Today’s Iraq war movies have a similar purging theme: the invader as both idealist and victim.

False reality It is not known how many Iraqis have died. They are “countless” or maybe “in the tens of thousands”.

Fact As a direct consequence of the Anglo-American led invasion, a million Iraqis have died. This figure from Opinion Research Business is based on peer-reviewed research led by Johns Hopkins University in Washington DC, whose methods were secretly affirmed as “best practice” and “robust” by the Blair government’s chief scientific adviser, as revealed in a Freedom of Information search. This figure is rarely reported or presented to “charming” and “savvy” American generals. Neither is the dispossession of four million Iraqis, the malnourishment of most Iraqi children, the epidemic of mental illness and the poisoning of the environment.

False reality The British economy has a deficit of billions which must be reduced with cuts in public services and regressive taxation, in a spirit of “we’re all in this together”.

Fact We are not in this together. What is remarkable about this public relations triumph is that only 18 months ago the diametric opposite filled TV screens and front pages. Then, in a state of shock, truth was unavoidable, if briefly. The Wall Street and City of London financiers’ trough was on full view for the first time, along with the venality of once celebrated snouts. Billions in public money went to inept and crooked organisations known as banks, which were spared debt liability by their Labour government sponsors.

Within a year, record profits and personal bonuses were posted, and state and media propaganda had recovered its equilibrium. Suddenly, the “black hole” was no longer the responsibility of the banks, whose debt is to be paid by those not in any way responsible: the public. The received media wisdom of this “necessity” is now a chorus, from the BBC to the Sun. A masterstroke, Bernays would surely say.

False reality The former government minister Ed Miliband offers a “genuine alternative” as leader of the British Labour Party.

Fact Miliband, like his brother David, the former foreign secretary, and almost all those standing for the Labour leadership, is immersed in the effluent of New Labour. As a New Labour MP and minister, he did not refuse to serve under Blair or speak out against Labour’s persistent warmongering. He now calls the invasion of Iraq a “profound mistake”. Calling it a mistake insults the memory and the dead. It was a crime, of which the evidence is voluminous. He has nothing new to say about the other colonial wars, none of them mistakes. Neither has he demanded basic social justice: that those who caused the recession clear up the mess and that Britain’s fabulously rich corporate minority be seriously taxed, starting with Rupert Murdoch.

Of course, the good news is that false realities often fail when the public trusts its own critical intelligence, not the media. Two classified documents recently released by Wikileaks express the CIA’s concern that the populations of European countries, which oppose their governments’ war policies, are not succumbing to the usual propaganda spun through the media. For the rulers of the world, this is a conundrum, because their unaccountable power rests on the false reality that no popular resistance works. And it does.


tip of the cap to Magda Hassan


See also:

The black art of news management
3 June 2010

In his latest column for the New Statesman, John Pilger describes the "master illusions" which have formed the basis of black propaganda and provided "false flags" for political chicanery and for wars and atrocities, such as Iraq and the Israeli assault on the Gaza peace flotilla.



How do wars begin? With a “master illusion”, according to Ralph McGehee, one of the CIA’s pioneers in “black propaganda”, known today as “news management”. In 1983, he described to me how the CIA had faked an “incident” that became the “conclusive proof of North Vietnam’s aggression”. This followed a claim, also fake, that North Vietnamese torpedo boats had attacked an American warship in the Gulf of Tonkin in August 1964.

“The CIA,” he said, “loaded up a junk, a North Vietnamese junk, with communist weapons - the Agency maintains communist arsenals in the United States and around the world. They floated this junk off the coast of central Vietnam. Then they shot it up and made it look like a fire fight had taken place, and they brought in the American press. Based on this evidence, two Marine landing teams went into Danang and a week after that the American air force began regular bombing of North Vietnam.” An invasion that took three million lives was under way.

The Israelis have played this murderous game since 1948. The massacre of peace activists in international waters on 31 May was “spun” to the Israeli public for most of last week, preparing them for yet more murder by their government, with the unarmed flotilla of humanitarians described as terrorists or dupes of terrorists. The BBC was so intimidated that it reported the atrocity primarily as a “potential public relations disaster for Israel”, the perspective of the killers, and a disgrace for journalism.

