Piece of Mind

As citizens and media consumers, we are embedded and embroiled in a battle for our minds.

When we actively tune into television news or other programming, read the major newspapers, seek out alternative media, play video games, watch a movie, or browse the Internet, we are subject to the influences, overtly and covertly, of people, organizations and ideologies which remain hidden to us.

There is also increasing evidence that we are subject to having our thoughts and mental processes surveilled and affected, even passively, beyond our choice or recognition.

This six-part series will examine the news media, propaganda, social agenda setting, the influences of corporations, the Pentagon, the CIA and related organizations, in driving not only what you perceive but also how you perceive it, what you think you understand, and perhaps how you will behave in a given socio-political context.

Several cases studies will be presented. Numerous articles and other sources will be noted.

In some cases, this effort is focused on the masses… reaching tens of millions of people at once, or repetitively.

In other cases, the focus is on driving an agenda through the influence of a few.

In some cases, the technologies can focus on a single individual.


The following six sections will include:

Introduction: Propaganda and Public Relations

The CIA and the Pentagon

• Operation Mockingbird
• “The Mighty Wulitzer”
• “The Provocateur State”
• Black Budgets, Manpower and Record-“Keeping”
• The Office of Strategic Influence
• “The War on Hostile Media”

Surveillance: Feedback Loops to the Benefit of Whom?
Echelon, Commercial Espionage and Data Mining

A Few “Case Histories”

• Iran-Contra, the CIA and Drugs
• The Kennedy Assassination
• Flight 800
• 9/11
• The Anthrax Matter
• The Valerie Plame Affair

CONUS

• “The Mind Has No Firewall”
• The War at Home
• New Weaponry
• Psychopharmacological Warfare

The Present and the Future

• ‘What’s Wrong With This Picture?”
• Repeated Trauma and Deliberately-Induced Fear
• Computer-Age Information Warfare
• Electromagnetic Weapons and Psychological Control of Civilians

This series is not about commercial product placement in movies, subliminal programming, or other “hidden persuaders”, though these are in use. Similarly, it is not about memetic engineering, though this is also present in our cultural discourse. It will not discuss the way in which TV viewing can induce mental states highly susceptible to suggestion, for which there is much evidence.

"Americans no longer talk to each other; they entertain each other. They do not exchange ideas; they exchange images. They do not argue with propositions; they argue with good looks, celebrities, parables, and public opinion polls. Because of this, it is even possible that someday soon a movie actor may become president of the United States."

Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death,1985.
See more about the book here.

The question has been asked:

‘If the media shape the public agenda, what shapes the media's agenda?’ ‘The mass media tell us not only what to think about but also how to think about it.’ [See http://www.annenberg.northwestern.edu/pubs...lence/viol4.htm ]

"The press may not be successful much of the time in telling people what to think, but it is stunningly successful in telling its readers what to think about." —Bernard C. Cohen, 1963
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agenda-setting_theory

“I think we should be skeptical of the agenda-setting ability of a media that is dominated by the values of commercialism and entertainment.”
http://web.mit.edu/m-I-t/conferences/democracy/session7.html

We live in a sound bite and image-driven world.

"We must come to understand the extent to which lenses shape, filter, and otherwise alter the data which passes through them the extreme degree to which the lens itself informs our information. This influence, though radical in many cases, often manifests itself subtly. Yet even the most blatant distortions tend to be taken for granted as a result of the enduring cultural confidence in the essential trustworthiness and impartiality of what is in fact a technology resonant with cultural bias and highly susceptible to manipulation."

A. D. Coleman, "Lentil Soup," Et cetera B. 42:1 (Spring 1985): p. 30.

The lenses and filters which function to set the socio-political agenda for this nation, and to a lesser extent the world, are increasingly and dominantly in the hands of the elite, the super-rich, the mega-corporations, the military-industrial complex, and the government, most notably its intelligence agencies and military structures, and the corporations which feed off of and serve its increasingly insatiable demands. Much of this series will focus on the history, the recent past, and the future manipulation of your mind by the Pentagon and the CIA.


What we are talking about is propaganda … but, today, it goes far beyond propaganda.

There are three kinds of propaganda:

• "black" propaganda (stories that are unattributed, or attributed to nonexistent sources, or false stories attributed to a real source),
• "gray" propaganda (stories from the government where the source is attributed to others), and
• "white" propaganda (stories from the government where the source is acknowledged as such).”

Source: Philip Agee, Inside the Company: CIA Diary (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1975), pp. 70-71, noted in Journalism And The CIA: The Mighty Wurlitzer by Daniel Brandt, April-June 1997.

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Propaganda starts with “public relations”:


“War on Truth: The Secret Battle for the American Mind”
http://www.ratical.org/ratville/PRcorrupt.html

Excerpts from an Interview with John Stauber of PRWatch
[ http://www.prwatch.org/prwissues/ ]

(In 1995, Common Courage Press published a book by Stauber and his colleague Sheldon Rampton titled Toxic Sludge Is Good for You: Lies, Damn Lies, and the Public Relations Industry.)

“Australian academic Alex Carey once wrote that "the twentieth century has been characterized by three developments of great political importance: the growth of democracy, the growth of corporate power, and the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy."

“The key [to propaganda] is invisibility. Once propaganda becomes visible, it's less effective. Public relations is effective in manipulating opinion -- and thus public policy -- only if people believe that the message covertly delivered by the PR campaign is not propaganda at all but simply common sense or accepted reality.”

As one of the largest PR firms in the nation puts it, its mission is to help clients "manage issues by influencing -- in the right combination -- public attitude, public perceptions, public behavior, and public policy."

