Media Center

Most people are under the misconception that reporters are meant to serve the public. They are not. They are paid employees who serve their employers. While the employer needs to preserve a general credibility in terms of the news covered, media owners typically cower when challenged by advertisers or major government figures.

When major media organs go after reporters after a story hits, question their motives. Do your own investigating. It takes time, but how else will you know who to trust? The links and stories on this page are designed to help you understand how the media works, and how to improve your own media literacy.

In the Archives

Why We Can't Trust the Media

The CIA and the Media

Speaking Truth to Power

The Media, the CIA and the JFK Case

The Media's "Liberal" Darlings

Useful News Sources

Create your own Newspaper

The Electric Library (fee required)

Counterintellingence Project of Brass Check (many links to additional media resources for activists)

Hidden News

Why We Should Close the School of the Americas

Useful Books on the Media

Fooling America

Unreliable Sources

Theirs Was the Kingdom

NBC just did a series called, in propagandistic fashion, "Truth or Conspiracy", implying that any conspiracy is never truth. The worst segment was, not surprisingly, the one on the JFK assassination. Promising to talk of "new evidence", Katie Couric and NBC interviewed instead only Gerald Posner, the notoriously inaccurate "researcher" and John McAdams, the professor who once posed under a completely false name and gave an interview to a reporter, lying even about his occupation (he claimed to be "Paul Nolan" and a computer store owner, but later admitted online that he had made that all up.) That NBC would present such a one-sided offering is no surprise to any who have followed this case. But it continues to depress, nonetheless.

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CNN irresponsibly backed off a story it aired. CNN has now made a full retraction and fired the people who brought it to light. If the story was true, this action sets a dark and dangerous precedent.

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Of Killing Defectors & Stories

In June of 1998, CNN ran a report on a secret Vietnam SOG mission called Operation Tailwind. Time magazine also ran a story on the operation (Time and CNN are both owned by the Time-Warner corporation). CNN and Time management had both been informed of the support for the story, as well as the likely opposition the story would receive. The story aired June 6, 1998.
     Suddenly, the network was awash in denials. If the story was true, America had used a deadly nerve gas to kill American defectors. This would be the first acknowledged use of such a gas at a time when America is trying to get Saddam to comply with weapons inspections, charging him with storing similarly lethal weapons. How hypocritical it would be for the U.S. if we were complaining about potential use after having actually used the weapons ourselves. In addition, living figures such as Henry Kissinger could potentially be called into court for War crimes were this to be acknowledged.
      In other words, this was a story no one was likely to confirm.
      Where is the truth in this matter? You must find out. Read the Floyd Abrams report on the CNN site, and then read the April Oliver/Jack Smith rebuttal. It's your history, your media. If you let them get away with this, what will they do next?

Talk back to CNN on their

Feedback page. See the Open Letter to Ted Turner on the Citizens for Truth about the Kennedy Assassination site.

The CIA and the Media

In the late 1970s, journalist Carl Bernstein, who with Bob Woodward broke the stories on Watergate in the Washington Post, gained access to what the CIA was trying to keep from congress about its program of using journalists not just abroad, but at home, in deliberate propaganda campaigns. Linked here is an excerpt from Bernstein's article, published in the October 20, 1977 issue of Rolling Stone:

Snippet of Bernstein's Article on the CIA and the Media

Why We Can't Trust the Media to Tell us the Truth

In the excellent book Unreliable Sources by Martin A. Lee and Norman Solomon (A Lyle Stuart Book, New York, 1990), journalists themselves tell you why their hands are tied:

Journalists on a beat are loath to alienate powerful sources, who might retaliate by freezing them out. Summing up the hazards of "aggressive challenges to the official version of things," Tom Wicker of the New York Times listed "lost access, complaints to editors and publishers, social penalities, leaks to competitors, a variety of responses no one wants." In order to get responses they want, reporters often cater to public officials. "Especially useful sources...are rewarded with occasional 'beat sweeteners,'" wrote Jonathan Alter in Newsweek. [...] "It is a bitter irony of source journalism.," [Walter] Karp [of Harpers] wrote, "that the most esteemed journalists are precisely the most servile. For it is by making themselves u seful to the powerful that they gain access to the 'best' sources."

For great information on what to watch out for in the press, check out the web site for FAIR (Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting), a public interest media watchdog group.

