Is the Mainstream Media Controlled?

[MisterBeale]

http://www.thefreelibrary.com/_/print/PrintArticle.aspx?id=97822448

One Elite, Many Conduits

The explosive growth of talk radio, the proliferation of cable television channels, and the rise of the Internet have created an unprecedented wealth of news and entertainment options. But the number of news outlets does not guarantee diversity if they merely stem from the same dominant cartel. Through a series of corporate mergers that took place over the past decade, the news and entertainment media have effectively fallen under the control of a handful of transnational conglomerates: AOL Time Warner, Disney, Viacom, News Corp, and Sony.

Passive media consumers generally don't understand the extent to which the cartel limits their options. For example, Viacom owns both the CBS and UPN television networks, as well as Showtime, MTV, Paramount Pictures, and Simon & Schuster books. Disney owns the ABC, A&E, and Lifetime networks, co-owns ESPN, and operates Disney's well-known motion picture properties. AOL Time Warner is not only the world's largest Internet service provider, but also owns the CNN, TNT, TBS, and HBO networks, Warner Brothers studios, and a host of publishing ventures.

Projecting from present trends into the near future, Neil Hickey of the Columbia Journalism Review paints a "nightmare scenario in which "some transnational company that knows little and cares less about your community ... will own your local daily and weekly newspapers, all your television and radio stations, the cable system, the Internet service provider, several of the national networks that serve you, your local video stores and movie houses, many of the magazines and books you read, and all of the sports teams in your area."

This media monolith "would allow endless cross-promotion of the owner's interests and probably very little hard news," Hickey continues. But media consolidation offers even more sinister possibilities. Eventually, Hickey predicts, "Everything you see, every opinion, every image, and every jot of information [could] arrive through one corporate filter." This prospect becomes even more ominous when you consider that a cabal would manage the "corporate filter" through which all news, views, and opinions would pass -- a cabal that seeks total dominion, both political and economic, over the entire globe.

The CFR's Corporate Shadows

If you've recently watched the nightly news or prime-time TV, bought a best-selling book, picked up a "local" newspaper, bought a CD, or attended a movie, chances are that the product in question has passed through a CFR-connected corporate filter.

In January 2001, a $165 billion merger joined America Online (AOL), the world's largest Internet service provider, with Time Warner, creating history's largest news, entertainment, and publishing conglomerate. The key players in the merger were Gerald Levin and W. Thomas Johnson, both of whom are members of the CFR. Even a cursory review of the corporate rolls of AOL Time Warner and its CNN news subsidiary demonstrates that the CFR essentially runs both operations (see the chart on page 13).

Both AOL Time Warner and Disney/ABC are CFR corporate members, and together they control more than $200 billion in news and entertainment assets. Vivendi Universal and Sony round out the global media-entertainment complex, accounting for large chunks of the movie and music industry. Both Vivendi and Sony's American subsidiary are corporate CFR members.

Two CFR members currently serve on the board of directors for Gannett Co., which publishes USA Today, owns a string of nearly identical "local" newspapers, and operates scores of television stations coast-to-coast. And as the previous article points out, the Washington Post and New York Times -- the tone-setting newspapers for both the print and electronic media -- are essentially CFR print organs.

The Times, as self-appointed gatekeeper of "All the News that's Fit to Print," remains the single most important media organ in terms of defining the issues that constitute the "news," and shaping coverage of them. Decades ago, Herbert Matthews, the Times correspondent who used his post to promote Fidel Castro's rise to power, once boasted that the paper is "the most powerful journalistic instrument that has ever been forged in the free world." The writers and editors whose work fills the Times' column space, Matthews declared, "use arms that, metaphorically speaking, are the equivalent of nuclear bombs."

"The New York Times achieves very considerable editorial effect by selecting and positioning the news," pointed out Herman H. Dinsmore, a defector from the Times editorial staff, in his expose All the News that Fits. "As the Times goes, so goes a large part of the nation's press." This remains true even in the age of 24/7 cable news and the Internet: The CFR-dominated Times continues to be the supposed "gold standard" against which the credibility of other news sources is measured.

Cartel "Conservatives"

Because the CFR has strategically seeded its personnel throughout the media cartel, its interests are represented no matter which elements of the cartel currently enjoy a competitive advantage. And the CFR's media cartel has dominant influence over both the leftist "mainstream" media and significant elements of the "conservative" media.

"The media is kind of weird these days, and there are some major institutional voices that are, truthfully speaking, part and parcel of the Republican Party," groused former Vice President Al Gore in an interview with the New York Observer. "Fox News Network, the Washington Times, Rush Limbaugh -- there's a bunch of them.... Most of the media have been slow to recognize the pervasive impact of this fifth column in their ranks...."

In using the expression "fifth column," Gore illustrated the common liberal conceit that conservative perspectives have no legitimate role in the "mainstream" media, which is to exclusively propagate liberal views. Thus conservative viewpoints, from Gore's perspective, must be smuggled into the media through stealthy, disciplined action.

