Kill the Messenger
Official Trailer #1 (2014) – Jeremy Renner Crime Movie HD A reporter becomes the target of a vicious smear campaign that drives him to the point of suicide after he exposes the CIA’s role in arming Contra rebels in Nicaragua and importing cocaine into California. Based on the true story of journalist Gary Webb.
Gary Webb interviewed on Counterspin
“But one [Los Angeles] Times reporter characterized himself as being “assigned to the ‘get Gary Webb team'” and another was heard to say “We’re going to take away that guy’s Pulitzer.” The opening “About this series” teaser made it clear that the Times pieces would explicitly address, and deny, the validity of all the main assertions in “Dark Alliance.”
From the beginning, it seemed Los Angeles Times Bureau Chief Doyle McManus was hungry to make an example of Gary Webb. Maybe it was because he actually got the scoop on a story that was in his backyard, as is commonly asserted, or maybe because there was a more searing envy rooted in watching a man do what he could never dare to do: maintain his journalistic integrity. Only the latter could explain the malice he exhibited, as McManus would infamously side against the American people to protect us from a truth they were entrusted to report. He’d paint the CIA as a law-abiding, conscientious agency and go after Webb despite the fact that much of what Webb reported was public record, congressional hearings, from the 1980s.
Not Watchdogs. Lap Dogs.
No less than six Los Angeles Times reporters were sent out to discredit Webb. In The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Los Angeles Times there was no shortage of wanna-be spooks run amuck, but they were nothing less than journalistic prostitutes, what reporter Deborah Davis once warned us about in Katherine the Great.She wrote that in a discussion with Philip Graham, the editor of the The Washington Post, a CIA operative commented derisively on the availability and prices of journalists willing to peddle CIA propaganda and cover stories: “You could get a journalist cheaper than a good call girl, for a couple hundred dollars a month.”
The CIA infiltrated the media
In a February, 1976 note, the CIA’s Office of the Director issued a memo which states “Genuine concern has recently been expressed about CIA relations with newsmen…” As a result, the agency instituted a new policy not to enter into paid arrangements with these institutions.
https://www.archives.gov/files/research/jfk/releases/docid-32403785.pdf [p. 3]
https://www.archives.gov/files/research/jfk/releases/docid-32403785.pdf [p. 3]
Over 40 journalists ‘who doubled as undercover agents’ worked for the CIA
https://www.archives.gov/files/research/jfk/releases/docid-32403785.pdf [p. 17]
We then discussed the matter somewhat at more length and I gave ball park figures of various categories of journalists with whom we had contact. I said that the total free lance stringers with whom we had varying degrees of association was in the area of 40.
https://www.archives.gov/files/research/jfk/releases/docid-32403785.pdf [p. 16]
CIA-NBC connection
https://www.archives.gov/files/research/jfk/releases/docid-32279986.pdf [p. 2]
It was Operation Mockingbird at its worst: CIA media assets planting stories and attacking the messenger. For doing his job and exposing the CIA-Contra-Crack connection, the national media ruined his career. One of the more well-known writers who piled on to this attack on the east coast was New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd. Those attacks made it impossible for Webb to work as a journalist again.
In 2004, he was found dead with two gunshots in his head. It was ruled a “suicide.” But collectively speaking, the gun was always in the hands of the pseudo-journalists who fought so hard, so heroically in their eyes, to protect us from a self-evident truth which the CIA later admitted.
Things haven’t changed. In a recent article at The Intercept, on September 4, 2014, we see in The CIA’s Mop-Up Man: L.A. Times Reporter Cleared Stories With Agency Before Publication that some assets will work for free.
“A prominent national security reporter for the Los Angeles Times routinely submitted drafts and detailed summaries of his stories to CIA press handlers prior to publication, according to documents obtained by The Intercept. Email exchanges between CIA public affairs officers and Ken Dilanian, now an Associated Press intelligence reporter who previously covered the CIA for the Times, show that Dilanian enjoyed a closely collaborative relationship with the agency, explicitly promising positive news coverage and sometimes sending the press office entire story drafts for review prior to publication. In at least one instance, the CIA’s reaction appears to have led to significant changes in the story that was eventually published in the Times.
“I’m working on a story about congressional oversight of drone strikes that can present a good opportunity for you guys,” Dilanian wrote in one email to a CIA press officer, explaining that what he intended to report would be “reassuring to the public” about CIA drone strikes. In another, after a series of back-and-forth emails about a pending story on CIA operations in Yemen, he sent a full draft of an unpublished report along with the subject line, “does this look better?” In another, he directly asks the flack: “You wouldn’t put out disinformation on this, would you?”
In fact, they have been doing it for over a decade now. For every journalist willing to peddle propaganda and cover stories for free simply for the dubious honor of calling themselves “CIA contractors” or “agents of influence”, there are 10 real reporters who will do the same for actual stories that matter; for the truth, and also for free. It’s just a pity that real journalists like Gary Webb could never work in the business again, and McManus and Dilanian still prosper in the national media as weeds in a long-neglected garden of truth.
These two never really got it: planting cover stories and deceiving the public was what the CIA was designed to do to enemy countries, not ours, so what they did to Americans didn’t make them James Bond, or any kind of secret agent heroes; it made them something to be truly despised. Even the agency looks down on these self-serving, unprincipled brown-nosers. “At least Webb had balls” is a common refrain and there was always a grudging admiration from those involved. And of course, movies aren’t made about “heroic” reporters who plant cover stories in psyop campaigns against their own people. Unless they were snuff films, they would be unwatchable. In that sense, because he was the promise of journalism personified, Webb scored, and scored big.
CIA Admits Using News To Manipulate the USA (1975)
German journo: European media writing pro-US stories under CIA pressure (VIDEO)
German journalist Udo Ulfkotte fears the media is pushing for a major war against Russia under false pretenses, claims Germany now a “banana republic.”
“I’ve been a journalist for about 25 years, I have been educated in how to lie, cheat, and not to tell people the truth. “I was supported by the Central Intelligence Agency, the CIA. Why, because I’m pro-American.” “German and American media are trying to bring the war to the people in Europe, leading to war with Russia. We passed the point of no return, and I’m going to stand up and say it… is not right what I’ve done in the past to manipulate people to sow propaganda against Russia.”
Udo Ulfkotte, former editor of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.
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