A similar master illusion currently preoccupies Asian governments. On 20 May, South Korea announced that it had “overwhelming evidence” that one of its warships, the Cheonan, had been sunk by a torpedo fired by a North Korean submarine in March with the loss of 46 sailors. The United States maintains 28,000 troops in South Korea, where popular sentiment has long backed a détente with Pyongyang.

On 26 May, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton flew to Seoul and demanded that the “international community must respond” to “North Korea’s outrage”. She flew on to Japan, where the new “threat” from North Korea conveniently eclipsed the briefly independent foreign policy of Japanese prime minister Yukio Hatoyama, elected last year with popular opposition to America’s permanent military occupation of Japan. The “overwhelming evidence” is a torpedo propeller that “had been corroding at least for several months,” reported the Korea Times. In April, the director of South Korea’s national intelligence, Won See-hoon, told a parliamentary committee that there was no evidence linking the sinking of the Cheonan to North Korea. The defence minister agreed. The head of South Korea’s military marine operations said, “No North Korean warships have been detected [in] the waters where the accident took place.” The reference to “accident” suggests the warship struck a reef and broke in two.

To the American media, North Korea’s guilt is beyond doubt, just as North Vietnam’s guilt was beyond doubt, just as Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, just as Israel can terrorise with impunity. However, unlike Vietnam and Iraq, North Korea has nuclear weapons, which helps explain why it has not been attacked, not yet: a salutary lesson to other countries, such as Iran, currently in the crosshairs.

In Britain, we have our own master illusions. Imagine someone on state benefits caught claiming £40,000 of taxpayers’ money in a second home scam. A prison sentence would almost certainly follow. David Laws, chief secretary to the Treasury, does the same and is described as follows:

“I have always admired his intelligence, his sense of public duty and his personal integrity” (Nick Clegg, deputy prime minister). “You are a good and honourable man. I am sure that throughout you have been motivated by wanting to protect your privacy rather than anything else.” (David Cameron, prime minister). Laws is “a man of quite exceptional nobility” (Julian Glover, the Guardian). A “brilliant mind” (BBC).

The Oxbridge club and its associate members in politics and the media have tried to link Laws’s “error of judgement” and “naivety” to his “right to privacy” as a gay man, an irrelevance. The “brilliant mind” is a wealthy Cambridge-groomed investment banker and gilts trader devoted to the noble task of cutting the public services of mostly poor and honest people.

Now imagine another public official, the force behind one of the great war criminals and liars. This official “spun” the illegal invasion of a defenceless country that resulted in the deaths of at least a million people and the dispossession of many more: in effect, the crushing of a human society. If this was the Balkans or Africa, he would very likely have been indicted by the International Criminal Court.

But crime pays for the clubbable. In quick step with the Laws affair, this truth was demonstrated by the continuing celebration of Alastair Campbell, whose frequent media appearances provide a vicarious thrill for the liberal intelligentsia. To the Guardian, Campbell is “bullish, sometimes misdirected, but unafraid to press on where others might have faltered”. The Guardian’s immediate interest is its “exclusive” publication of Campbell’s “politically explosive” and “uncut” diaries. Here is a flavour: “Saturday 14 May. I called Peter [Mandelson] and asked why he didn’t return my calls yesterday. ‘You know why.’ ‘No, I don’t.’ He said he was incandescent at my Newsnight interview...’ ”

In a promotional interview with the Guardian, Campbell dispensed more of this dated incest, referring just once to the bloodbath for which he was a principal apologist. “Did Iraq lose us support in 2005?” he asked rhetorically. “Without a doubt...” Thus, a criminal tragedy equal in scale to the Rwandan genocide was dismissed as a “loss” for New Labour: a master illusion of notable profanity.

http://www.johnpilger.com/page.asp?partid=578

###

The charge of the media brigade
8 July 2010

In his latest column for the New Statesman, John Pilger describes how an all-pervasive corporate media culture in the United States prepares the way for a permanent state of war. And yet for all the column inches and broadcast hours filled, the brainwashing is not succeeding. And this, he suggests, is 'America's greatest virtue'.