The truth is that the liberal media have lost both credibility and consumer share in recent years. The major network newscasts, featuring Dan Rather (CFR) at CBS, Tom Brokaw (CFR) at NBC, and Peter Jennings at ABC, confront plummeting ratings and a dwindling audience of aging viewers. CNN, the jewel in the AOL Time Warner crown, has been consistently beaten in the ratings by Fox News. Does this mean, as Gore complained, that the media have taken on a "weird" -- meaning conservative -- character? Not necessarily. Moreover, the ascendancy of Fox News illustrates the extent of the CFR-headed media cartel's control.

http://web.archive.org/web/20041205073935/http://www.thenewamerican.com/tna/1996/vo12no19/vo12no19_cfr.htm

Although Quigley offered in Tragedy and Hope the de rigueur dismissals of "conspiracy theories," he did offer some significant admissions:

There does exist, and has existed for a generation, an international Anglophile network which operates, to some extent, in the way the radical Right believes the Communists act. In fact, this network, which we may identify as the Round Table Groups, has no aversion to cooperating with the Communists, or any other groups, and frequently does so. I know of the operations of this network because I have studied it for twenty years and was permitted for two years, in the early 1960s, to examine its papers and secret records.

The Round Table Groups, which were "semi-secret discussion and lobbying groups," were created to help "federate the English-speaking world along lines laid down by Cecil Rhodes...." The American affiliate of this network, wrote Quigley, "was known as the Council on Foreign Relations...." Although he did not endorse all of that network's designs or decisions, Quigley was generally supportive of its ends, stating that "my chief difference of opinion is that it wishes to remain unknown, and I believe its role in history is significant enough to be known."

It was this network, according to Quigley, that "provided much of the framework of influence which the Communist sympathizers and fellow travellers took over in the United States in the 1930s. It must be recognized that the power that these energetic Left-wingers exercised was never their own power or Communist power but was ultimately the power of the international financial coterie...."

Quigley noted that the workings of this elite were partially revealed by congressional investigators in the 1950s who, "following backward to their source the threads which led from admitted Communists like Whittaker Chambers, through Alger Hiss and the Carnegie Endowment to Thomas Lamont and the Morgan Bank, fell into the whole complicated network of the interlocking tax-exempt foundations."

The subversive "network of interlocking tax-exempt foundations," through which the moneyed elite has funded the efforts of "energetic left-wingers," is a fulfillment of one of House's Philip Dru prophecies: "t will be the educated and rich, in fact the ones that are now the most selfish, that will be in the vanguard of the procession. They will be the first to realize the joy of it all [i.e., constructing world socialism], and in this way they will redeem the sins of their ancestors." Of course, that "redemption" is to be accomplished by seizing total power in the name of "social justice," "world stability," or some other grand abstraction -- and that seizure will be paid for by the money, liberty, and lives of the less fortunate.

The Power Elite

Although Quigley enjoyed unique access to the formal records of the "Anglophile network," he is not the only academic who has documented its existence and methods. In a study entitled The Power Elite, published 40 years ago, Columbia University sociologist C. Wright Mills sought to dismiss the "conspiracy theory" of modern political history -- even as he vindicated the essential claims of the conspiratorial perspective. Although Mills claimed to find no conspirators in high places, he nonetheless admitted, "There is ... little doubt that the American power elite -- which contains, we are told, some of 'the greatest organizers in the world' -- has ... planned and plotted." He recognized the existence of a definable network joining elites in politics, academia, the military, the media, and foundations, and admitted, "Certain types of men from each of the dominant institutional areas, more far-sighted than others, have actively promoted the liaison before it took its truly modern shape."

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Behind the bias: instead of investigating and exposing the actions of the power elite, the major media are complicit in that elite's drive for total control. (The Media Cartel).

"We are grateful to the Washington Post, the New York Times, Time magazine, and other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected their promises of discretion for almost forty years." The speaker was David Rockefeller, the "Chairman of the Establishment." The scene was the June 5, 1991 Bilderberg meeting in Sand, Germany -- an ultra-elite conclave of banking, political media, and industrial elites committed to world government. The subject of this particular address was the media's role in promoting the power elite's objectives.

"It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subject to the bright lights of publicity during these years," continued Rockefeller. "But the world is now more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world government which will never again know war but only peace and prosperity for the whole of humanity."

The way in which Rockefeller's remarks were made public ironically illustrates the power elite's chokehold on the mass media. Excerpts from Rockefeller's opening address were leaked to two independent French publications. They then came to the attention of Hilaire du Berrier, an international correspondent living in Monaco, who published them in his newsletter, HduB Reports. As he relayed Rockefeller's breathtakingly brazen admissions to his readers, du Berrier knowingly commented that he would "lay odds that not a word of Mr. Rockefeller's speech will be reported in America." As far as the major media are concerned, du Berrier's prediction came true.

