Propaganda, Brought by Your Own Tax Dollars

Former President Obama (2018): "Special interests, foreign governments, etc. can, in fact, manipulate and propagandize." What if at least one of those special interests is your own government? In Peter Richardson's A Bomb in Every Issue (2009), we learn the CIA directly or indirectly funded numerous liberal and conservative organizations, including ones with Gloria Steinem, the AFL-CIO, and William F. Buckley, Jr. 

Problematically, we don't know which cultural change organizations weren't funded by the CIA. In other words, government interference may have cost Americans leaders who could have delivered more honest or less divisive commentary but who didn't have the numbers or influence at the exact time of the CIA's involvement. Funding x rather than y meant anything independent--anything related to y and not x--was at a disadvantage, tilting the media towards CIA-picked cultural leaders. As a result, almost everything you see and read might have been curated for you by a secretive, non-transparent government agency. If that's not propaganda, what is? And why isn't the president of the United States talking about it? 

Bonus: "The agency's goals were to counter similar groups under Soviet control abroad and to recruit foreign students." The only reason we know any of this is because an insider--we'd call him a whistleblower today--hadn't signed an NDA and provided documents to a journalist at an independent publication. The independent publication, The Ramparts, had a distinctive strategy: raise hell and keep on raising it until national media, always late to the game, finally picked up the story. 

Bonus: a world where secretive organizations can manipulate winners requires not just irresponsible funding but online manipulation (SEO, etc.). If the top 25 hits on Google's search engine can be curated for you by one or more intelligence organizations, can you believe anything you see and hear? 

Robert Scheer, Muckraker, on Ramparts' Warren Hinckle

I was privileged to meet Robert Scheer from USC Annenberg's School of Communications and Journalism in Berkeley, California on April 29, 2018. 

Scheer, along with William Hinckle, was one of America's original muckrakers. Some of his work influenced MLK's opposition to the Vietnam War, which eventually led to Daniel Ellsberg's whistleblowing. At Berkeley's Book Fest, Scheer discussed working with Warren Hinckle, lesser known than Hunter S. Thompson but arguably a much better writer.

On motivation: "What drove Warren [Hinckle] was journalism." "His success was a rebuke of mainstream journalism... [he was] forging a connection with the anti-war movement and the civil rights movement. We were the start of whistleblower journalism."

On mainstream media: Even the New York Times condemned Martin Luther King. Every single mainstream newspaper has [initially] supported every one of America's wars. In fact, "Martin Luther King's condemnation of the Vietnam War was [itself] condemned by the New York Times."

On whether Warren would have been more famous among New York's hoi polloi: "If we'd been on the East Coast, we'd have been unpublished!" [i.e., too much competition and too many existing outlets and power players]

On David Horowitz's criticism of Ramparts: "Fred Mitchell saved Ramparts... [you can criticize how we spent money but] we didn't pay most or our bills because we declared Chapter 11 [bankruptcy]... [In all seriousness] we lost money [not because of mismanagement] but because of the positions we took. We reported on the Six Day War [and then had pro-Israel Martin Peretz and Dick Russell, two of the magazine's shareholders, withdraw their money, 1 million USD, from Ramparts]. We reported on Malcolm X [when no one else was doing so]." 

Bonus: Steve Wasserman on Warren Hinckle: "Every story he told was true, even the unbelievable ones." "Warren was on the side of the little people... He couldn't bear hypocrisy."