The TV anchorwoman was conducting a split screen interview with a journalist who had volunteered to be a witness at the execution of a man on death row in Utah for 25 years. “He had a choice,” said the journalist, “lethal injection or firing squad.” “Wow!” said the anchorwoman. Cue a blizzard of commercials for fast food, teeth whitener, stomach stapling, the new Cadillac. This was followed by the war in Afghanistan presented by a correspondent sweating in a flak jacket. “Hey, it’s hot,” he said on the split screen. “Take care,” said the anchorwoman. “Coming up” was a reality show in which the camera watched a man serving solitary confinement in a prison’s “hell hole”.

The next morning I arrived at the Pentagon for an interview with one of President Obama’s senior war-making officials. There was a long walk along shiny corridors hung with pictures of generals and admirals festooned in ribbons. The interview room was purpose-built. It was blue and arctic cold, and windowless and featureless except for a flag and two chairs: props to create the illusion of a place of authority. The last time I was in a room like this in the Pentagon a colonel called Hum stopped my interview with another war-making official when I asked why so many innocent civilians were being killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Then it was in the thousands; now it is more than a million. “Stop tape!” he ordered.

This time there was no Colonel Hum, merely a polite dismissal of soldiers’ testimony that it was a “common occurrence” that troops were ordered to “kill every mother fucker”. The Pentagon, says the Associated Press, spends $4.7 billion on public relations: that is, winning the hearts and minds not of recalcitrant Afghan tribesmen but of Americans. This is known as “information dominance” and PR people are “information warriors”.

American imperial power flows through a media culture to which the word imperial is anathema. To broach it is heresy. Colonial campaigns are really “wars of perception”, wrote the present commander, General David Petraeus, in which the media popularises the terms and conditions. “Narrative” is the accredited word because it is post-modern and bereft of context and truth. The narrative of Iraq is that the war is won, and the narrative of Afghanistan is that it is a “good war”. That neither is true is beside the point. They promote a “grand narrative” of a constant threat and the need for permanent war. “We are living in a world of cascading and intertwined threats,” wrote the celebrated New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, “that have the potential to turn our country upside down at any moment.”

Friedman supports an attack on Iran, whose independence is intolerable. This is the psychopathic vanity of great power which Martin Luther King described as “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world”. He was then shot dead.

The psychopathic is applauded across popular, corporate culture, from the TV death watch of a man choosing a firing squad over lethal injection to the Oscar winning Hurt Locker and a new acclaimed war documentary Restrepo. Directors of both films deny and dignify the violence of invasion as “apolitical”. And yet behind the cartoon facade is serious purpose. The US is engaged militarily in 75 countries. There are some 900 US military bases across the world, many at the gateways to the sources of fossil fuels.

But there is a problem. Most Americans are opposed to these wars and to the billions of dollars spent on them. That their brainwashing so often fails is America’s greatest virtue. This is frequnetly due to courageous mavericks, especially those who emerge from the centrifuge of power. In 1971, military analyst Daniel Ellsberg leaked documents known as the Pentagon Papers which put the lie to almost everything two presidents had claimed about Vietnam. Many of these insiders are not even renegades. I have a section in my address book filled with the names of former officers of the CIA, who have spoken out. They have no equivalent in Britain.

In 1993, C. Philip Liechty, the CIA operations officer in Jakarta at the time of Indonesia’s murderous invasion of East Timor, described to me how President Gerald Ford and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger had given the dictator Suharto “a green light” and secretly supplied the arms and logistics he needed. As the first reports of massacres arrived at his desk, he began to turn. “It was wrong,” he said. “I felt badly.”

Melvin Goodman is now a scholar at Johns Hopkins University in Washington. He was in the CIA more than 40 years and rose to be a senior Soviet analyst. When we met the other day, he described the conduct of the cold war as a series of gross exaggerations of Soviet “aggressiveness” that wilfully ignored the intelligence that the Soviets were committed to avoid nuclear war at all costs. Declassified official files on both sides of the Atlantic support this view. “What mattered to the hardliners in Washington,” he said, “was how a perceived threat could be exploited.” The present secretary of defence, Robert Gates, as deputy director of the CIA in the 1980s, had constantly hyped the “Soviet menace” and is, says Goodman, doing the same today “on Afghanistan, North Korea and Iran”.