Speaking Truth to Power

When Robert Parry was breaking the first AP stories about the Iran-Contra affair, the press and congress tried to ignore his revelations. When he moved over to Newsweek, he was witness to an even more appalling event: Newsweek retracted a story they all knew was true, for political reasons. This is the text of a talk Robert Parry gave for FAIR, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, a few years ago. It stands as one of the most incisive and eloquent examples of why we cannot save we have true freedom of the press in this country. Parry now does independent reporting through his new magazine called i.F. Magazine, and writes and publishes bi-weekly articles at The Consortium.

"The people who succeeded and did well were those who didn't stand up, who didn't write the big stories, who looked the other way when history was happening in front of them, and went along either consciously or just by cowardice with the deception of the American people."

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Fooling America: A Talk by Robert Parry

Julian Holmes wrote a most eloquent piece about the Washington Post's continued denials of conspiracy, even in the face of Watergate, Iran-Contra, the illegal arming of Iraq (see the Teicher Affidavit) and more. Very much to the point. Enjoy.

Holmes to the Washington Post

The Media's "Liberal" Darlings

One of the most pervasive, easily debunked myths is that of the "liberal" media. The Freedom Forum recently did a study on this, which

Robert Parry eloquently summarized.

Media owners, not the writers, control the news, and they are by and large a very conservative group.

For example, take Katherine Graham. Graham owns the Washington Post. A self-proclaimed Republican, Graham stated to a group of CIA officers in 1988, "Democracy flourishes when it can keep its secrets." Surely George Orwell would be proud of such a clear example of "newspeak."

Even so-called "liberal" journalists like Alexander Cockburn and Noam Chomsky have turned their backs on the truth of, for example, the issues surrounding the Kennedy assassination.

Attached here is a document comparing Cockburn's statements to the record on issues surrounding JFK - both the man and the movie - and the assassination, prepared by

CTKA (Citizens for Truth about the Kennedy Assassination).

The second document is a critique of Noam Chomsky on the Vietnam withdrawal issue as portrayed in Chomsky's book Rethinking Camelot.

The Media, the CIA and the JFK Assassination

In the JFK case, we find many journalists were serving two masters - the press and the FBI or the CIA, depending on which journalist you are talking about. For example: Jack Anderson, famous for his 'breakthrough' investigative journalism, briefed the FBI after talking to Jim Garrison. He told the FBI Garrison had quite a case, and was quite serious in his efforts. [FBI document from 4-4-67, referenced in Unreliable Sources] But what did Anderson tell the American public? That it looked like the president had been killed in what might have been a Communist plot!

During the Garrison investigation, worried about public opinion, the

CIA sent out this operational memorandum instructing media assets how to respond to critics of the Warren Commission's lone assassin verdict. Instructions include trying to associate critics with Communists, and trying to insinuate that the critics are only in it for money (neither of which has any bearing on reality, if my own experiences are worth anything!)

One of the most prolific journalists writing about the JFK case, and more particularly, Oswald himself, is Priscilla Johnson McMillan (Johnson was her maiden name.) Her husband,

George McMillan, wrote a book on the 'lone nut' alleged assassin of Martin Luther King. All in the family? The below documents indicate that Priscilla was pursuing a working relationship with the CIA long before she first wrote about Oswald:

Leading the charge against Jim Garrison, District Attorney for New Orleans in Louisiana, when he attempted to prosecute Clay Shaw along with others on the charge of conspiracy to assassination President Kennedy, was Saturday Evening Post writer James Phel an. Like Priscilla, Phelan proved to be serving two masters. While ostensibly working as a journalist, Phelan was also informing to the FBI on Garrison's case, sending them copies of documents from Garrison's case files. Here are a couple of FBI documents on Jim Phelan:

Jim Phelan FBI documents

Lately, a man who has written an anti-conspiracy book named Case Closed, Gerald Posner, now appears on the pages of the New York Times as a book critic for other anti-conspiracy books, most noteably the flimsy "research" work by

Dan Moldea on the Robert Kennedy assassination. Following in the steps of David Belin, a Warren Commission member who later wrote book reviews (of conspiracy authors' works) for the New York Times, and anti-conspiracy writer Priscilla McMillan, also a book reviewer ( of conspiracy authors' works) for the New York Times, now we add yet another deceitful author, Gerald Posner, whose own book is so filled with inaccuracies it is the laughing stock of the conspiracy research community. Coincidence or Conspiracy? Many people had a similar experience to myself after reading the book: Nothing else was such good evidence of conspiracy as this dishonest book.

For a lengthy but very well written summary of the New York Times' handling of the JFK story over the years, see the piece below by Jerry Policoff:

The New York Times and the JFK Assassination

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