Wikileaks’
recent disclosure of the CIA’s hacking and surveillance
capabilities highlights a frightening new reality for today’s
journalists. Considering the CIA’s penchant for silencing and
intimidating reporters and editors, journalists will have to overcome
greater odds to protect the public’s right to know.
by
Whitney Webb
Part
3 - The Government’s War on Journalists and Operation Mockingbird
However,
it’s not just the CIA that journalists should be worried about,
considering that the executive branch has upped its own war against
journalists in recent years. This was particularly evident during the
Obama years, which saw the harassment and wiretapping of numerous
journalists.
In 2013, the
Obama Justice Department secretly acquired two months’ worth of
telephone records of Associated Press reporters and editors, which
the news cooperative’s top executive called a “massive and
unprecedented intrusion.” Soon after, it was disclosed that the
Justice Department had also spied extensively on Fox News reporter
James Rosen. A year later, the Obama administration began
relentlessly harassing a New York Times reporter for refusing to
reveal one of his sources.
Of course,
not all journalists will be alarmed by these latest revelations,
particularly those that work on behalf of U.S. intelligence or have
already been proven to be illegally colluding with politicians or
other elements of the U.S. power structure. Most recently, Wikileaks’
disclosure of the Podesta emails exposed the widespread collusion of
top journalists with Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.
One of the
journalists who appeared in John Podesta’s emails was Glenn Thrush,
a former chief White House correspondent for Politico and current
White House correspondent for the New York Times. Thrush, in one
email, referred to himself having become “a hack,” a reference to
his self-admitted lack of journalistic integrity in service to the
U.S. establishment.
The
collusion of journalists with the U.S. government is nothing new, as
the CIA – as part of its program Operation Mockingbird – has been
recruiting journalists from across the country since the 1950s in
order to more effectively influence public opinion. The program
encompasses all forms of media, including newspapers, periodicals,
press services, news agencies, book publishers and radio and TV
stations.
The
machinery behind Operation Mockingbird was exposed by the U.S. Senate
when the Church Committee, a Nixon-era Senate committee tasked with
investigating U.S. intelligence abuses, found that:
“Approximately
50 of the [CIA] assets are individual American journalists or
employees of U.S. media organizations. Of these, fewer than half are
“accredited” by U.S. media organizations … The remaining
individuals are non-accredited freelance contributors and media
representatives abroad … More than a dozen United States news
organizations and commercial publishing houses formerly provided
cover for CIA agents abroad.”
With the
true extent of the CIA’s surveillance capabilities and their
history for silencing or attacking reporters confirmed, journalists
now face a rather stark choice. With the government able to read any
and all forms of electronic communication, journalists can either
choose to serve Washington’s interests, as many journalists already
have, or to continue to fight for the public’s right to know.
Though the former may be more comforting to some in the short-term,
history is unlikely to remember them as kindly as the latter.
***
Source
and links:
Comments
Post a Comment