Mockingbird Media

Operation Mockingbird began in the 1950s as a secret Central Intelligence Agency effort to propagandize both foreign and domestic media. A 1970s Congressional investigation revealed that Operation Mockingbird activities were still ongoing; then-CIA director George H. W. Bush announced in 1976 that the CIA would no longer pay to influence the media.
 
“Mockingbird media” (less frequently written without capitalization as “mockingbird media”) refers to media that participated in Operation Mockingbird. However, the 2000s usage of “Mockingbird media” has applied to the “mainstream media” (MSM), what Rush Limbaugh has called “drive-by media” and then the “state-run media.” A newspaper or television station or radio station or blog of the “Mockingbird media” is one that accepts the U.S. government’s interpretation of events without serious examination.
 
The term “Mockingbird media” has been popularized by Kurt Nimmo on the websites Infowars.com and PrisonPlanet.com.
 
 
Wikipedia: Operation Mockingbird
Operation Mockingbird was a secret Central Intelligence Agency campaign to influence domestic and foreign media beginning in the 1950s.
 
The activities, extent and even the existence of the CIA project remain in dispute: the operation was first called Mockingbird in Deborah Davis’ 1979 book, Katharine the Great: Katharine Graham and her Washington Post Empire. But Davis’ book, alleging that the media had been recruited (infiltrated) by the CIA for propaganda purposes, was itself controversial and has since been shown to have had a number of erroneous assertions. More evidence of Mockingbird’s existence emerged in the 2007 memoir American Spy: My Secret History in the CIA, Watergate and Beyond, by convicted Watergate “plumber” E. Howard Hunt and The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America by Hugh Wilford (2008).
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Church Committee investigations
Further details of Operation Mockingbird were revealed as a result of the Frank Church investigations (Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities) in 1975. According to the Congress report published in 1976:
 
“The CIA currently maintains a network of several hundred foreign individuals around the world who provide intelligence for the CIA and at times attempt to influence opinion through the use of covert propaganda. These individuals provide the CIA with direct access to a large number of newspapers and periodicals, scores of press services and news agencies, radio and television stations, commercial book publishers, and other foreign media outlets.”
 
Church argued that misinforming the world cost American taxpayers an estimated $265 million a year.
 
In February 1976, George H. W. Bush, the recently appointed Director of the CIA, announced a new policy: “Effective immediately, the CIA will not enter into any paid or contract relationship with any full-time or part-time news correspondent accredited by any U.S. news service, newspaper, periodical, radio or television network or station.” However, he added that the CIA would continue to “welcome” the voluntary, unpaid cooperation of journalists.
 
Free Merriam-Webster Dictionary
mock·ing·bird noun \ˈmä-kiŋ-ˌbərd, ˈmȯ-\
Definition of MOCKINGBIRD
: a common grayish North American bird (Mimus polyglottos) related to the thrashers that is remarkable for its exact imitations of the notes of other birds
           
Google Groups: alt.current-events.clinton.whitewater
Newsgroups: alt.current-events.clinton.whitewater
From: .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) (Michael Rivero)
Date: 1997/07/24
Subject: Re: When will most Democrats say they have had enough?
 
But if one goes back to the control of the media via operation MOCKINGBIRD, then realizes that Clinton’s fall would more than likely rip the cover off of the CIA’s drug running operations, then the MOCKINGBIRD media’s outright refusal to cover certain hard stories makes much more sense.
     
Google Groups: alt.thebird
Newsgroups: alt.thebird
From: .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
Date: 1998/10/07
Subject: [PNEWS] More Clinton Scandal Clips

For example, the mockingbird media quickly picked up the anti-Starr call of the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward when he reported that state troopers were being asked about Clinton’s sex life.
     
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Newsgroups: alt.activism, alt.activism.d, alt.anarchism, wash.politics, az.politics, dc.politics, soc.retirement, az.general, alt.politics.democrats
From: “Raleigh Myers”

Date: Tue, 14 Sep 2004 02:55:31 GMT
Local: Mon, Sep 13 2004 8:55 pm
Subject: GOP Fascism makes representative democracy a farce attn.Dit Heads.

The GOP’s Mujahadedeen CIA Al CIAda faking a terrorist attack and the corporatist mockingbird media wiping up the rear?
 
Kid Mercury
07-25-2007, 02:42 PM
Wake Up, US Bloggers: Korey Rowe’s Arrest Means Your Free Speech is Under Attack
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Don’t expect to read about this in the New York Times, Washington Post, or other members of the mockingbird media.
 
Infowars.com
Corporate Media Notices War College Report on Economic Crisis
Kurt Nimmo
Infowars
December 30, 2008
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Alex Jones has talked about martial law and a military dictatorship on his radio show and in his films for years. It now appears, with the release of the in-your-face War College report, at least a few corporate media outlets are beginning to pay attention, although Motley Fool and the El Paso Times are hardly the Washington Post or the New York Times.
 
But then it is the role of the corporate Mockingbird media to ignore the obvious and when confronted with the facts denounce those who speak the truth as nutty conspiracy theorists.
 
Infowars.com
Rep. Kennedy Denounces Mockingbird Media Over War
Kurt Nimmo
Infowars.com
March 11, 2010
The House has voted down a resolution to pull troops out of Afghanistan by the end of the year.
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Former Wall Street lawyer Frank Wisner created Operation Mockingbird in 1948 and recruited Philip Graham of the Washington Post to run the project. Mockingbird eventually controlled news reported by the New York Times, Newsweek, the New York Herald Tribune, Time Magazine, and hundreds of other newspapers and magazines in the United States and around the world.
 
By the 1950s, according to Alex Constantine (Mockingbird: The Subversion Of The Free Press By The CIA), “some 3,000 salaried and contract CIA employees were eventually engaged in propaganda efforts.” Wisner was also able to restrict newspapers from reporting about certain events. For example, the CIA plots to overthrow the governments of Iran and Guatemala.

During the brief period in the 1970s mentioned above, the Church Committee (Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities) revealed that Operation Mockingbird was alive and well.
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Operation Mockingbird, then and now, is all about keeping the American people in the dark as the elite perpetuate highly profitable war and endless crimes against humanity. “It is primarily from U.S. citizens that the U.S. Government must keep the true nature and real purpose of so many of its domestic and foreign acts secret while it manufactures fear and falsehood to manipulate the U.S. public,” write Ellen Ray and William H. Schaap (Covert Action: the Roots of Terrorism).
 
Infowars.com
Mockingbird News Media Viewership Declines Sharply
Infowars.com
September 21, 2010
Good news! Less Americans tuned into the Mockingbird media over the last year. ABC and CBS saw a sharp decline in news viewership
   
Infowars.com
Globalist Mockingbird Media Attacks RT, Press TV as “Enemies”
Kurt Nimmo
Infowars.com
October 6, 2010
Walter Isaacson, president and CEO of the globalist Aspen Institute, has declared Russia Today, Iran’s Press TV, and China’s CCTV as enemies.