Little has changed. In America, in 1939, W.H. Auden wrote:

As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives […]
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism’s face
And the international wrong

http://www.johnpilger.com/page.asp?partid=580

[Ed Jewett]

opnav-1412-13.pdf

Navy Information Dominance Warfare Officer September 21, 2010

available through cryptome or

http://cryptome.org/dodi/opnav-1412-13.pdf

[Ed Jewett]

Fri Oct 1, 4:59 pm ET
Army embeds active-duty PSYOPS soldiers at local TV stations
By John Cook

By John Cook john Cook – Fri Oct 1, 4:59 pm ET





The U.S. Army has used local television stations in the U.S. as training posts for some of its psychological-operations personnel, The Upshot has learned. Since at least 2001, both WRAL, a CBS affiliate in Raleigh, N.C., and WTOC, a CBS affiliate in Savannah, Ga., have regularly hosted active-duty soldiers from the Army's 4th Psychological Operations group as part of the Army's Training With Industry program. Training With Industry is designed to offer career soldiers a chance to pick up skills through internships and fellowships with private businesses. The PSYOPS soldiers used WRAL and WTOC to learn broadcasting and communications expertise that they could apply in their mission, as the Army describes it, of "influenc[ing] the emotions, motives, objective reasoning, and ultimately the behavior of foreign audiences."

WRAL and WTOC were on a list of participants in the Army's Training With Industry program provided to The Upshot in response to a Freedom of Information Act request, and a spokeswoman with the Army's Human Resources Command confirmed that PSYOPS soldiers worked at the stations.

"Both of those stations are very supportive of the military, and think very highly of the program," said Lt. Col. Stacy Bathrick. "Our officers are there to learn best practices in terms of programming and production side that they can use when they deploy. To be able to get hands-on interaction with a news station there's nothing like that." Bathrick said the soldiers were never involved in newsgathering.

The relationship between PSYOPS, Training With Industry, and television news operations has stirred controversy in the past. In 2000, after a Dutch newspaper reported that PSYOPS troops had been placed in CNN's newsroom under the program, CNN discontinued the internships and admitted that they had been a mistake. "It was inappropriate for PSYOPS personnel to be at CNN, they are not here now, and they never again will be at CNN," a spokesperson said at the time.

WRAL's news director, Rick Gall, feels differently. "My sense was, this was an educational opportunity to see how the broadcasting industry operates," said Gall. "They'd spend time in the various departments of the station, including the newsroom. I wasn't concerned about having someone learn what we do, and there was no influence on newsgathering. It was like shadowing." WRAL is owned by Capitol Broadcasting Company, which owns a variety of media outlets in North Carolina. Gall said WRAL hasn't hosted a soldier — which he described as an "embed" — since 2007. According to Bathrick, the Army's relationship with WTOC in Savannah is ongoing — a PSYOPS officer is currently embedded there. Bill Cathcart, WTOC's vice president and general manager, did not return phone calls or an e-mail seeking comment. WTOC is owned by Raycom Media, a television chain based in Alabama.

WRAL and WTOC are not alone among media outlets that the U.S. military has sought to learn from through Training With Industry. The Upshot has previously reported that the Marine Corps placed public affairs officers with the Chicago Tribune for several years in order to better understand how to influence and work with the news media, and CNNMoney.com hosted an officer in 2007 and 2008, despite the network's embarrassment over the program in 2000.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_upshot/201...v-stations

[Ed Jewett]

Sunday, October 10, 2010

The Emperor's Spokesman Has No Clothes

As Gallup notes, trust in the corporate media is at an all-time low.

Much of the loss of trust is due to the media's selling of Iraq war lies and covering up the severity of the financial crisis.

Here are two essays I wrote - the first from a year ago, and the second from last December - explaining why media is so bad, and why we need to "be the media" ourselves .


