TYBs
>Bannon opens CPAC with QAnon fan art and D-list book promotion
kek
Media Matters Reeeeeee
>Bannon opens CPAC with QAnon fan art and D-list book promotion
>kek
>Media Matters Reeeeeee
Bannon opens CPAC with QAnon fan art and D-list book promotion
The former Trump adviser has found a flock he can fleece, all in the name of MAGA orthodoxy
Written by John Knefel
Published 02/22/24 10:00 AM EST
The steam-warmed lunch trays had just been cleared when former Trump adviser Steve Bannon welcomed a fan on stage. The young man introduced himself as Spencer Reyes, and proceeded to unfurl a poster-sized canvas with what appeared to be a large Q over the word “Hollywood.”
“Young MAGA, right?” Bannon said. “Can we give it up for it?"
Although neither Bannon nor Reyes mentioned anything about QAnon on stage, the meaning of the moment wasn’t hard to divine. “We’ll get you on the show,” Bannon told Reyes, after praising his homemade artwork. For his part,Bannon referenced Ukrainian biolabs and child trafficking,both long-running elements of the broader QAnon conspiracy theory.
It was a fitting unofficial opening to the Conservative Political Action Conference, the large annual conservative gathering that takes place just outside of Washington, D.C. With each passing year, CPAC devolves further and further into conspiracy theory-peddling and crankery, a trend well-exemplified by the appearance of a QAnon reference before the conference had even technically begun.
Bannon’s breakout session served as a gathering point for the angry local gentry of the country, the beige conference room’s uncirculated air heavy with grievance and entitlement. Over the course of more than four hours, Bannon’s extended podcast universe of kooks thrilled the audience with exhortations against the Chinese government and trans children, two fingers in the fist of supposed worldwide woke hegemony.
The War Room host also constantly hocked his new publishing imprint and film distribution hub. The best way to save your country is to buy Bannon Inc., it appears. He harangued the crowd to buy new titles from War Room books, and to watch new movies from War Room films. He pitched a coffee table book of photos of himself and his guests in dramatic lighting. His co-host, Natalie Winters, hocked a lifestyle brand. At one point Bannon alluded to Donald Trump Jr.’s publishing ambitions. It all felt like an extension of the billion-dollar scheme that recently landed Bannon’s longtime associate, Miles Guo, under a federal indictment. If, as the old poker saying goes, it’s immoral to let a sucker keep his money, the Bannon clique may be the country’s foremost ethicists.
Bannon’s skill is convincing the people he’s fleecing that he has brought them inside the halls of power — hence the brand War Room. For all the fawning mainstream coverage he got early in Trump’s rise, many reporters missed what makes Bannon worth thinking about. His self-appointed status as a Machiavellian political theorist has always been ludicrous, but he does deserve credit for speaking in the idiom of an organizer, or, perhaps more accurately, as a hustler. He regularly tells his audience that they are a “force multiplier,” and that any perceived win — the ouster of former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, for example — is due to their participation in the movement, which often just means listening to Bannon rant.
To the uninitiated, it may look like Bannon is building a movement — albeit one that has failed time and again. In truth, his event at CPAC had more in common with scams like Trump University — or Bannon’s own We Build the Wall grift — than with real political base building.
>COUTTS 4 evidence could bring down the government and badly further wound the CBC. A questions primer for citizen journalists.
>LOVER BOY NATHAN WADE GOT GEO-TRACKED! Fani Willis and Lover Nathan Wade in Danger of Disqualification in Trump Case After Fresh Discovery of Cellphone Data Suggests They Lied Under Oath
PB
>>20462290 Clowns own the Executives now. Q drops Operation Mockingbird Docs 2/22 - CBS seizes Herridges files 2/22
The CIA’s Media Assets
Four years after he broke the Watergate story, Carl Bernstein quit the Washington Post and spent six months looking at the relationship between the CIA and the press. The result […]
Published on June 28, 2021
Four years after he broke the Watergate story, Carl Bernstein quit the Washington Post and spent six months looking at the relationship between the CIA and the press. The result was a 25,000-word cover story in the October 20, 1977 edition of Rolling Stone called “The CIA and the Media.” The article, still online at carlbernstein.com, remains interesting and relevant. The reasons a U.S. intelligence agency would find co-opting journalists useful then would still apply today. The same could apply in Canada as well, but would we ever find out?
