Payola is a criminalized activity in which radio stations are paid money by record companies to play and promote certain songs.
And while the latest shenanigans involving FEMA are being unscrambled, it turns out that their fraudulent practices are neither new nor exclusive to this controversial agency.
In fact, in a detailed analysis written two years ago, fake newscasts have played a pivotal role in promoting numerous policies advocated by the current Bush administration.
Among others, this includes paying $240,000 to Armstrong Williams, to promote the No Child Left Behind law “on his nationally syndicated television show and through his newspaper column, and to urge other black journalists to do the same.”
But more to the current tomfoolery at hand:
Since 2001, the Army and Air Force Hometown News Service has fielded 40 reporters, producers and public affairs specialists to create â€good military news†to be beamed to home audiences via local news stations. The service’s â€good news†segments have reportedly reached 41 million Americans via local newscasts — in most cases, without the station acknowledging their source.
This of course is unsurprising considering that the military spent $1.5 million building a high-tech media center to broadcast their propaganda (designed by Hollywod veterans).
See also: The Marketplace They Loathe
Uniting Tinfoil Hat Wearers
Neoconservatism: a CIA Front?
Operation Mockingbird
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Propaganda has always been a part of war, but it is becoming increasingly important. Once you’ve decided to go to war, it would be incompetent not to meet the enemy point for point.
Palestinians and Hamas have been shown to have created entirely fake news stories, complete with fake ambulances. People have witnessed an empty street suddenly fill with rescue personnel and victims, who pose for the Western cameras that appear minutes later, and then the whole thing vanishes. You watch the aftermath of an “Israeli attack” on your evening news.
Google Pallywood if you’re interested in it.
So 8 would have it that the criterion for morality is the action of Hamas. Sounds sensible.
There’s nothing new under the sun.
This is of course deplorable. However, you seem to be indicting the GWB administration rather than the system at large doing business as usual. Surely there’s plenty to criticize about the GOP. However, if these are the things you’re concerned about, you should look at problems in the system itself rather than in any Party or person.
Consider:
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/feed/a4439-2000jan20.htm
The six major broadcast networks have drawn criticism for allowing the drug office to review scripts and tapes of such popular shows as “ER” and “Beverly Hills, 90210,” with the government in some cases making suggestions before the programs aired.. such arrangements could lead to “the possibility of censorship and state-sponsored propaganda.”
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http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=17437
Maj. Thomas Collins, U.S. Information Service has confirmed that “psyops” (psychological operations) personnel, soldiers and officers, have worked in the CNN headquarters in Atlanta. The lend/lease exercise was part of an Army program called “Training With Industry.” According to Collins, the soldiers and officers, “… worked as regular employees of CNN. Conceivably, they would have worked on stories during the Kosovo war. They helped in the production of news.”
When asked if the introduction of military personnel into a civilian news organization was standard operating procedure, one source said, “That question is above my pay grade … but I hope so. It’s what we do.”
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Both of these cases of media tampering were reported at the tail end of the Clinton administration, so clearly don’t have GWB’s evil mark on them. I think these are pretty much the same story that you’re shoveling at us, just change some names and dates. So there’s no conclusion you can make other than that there’s a problem with the system, not focusing specifically in the GWB administration.
Hardly. What do you do if you’re the U.S. military and the BBC and CNN are reporting enemy propaganda? Or do you believe it is the job of the BBC and CNN to report the U.S. military position?
Oops. Let me partly retract my previous statement: “I think these are pretty much the same story that you’re shoveling at us”. In that sentence, the word “shoveling” was inappropriate. It got there because I copied part of this message from correspondence with someone else. Apologies for sounding inflammatory, especially when I didn’t mean to be.
Well, we got ourselves a live one here. I’ll bite – if I’m the US military (odd concept, but I’ll go with it) first thing I do is get the hell out of countries I have no business being in. Next, I ask myself “would I want to know enemy troop movements? Would I approve of tv stations reporting enemy troop movements?” Since the answer is yes, there’s no reason turnaround isn’t fair play.
More to the point, though, just how does propaganda cancel out propaganda? Assuming, for a moment, that you were right, that the CNN wasn’t statist to the core, but actually was viciously anti-war(if that even makes sense.) How does telling the Americans that the war is going well, and promoting the No Child Left Behind Act, cancel out this problem?
I don’t know how the military can fight an information war unless it has the media on it’s side, either because the media has chosen sides or because the military is openly engaging the enemy with information warfare. Actually, a better word to describe what I’m talking about is misinformation, as opposed to propaganda.
I’m not talking about troop movements here. Many media outlets hire stringers who in fact work for Hamas, Al-Qaeda, and other groups, in addition to reporting staged events as news. They have dedicated information warfare units that are very good at getting their message into Western news reports. In the long-run, the market should cause ratings at Reuters and other media outlets that pass along misinformation to fall (apparently that may be happening, since Reuters was bought out), but the military can’t wait for the long-run in a shooting war.
As for your statement about the military getting out of places it doesn’t belong, my counter is simply that that is the question. If there’s a war, you will get it, as sure as you will get bombs, collateral damage, etc.
I don’t approve of any propaganda by any other government agency at anytime, nor from the military during peacetime.
“Neoconservatism: a CIA Front?” maybe should be an epilogue to Betrayal of the American Right. In the book, Rothbard doesn’t really draw out the conclusions from certain coincidences. He does mention the Buckley-CIA connection. But he doesn’t go into detail like this article does. Also, MKUltra was in effect around the same time and certain key libertarian figures seemed to go off the deep end psychologically around that time. Not saying there was that level of CIA involvement but perhaps there was…
Remember the Spanish-America war? You know “You provide the story, I’ll provide the war”. Of course the media wants war – war sells more newspapers. They will of course change sides in a heartbeat when they decide they can sell more stories by being anti-war
Sadly a free media that encourages war is better than media controlled by government.
If we could only get people to stop believing all that garbage they learn in public school/newspapers/television news the world would be a better place.
While the government doesn’t control the news agencies per se, it rewards news outlets that convey their message (special interviews, good stories.) Also, the statist media elites are quite entrenched, which is why we are on the web talking and not in the newspaper talking.
I think if the US Gov’t was, as Ron Paul suggests it should be, anti-interventionist, and we engaged in friendly free trade with all nations without our govt’s interference, we wouldn’t have any enemies and we wouldn’t have to worry about propaganda. It’s about time we all realize that we’ve gone dangerously far into the black, yawning mouth of Statism, to the point where the gov’t wants to know what every citizen is doing, saying and writing, but it refuses to let the citizenry know what it is doing.
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