Herding the Sheep

Financial insider and commentator Yves Smith wrote an essay last week entitled "MSM Reporting as Propaganda" arguing that the government has been using propaganda to make people think that things are getting better, no one is angry, and - therefore - no one should get upset:

The message, quite overtly, is: if you are pissed, you are in a minority. The country has moved on. Things are getting better, get with the program...
Per the social psychology research, this “you are in a minority, you are wrong” message DOES dissuade a lot of people. It is remarkably poisonous. And it discourages people from taking concrete action.

Is Smith right? And even if she is, isn't "propaganda" too strong a word?

Think Positive
Sure, William K. Black - professor of economics and law, and the senior regulator during the S & L crisis - says that that the government's entire strategy now - as during the S&L crisis - is to cover up how bad things are ("the entire strategy is to keep people from getting the facts").
Admittedly, 7 out of the 8 giant, money center banks went bankrupt in the 1980's during the "Latin American Crisis", and the government's response was to cover up their insolvency.

It's true that Business Week wrote on May 23, 2006:

President George W. Bush has bestowed on his intelligence czar, John Negroponte, broad authority, in the name of national security, to excuse publicly traded companies from their usual accounting and securities-disclosure obligations.

I can't deny that the Tarp Inspector General said that Paulson and Bernanke falsely stated that the big banks receiving Tarp money were healthy, when they were not.

Okay, the government and Wall Street have traditionally tried to dispense happy talk when there is an economic crash, and Arianna Huffington recently pointed out:
There is something in the current DC/NY culture that equates a lack of unthinking boosterism with a lack of patriotism. As if not being drunk on the latest Dow gains is somehow un-American.

And I'll give you that a recent Pew Research Center study on the coverage of the crisis found that the media has largely parroted what the White House and Wall Street were saying.

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-rei...30105.html

But that's not propaganda . . . its just positive thinking, right?

The Other Guy
And the whole word propaganda is a Nazi, communist kind of thing which has no place in the same sentence as America. Right?

Granted, famed Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein says the CIA has already bought and paid for many successful journalists.

And sure, the New York Times discusses in a matter-of-fact way the use of mainstream writers by the CIA to spread messages.
True, a 4-part BBC documentary called the "Century of the Self" shows that an American - Freud's nephew, Edward Bernays - created the modern field of manipulation of public perceptions, and the U.S. government has extensively used his techniques (but the BBC isn't American, so it doesn't count).
I won't deny that the Independent discusses allegations of American propaganda (but that's a British paper, doesn't count).
And (ho hum) one of the premier writers on journalism says the U.S. has used widespread propaganda.
And (are we still talking about this?) an expert on propaganda testified under oath during trial that the CIA employs THOUSANDS of reporters and OWNS its own media organizations (the expert has an impressive background).
And (I can't believe we're still talking about this) while the U.S. government has repeatedly claimed that it was launching propaganda programs solely at foreign enemies, it has actually used them against American citizens. For example:

• In 2002, the Pentagon announced that it was considering spreading false propaganda in the foreign press. However, the military has spread propaganda within the U.S. in an operation so aggressive that one participant, a military analyst, called it "psyops on steroids"
  

• Raw Story confirmed yesterday the use of propaganda on Americans
  

• The U.S. government long ago announced its intention to "fight the net".
  

• As revealed by an official Pentagon report signed by Rumsfeld called "Information Operations Roadmap":
  

The roadmap [contains an] acknowledgement that information put out as part of the military's psychological operations, or Psyops, is finding its way onto the computer and television screens of ordinary Americans. "Information intended for foreign audiences, including public diplomacy and Psyops, is increasingly consumed by our domestic audience," it reads.
"Psyops messages will often be replayed by the news media for much larger audiences, including the American public," it goes on.***
"Strategy should be based on the premise that the Department [of Defense] will 'fight the net' as it would an enemy weapons system".