The CIA used more than 400 journalists from 1953 to 1977. “Some of these journalists’ relationships with the Agency were tacit; some were explicit,” Bernstein reports.
“There was cooperation, accommodation and overlap. Journalists provided a full range of clandestine services—from simple intelligence gathering to serving as go-betweens with spies in Communist countries. Reporters shared their notebooks with the CIA. Editors shared their staffs. Some of the journalists were Pulitzer Prize winners.”
Through the 1950s and 1960s, the CIA had co-operation from “some of the most powerful organizations and individuals in American journalism.” Among 25 news organizations that co-operated, the New York Times, CBS and Time magazine gave the most valuable help.
Reportedly, these journalists and their employers were more inspired by patriotism than profit, though management knew a reporter with CIA help could get better stories. Bernstein said it was also a good fit because these journalists and CIA officials “were part of the same ‘old boy’ network that constituted something of an establishment elite in the media politics and academia.”
As it turned out, it wasn’t just Communist governments who paid their journalists to lie. No, American journalists were used for “planting subtly concocted pieces of misinformation…[and] serving up ‘black’ propaganda to leading foreign journalists at lunch or dinner.” Here journalists lied to journalists who misinformed others in turn.
Journalistic assets were useful in many ways. “In the field, journalists were used to help recruit and handle foreigners as agents; to acquire and evaluate information, and to plant false information with officials of foreign governments. Many signed secrecy agreements,” Bernstein wrote.
Few journalists were solely paid as spies. Often, the agency contacted a conventional journalist informally with a lunch or drink and casually offered information. Later, they might offer a trip to a country few others could get to, asking nothing in exchange but a debriefing when the reporter returned. A quid pro quo—you do something for me, I do something for you—might grow until the reporter was offered a formal arrangement. “That came later, after you had the journalist on a string,” one CIA official explained.
Undercover journalists were most extensively used in Western Europe, Latin America and the Far East. Here, “journalists were used as intermediaries—spotting, paying, passing instructions—to members of the Christian Democratic Party in Italy and the Social Democrats in Germany, both of which covertly received millions of dollars from the CIA.”
In Chile in the 1960s, CIA-affiliated reporters funnelled money to opponents of Salvador Allende and wrote propaganda for CIA publications there. American perceptions were also affected as “CIA-generated black propaganda transmitted on the wire service out of Santiago often turned up in American publications.” In fact, “the agency has secretly bankrolled numerous foreign press services, periodicals and newspapers—both English and foreign language.”
>The CIA’s Media Assets
Most of this activity was shrouded in secrecy, but a few cracks of disclosure emerged in the wake of Watergate. Then Democrat Frank Church held a Senate committee to investigate CIA activities.
George Bush, then head of the CIA, allowed the Church committee to receive one-paragraph summaries on more than 400 CIA media assets, then request extensive documentation on 25 of them. The files on each one were three to 11 inches thick. Despite redacted details, legislators determined the names of these “journalists in the most prominent sectors of the American press corps, including four or five of the largest newspapers in the country, the broadcast networks and the two major newsweekly magazines.”
The CIA brass convinced politicians to fudge things a bit to the public. “But top officials of the CIA, including former directors William Colby and George Bush, persuaded the committee to restrict its inquiry into the matter and to deliberately misrepresent the actual scope of the activities in its final report.” As one source told Bernstein, “Exposure of the CIA’s relationships with journalists and academics, the Agency feared, would close down two of the few avenues of agent recruitment still open.”
Intelligence agencies used professors too? That might explain some of the wackier ones.
One can only imagine to what extent journalists might be used by intelligence agencies in our country and various others today. The ethical problems here are many and disclosure of any such current practices is unlikely. For a viewing public, more skeptical of mainstream news than ever, it’s just one more reason for distrust.
Lee Harding is a research associate for the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.
> https://fcpp.org/2021/06/28/the-cias-media-assets/
>The result was a 25,000-word cover story in the October 20, 1977 edition of Rolling Stone called “The CIA and the Media.” The article, still online at carlbernstein.com, remains interesting and relevant. The reasons a U.S. intelligence agency would find co-opting journalists useful then would still apply today. The same could apply in Canada as well, but would we ever find out?
We couldn't find the page you were looking for. This is either because:
There is an error in the URL entered into your web browser. Please check the URL and try again.
The page you are looking for has been moved or deleted.
>https://web.archive.org/web/20210304033459/http://carlbernstein.com/magazine_cia_and_media.php