Says Stauber:

“ … corporate news media are dependent on public relations. Half of everything in the news actually originates from a PR firm. If you're a lazy journalist, editor, or news director, it's easy to simply regurgitate the dozens of press releases and stories that come in every day for free from PR firms. Remember, the media's primary source of income is the more than $100 billion a year corporations spend on advertising.”

“Propaganda will always be used by those who can afford it. That's how the powerful maintain control. In defense, the rest of us need to develop our critical-thinking capabilities and maintain a strong commitment to reinvigorating democracy…. Public relations has become a huge, powerful, hidden medium available only to wealthy individuals, big corporations, governments, and government agencies because of its high cost. And the purpose of these campaigns is not to facilitate democracy or promote social good, but to increase power and profitability for the clients paying the bills. This overall management of public opinion and policy by the few is completely contrary to and destructive of democracy.”

“…citizens are almost always reluctant to go to war. Take the Persian Gulf War of 1991. We now know that the royal family of Kuwait hired as many as twenty public-relations, law, and lobbying firms in Washington, D.C., to convince Americans to support that war. It paid one PR firm alone, Hill & Knowlton, $10.8 million. Hill & Knowlton set up an astroturf group called Citizens for a Free Kuwait to make it appear as if there were a large grass-roots constituency in support of the war. The firm also produced and distributed dozens of "video news releases" that were aired as news stories by TV stations and networks around the world. It was Hill & Knowlton that arranged the infamous phony Congressional hearing at which the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador, appearing anonymously, falsely testified to having witnessed Iraqi soldiers pulling scores of babies from incubators in a hospital and leaving them to die. Her testimony was a complete fabrication, but everyone from Amnesty International to President George Bush repeated it over and over as proof of Saddam Hussein's evil. Sam Zakhem, a former U.S. ambassador to Bahrain, funneled another $7.7 million into the propaganda campaign through two front groups, the Freedom Task Force and the Coalition for Americans at Risk, to pay for TV and newspaper ads and to keep on payroll a stable of fifty speakers for pro-war rallies.

The Hill & Knowlton executives running the show were Craig Fuller, a close friend and advisor to President Bush, and Frank Mankiewicz -- better known as a friend of the Kennedys and former president of National Public Radio -- who managed the media masterfully, particularly television: a University of Massachusetts study later showed that the more TV people watched, the fewer facts they actually knew about the situation in the Persian Gulf, and the more they supported the war.

“Bernays …wrote in his book Propaganda: "If we understand the mechanisms and motives of the group mind, it is now possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without them knowing it." He called this the "engineering of consent" and proposed that "those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. . . . In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons . . . who pull the wires which control the public mind."


Says Stauber: “Journalism is in drastic decline. It's become a lousy profession. The commercial media are greed-driven enterprises dominated by a dozen transnational companies. Newsroom staffs have been downsized. Much of what you see on national and local TV news is actually video news releases prepared by public-relations firms and given free to TV stations and networks. News directors air these PR puff pieces disguised as news stories because it's a free way to fill air time and allows them to lay off reporters. Of course, it's not just television that's the problem. Academics who study public relations report that half or more of what appears in newspapers and magazines is lifted verbatim from press releases generated by public-relations firms.”


Propaganda and PR work…

“because we don't have a watchdog press that aggressively investigates and exposes PR lies and deceptions. Its success is also a reflection of the sorry state of democracy in our society. We really have a single corporate party with two wings, both funded by wealthy special interests. On the critical issues -- taxation, health care, foreign policy -- there's rarely much disagreement. If there is, more special-interest money floods in to make sure the corporate agenda wins out. On a deeper level, we all want to believe these lies. Wouldn't it be great to wake up and find ourselves living in a functioning democracy? To be truly represented by our so-called Representatives? Not to have to worry about the destruction of the biosphere or the safety of the water we drink and the food we eat? I think we all buy in because we want to believe things aren't as bad as they really are.”

The reality is, though, that the U.S. political and social environment is corrupt and deeply dysfunctional. Structural reforms must be made in our political and economic system in order to assert the rights of citizens over corporations. But since big corporations dominate the media, we're not going to hear about this on network news or in the New York Times. We're not going to hear about it from politicians who are bought and paid for by wealthy interests. The beginning of the solution is for people to recognize that it's not enough to send checks in response to direct-mail solicitations from politicians and public-interest groups. We need to become real citizens and get personally involved in reclaiming our country.” Big environmental organizations, socially responsible investment funds, and other groups perpetuate the myth that if we just write checks to them, they'll heal the environment, reform the corrupt campaign-finance system, protect our freedom of speech, and reign in corporate power. This is a dangerous falsehood, because it implies that we don't have to sweat and struggle to make democracy work. It's so much easier to write a check for twenty-five or fifty dollars than it is to integrate our concerns about critical issues into our daily lives and organize with our neighbors for democracy. The propaganda-for-hire industry perverts democracy. We try to help citizens and journalists learn about how they're being lied to, manipulated, and too often defeated by sophisticated PR campaigns. The public-relations industry is a little like the invisible man in that old Claude Rains movie: crimes are committed, but no one can see the perpetrator. At PR Watch, we try to paint the invisible manipulators with bright orange paint. Citizens in a democracy need to know who and what interests are manipulating public opinion and policy, and how. Democracies work best without invisible men.”

See also http://www.prwatch.org/node/1067 for the PR Watch discussion on the Rendon Group.

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“… the CIA "uses far more resources in its propaganda operations than any single news agency.... In fact, the CIA propaganda budget is as large as the combined budgets of Reuters, United Press International and the Associated Press."

Source: Sean Gervasi, "CIA Covert Propaganda Capability," Covert Action Information Bulletin, No. 7, December 1979 - January 1980, pp. 18-20, as noted in Journalism And The CIA: The Mighty Wurlitzer by Daniel Brandt, April-June 1997.