And (when's the next episode of American Idol on?) CENTCOM announced in 2008 that a team of employees would be "[engaging] bloggers who are posting inaccurate or untrue information, as well as bloggers who are posting incomplete information."And (who do you think will win the playoffs?) the Air Force is also engaging bloggers. Indeed, an Air Force spokesman said:

"We obviously have many more concerns regarding cyberspace than a typical Social Media user," Capt. Faggard says. "I am concerned with how insurgents or potential enemies can use Social Media to their advantage. It's our role to provide a clear and accurate, completely truthful and transparent picture for any audience."

And (did you see that crazy photo?) it is well known that certain governments use software to automatically vote stories questioning their interests down and to send letters favorable to their view to politicians and media (see - as just one example - this, this and this). The U.S. government is very large and well-funded, and could substantially influence voting on social news sites with very little effort, if it wished.
The Bottom Line
Yeah yeah, people say this or that, whatever, I'm too busy to think about it.
Even if true, propaganda is too strong a word for attempts to convince people that important issues are boring, that no one else is angry about them, and that everything is normal.
Perhaps "herding the wayward sheep" would be better . . .

5 Reasons that Corporate Media Coverage is Pro-War

Note: McClatchy and several other large news sources are exceptions which have reported well on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

There are five reasons that the mainstream media is worthless.
1. Self-Censorship by Journalists
Initially, there is tremendous self-censorship by journalists.
For example, several months after 9/11, famed news anchor Dan Rather told the BBC that American reporters were practicing "a form of self-censorship":

There was a time in South Africa that people would put flaming tires around peoples' necks if they dissented. And in some ways the fear is that you will be necklaced here, you will have a flaming tire of lack of patriotism put around your neck. Now it is that fear that keeps journalists from asking the toughest of the tough questions.... And again, I am humbled to say, I do not except myself from this criticism. What we are talking about here - whether one wants to recognise it or not, or call it by its proper name or not - is a form of self-censorship.

Keith Olbermann agreed that there is self-censorship in the American media, and that:

You can rock the boat, but you can never say that the entire ocean is in trouble .... You cannot say: By the way, there's something wrong with our .... system.

As former Washington Post columnist Dan Froomkin wrote in 2006:

Mainstream-media political journalism is in danger of becoming increasingly irrelevant, but not because of the Internet, or even Comedy Central. The threat comes from inside. It comes from journalists being afraid to do what journalists were put on this green earth to do. . . .
There’s the intense pressure to maintain access to insider sources, even as those sources become ridiculously unrevealing and oversensitive. There’s the fear of being labeled partisan if one’s bullshit-calling isn’t meted out in precisely equal increments along the political spectrum.
If mainstream-media political journalists don’t start calling bullshit more often, then we do risk losing our primacy — if not to the comedians then to the bloggers.
I still believe that no one is fundamentally more capable of first-rate bullshit-calling than a well-informed beat reporter - whatever their beat. We just need to get the editors, or the corporate culture, or the self-censorship – or whatever it is – out of the way.

2. Censorship by Higher-Ups If journalists do want to speak out about an issue, they also are subject to tremendous pressure by their editors or producers to kill the story.

The Pulitzer prize-winning reporter who uncovered the Iraq prison torture scandal and the Mai Lai massacre in Vietnam, Seymour Hersh, said:

"All of the institutions we thought would protect us -- particularly the press, but also the military, the bureaucracy, the Congress -- they have failed. The courts . . . the jury's not in yet on the courts. So all the things that we expect would normally carry us through didn't. The biggest failure, I would argue, is the press, because that's the most glaring.... Q: What can be done to fix the (media) situation?
[Long pause] You'd have to fire or execute ninety percent of the editors and executives. You'd actually have to start promoting people from the newsrooms to be editors who you didn't think you could control. And they're not going to do that."

In fact many journalists are warning that the true story is not being reported. See this announcement and this talk.
And a series of interviews with award-winning journalists also documents censorship of certain stories by media editors and owners (and see these samples).
There are many reasons for censorship by media higher-ups.
One is money.
The media has a strong monetary interest to avoid controversial topics in general. It has always been true that advertisers discourage stories which challenge corporate power. Indeed, a 2003 survey reveals that 35% of reporters and news executives themselves admitted that journalists avoid newsworthy stories if “the story would be embarrassing or damaging to the financial interests of a news organization’s owners or parent company.”
In addition, the government has allowed tremendous consolidation in ownership of the airwaves during the past decade.
Dan Rather has slammed media consolidation:

Likening media consolidation to that of the banking industry, Rather claimed that “roughly 80 percent” of the media is controlled by no more than six, and possibly as few as four, corporations.