"Nonsense," you say? "The power elite would never conspire to consolidate economic and political power on a global scale." Many Europeans reacted in a similar way when they heard certain "alarmists" outside their mainstream media claim that elitists among them had created the Common Market for the purpose of gradually building it into a government of Europe. Now that the Common Market has become the EU through a series of steps, and the EU has begun sapping political and economic powers from once-sovereign European nations, a power grab once dismissed as preposterous is widely recognized as fact. But that power grab could not have succeeded without the complicity of the media moguls on both sides of the Atlantic, who portrayed earlier manifestations of the EU as a "free trade" agreement, thereby providing protective coloration for their counterparts in the political elite.

Thomas Jefferson once famously remarked that it is better to have a newspaper without a government than a government without a newspaper. The free press, in whatever manifestation -- from Revolutionary-era broadsides to "streaming video" and "blogs" on the Internet -- plays an indispensable role in holding government accountable to the public. But the media cannot perform this duty if it is itself part of the ruling Establishment -- the self-appointed elitists like Rockefeller who busy themselves planning the future, supposedly on behalf of "the whole of humanity."

Origins of the Media Elite

Control over the media has been a long-term objective of the globalist elite. In February, 1917, Congressman Oscar Callaway placed a statement in the Congressional Record describing the origins of what he called the "newspaper combination." According to that account, the J.P. Morgan Banking interests and their allies "got together 12 men high up in the newspaper world and employed them to select the most influential newspapers in the United States and [the] sufficient number of them to control generally the policy of the daily press in the United States."

Beginning with a list of 179 papers, the 12 men pared down the list. Ultimately, the cabal "found it was only necessary to purchase control of 25 of the greatest papers. The 25 papers were agreed upon; emissaries were sent to purchase the policy, national and international, of these papers; an agreement was reached; the policy of the papers was bought, to be paid for by the month; an editor was furnished for each paper to properly supervise and edit information ... [on matters] considered vital to the interests of the purchasers."

The Morgan interests figured prominently in the "international Anglophile network" identified by the late Georgetown University historian Carroll Quigley as the spine of the global power elite. Quigley was more than just another tweedy academic: From his position at Georgetown, he played a key role in mentoring many individuals who went on to occupy critical positions. Among his students was Bill Clinton, who paid homage to Quigley in his acceptance speech at the 1992 Democratic convention.

In his 1966 work Tragedy and Hope, Quigley -- after writing disdainfully of "conspiracy theorists" -- admitted the existence of a partially submerged elite that "operates, to some extent, in the way the radical Right believes the Communists act. In fact, this network, which we may identify as the Round Table Groups, has no aversion to cooperating with the Communists, or any other groups, and frequently does so. I know of the operations of this network because I have studied it for twenty years and was permitted for two years, in the early 1960s, to examine its papers and secret records. I have no aversion to it or to most of its aims and have, for much of my life, been close to it and many of its instruments." The network's "aim," Quigley continued, is "nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole."

The "Round Table Groups" stemmed from a secret society (Quigley's phrase) created by British magnate Cecil Rhodes to unite the world -- beginning with the English-speaking dominions -- under "enlightened" elitists like himself. World War I and the postwar proposal for a League of Nations resulted from the Round Table cabal's machinations. During the post-war Versailles "Peace Conference," noted Quigley, this covert network decided to establish "in England and in each dominion, a front organization to the existing Round Table Group. This front organization, called the Royal Institute of International Affairs, had as its nucleus in each area the existing submerged Round Table Group. In New York it was known as the Council on Foreign Relations...."

The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) boasts a membership of only about 4,000. But its roster includes literally hundreds of powerful figures occupying key positions in the media -- not merely writers, reporters, and news anchors who deliver the news, but also editors, publishers, and executives who define what news is and how it is covered. (See page 13 for a partial list of CFR members in the media.) Just as significantly, the tiny CFR clique has for decades had a virtual stranglehold on the executive branch of the U.S. government, as well as much of academe.

Voice of the "Ruling Class"

Carroll Quigley -- like David Rockefeller -- specifically identified the New York Times and the Washington Post as key media organs of the power elite. The Times, with utterly unwarranted self-assurance, designates itself the arbiter of "All the News that's Fit to Print," while the Post is the voice of official Washington. Even in the cyber age, these two hoary papers (both of which are longtime CFR redoubts) set the tone for most news coverage, defining issues and setting the limits of "respectable" opinion. But the CFR's chokehold on media influence extends well beyond the Manhattan-Washington corridor.

In his October 30, 1993 "Ruling Class Journalists" essay, Washington Post ombudsman Richard Harwood candidly remarked about how the CFR dominates our news media. Harwood described the council as "the closest thing we have to a ruling Establishment in the United States.... [Its members are] the people who, for more than half a century, have managed our international affairs and our military-industrial complex." After listing the executive branch positions then occupied by CFR members, Harwood continued: "What is distinctively modern about the council these days is the considerable involvement of journalists and other media figures, who account for more than 10 percent of the membership."

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QAaxQTEmIzc]The Council on Foreign Relations: Controlling Your TV News - YouTube[/ame]

If you got this far and want to know the whole story, here is the whole video. Go to Youtube and read the "About" for more information.
[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zrf2R3UHhKo]Behind the Big News - YouTube[/ame]

 

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