This is documented by the following must-see charts prepared by:

• Media Channel
  

• The Nation
  

• Free Press
  

And check out this list of interlocking directorates of big media companies from Fairness and Accuracy in Media, and this resource from the Columbia Journalism Review to research a particular company.

This image gives a sense of the decline in diversity in media ownership over the last couple of decades:

The large media players stand to gain billions of dollars in profits if the Obama administration continues to allow monopoly ownership of the airwaves by a handful of players. The media giants know who butters their bread. So there is a spoken or tacit agreement: if the media cover the administration in a favorable light, the MSM will continue to be the receiver of the government's goodies. 3. Drumming Up Support for War
In addition, the owners of American media companies have long actively played a part in drumming up support for war.
It is painfully obvious that the large news outlets studiously avoided any real criticism of the government's claims in the run up to the Iraq war. It is painfully obvious that the large American media companies acted as lapdogs and stenographers for the government's war agenda.
Veteran reporter Bill Moyers criticized the corporate media for parroting the obviously false link between 9/11 and Iraq (and the false claims that Iraq possessed WMDs) which the administration made in the run up to the Iraq war, and concluded that the false information was not challenged because:

"the [mainstream] media had been cheerleaders for the White House from the beginning and were simply continuing to rally the public behind the President — no questions asked."

And as NBC News' David Gregory (later promoted to host Meet the Press) said:

"I think there are a lot of critics who think that . . . . if we did not stand up [in the run-up to the war] and say 'this is bogus, and you're a liar, and why are you doing this,' that we didn't do our job. I respectfully disagree. It's not our role"

But this is nothing new. In fact, the large media companies have drummed up support for all previous wars.
For example, Hearst helped drum up support for the Spanish-American War.
And an official summary of America's overthrow of the democratically-elected president of Iran in the 1950's states, "In cooperation with the Department of State, CIA had several articles planted in major American newspapers and magazines which, when reproduced in Iran, had the desired psychological effect in Iran and contributed to the war of nerves against Mossadeq." (page x)
The mainstream media also may have played footsie with the U.S. government right before Pearl Harbor. Specifically, a highly-praised historian (Bob Stineet) argues that the Army’s Chief of Staff informed the Washington bureau chiefs of the major newspapers and magazines of the impending Pearl Harbor attack BEFORE IT OCCURRED, and swore them to an oath of secrecy, which the media honored (page 361) .
And the military-media alliance has continued without a break (as a highly-respected journalist says, "viewers may be taken aback to see the grotesque extent to which US presidents and American news media have jointly shouldered key propaganda chores for war launches during the last five decades.")
As the mainstream British paper, the Independent, writes:

There is a concerted strategy to manipulate global perception. And the mass media are operating as its compliant assistants, failing both to resist it and to expose it. The sheer ease with which this machinery has been able to do its work reflects a creeping structural weakness which now afflicts the production of our news.

The article in the Independent discusses the use of "black propaganda" by the U.S. government, which is then parroted by the media without analysis; for example, the government forged a letter from al Zarqawi to the "inner circle" of al-Qa'ida's leadership, urging them to accept that the best way to beat US forces in Iraq was effectively to start a civil war, which was then publicized without question by the media..
So why has the American press has consistenly served the elites in disseminating their false justifications for war?
One of of the reasons is because the large media companies are owned by those who support the militarist agenda or even directly profit from war and terror (for example, NBC - which is being sold to Comcast - was owned by General Electric, one of the largest defense contractors in the world -- which directly profits from war, terrorism and chaos).
Another seems to be an unspoken rule that the media will not criticize the government's imperial war agenda.
And the media support isn't just for war: it is also for various other shenanigans by the powerful. For example, a BBC documentary proves:

There was "a planned coup in the USA in 1933 by a group of right-wing American businessmen . . . . The coup was aimed at toppling President Franklin D Roosevelt with the help of half-a-million war veterans. The plotters, who were alleged to involve some of the most famous families in America, (owners of Heinz, Birds Eye, Goodtea, Maxwell Hse & George Bush’s Grandfather, Prescott) believed that their country should adopt the policies of Hitler and Mussolini to beat the great depression."

Moreover, "the tycoons told the general who they asked to carry out the coup that the American people would accept the new government because they controlled all the newspapers."

See also this book.
Have you ever heard of this scheme before? It was certainly a very large one. And if the conspirators controlled the newspapers then, how much worse is it today with media consolidation?
4. Access
Politico reveals:

For $25,000 to $250,000, The Washington Post has offered lobbyists and association executives off-the-record, nonconfrontational access to "those powerful few": Obama administration officials, members of Congress, and — at first — even the paper’s own reporters and editors...

The offer — which essentially turns a news organization into a facilitator for private lobbyist-official encounters — was a new sign of the lengths to which news organizations will go to find revenue at a time when most newspapers are struggling for survival.

That may be one reason that the mainstream news commentators hate bloggers so much. The more people who get their news from blogs instead of mainstream news sources, the smaller their audience, and the less the MSM can charge for the kind of "nonconfrontational access" which leads to puff pieces for the big boys. 5. Censorship by the Government
Finally, as if the media's own interest in promoting war is not strong enough, the government has exerted tremendous pressure on the media to report things a certain way. Indeed, at times the government has thrown media owners and reporters in jail if they've been too critical. The media companies have felt great pressure from the government to kill any real questioning of the endless wars.
For example, Dan Rather said, regarding American media, "What you have is a miniature version of what you have in totalitarian states".
Tom Brokaw said "all wars are based on propaganda.
And the head of CNN said:

There was 'almost a patriotism police' after 9/11 and when the network showed [things critical of the administration's policies] it would get phone calls from advertisers and the administration and "big people in corporations were calling up and saying, 'You're being anti-American here.'

Indeed, former military analyst and famed Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg said that the government has ordered the media not to cover 9/11:

Ellsberg seemed hardly surprised that today's American mainstream broadcast media has so far failed to take [former FBI translator and 9/11 whistleblower Sibel] Edmonds up on her offer, despite the blockbuster nature of her allegations [which Ellsberg calls "far more explosive than the Pentagon Papers"]. As Edmonds has also alluded, Ellsberg pointed to the New York Times, who "sat on the NSA spying story for over a year" when they "could have put it out before the 2004 election, which might have changed the outcome."
"There will be phone calls going out to the media saying 'don't even think of touching it, you will be prosecuted for violating national security,'" he told us.
* * *
"I am confident that there is conversation inside the Government as to 'How do we deal with Sibel?'" contends Ellsberg. "The first line of defense is to ensure that she doesn't get into the 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 . . . .'"

Of course, if the stick approach doesn't work, the government can always just pay off reporters to spread disinformation.

Famed Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein says the CIA has already bought and paid for many successful journalists. See also this New York Times piece, this essay by the Independent, this speech by one of the premier writers on journalism, and this and this roundup. Indeed, in the final analysis, the main reason today that the media giants will not cover the real stories or question the government's actions or policies in any meaningful way is that the American government and mainstream media been somewhat blended together.
Can We Win the Battle Against Censorship? We cannot just leave governance to our "leaders", as "The price of freedom is eternal vigilance" (Jefferson). Similarly, we cannot leave news to the corporate media. We need to "be the media" ourselves.
"To stand in silence when they should be protesting makes cowards out of men."
- Abraham Lincoln
"Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter."
- Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
"Powerlessness and silence go together. We...should use our privileged positions not as a shelter from the world's reality, but as a platform from which to speak. A voice is a gift. It should be cherished and used."
– Margaret Atwood
"There is no act too small, no act too bold. The history of social change is the history of millions of actions, small and large, coming together at points in history and creating a power that governments cannot suppress."
- Howard Zinn (historian)
"All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent"
- Thomas Jefferson