Propaganda
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Contents
The Mighty Wurlitzer
Source: The CIAs Greatest Hits - by Mark Zepezaue
Deputy Director Frank Wisner proudly referred to the CIA's worldwide propaganda machine as "the mighty Wurlitzer." And indeed, the agency's skill at murdering people is matched only by its ability to murder the truth.
The CIA has published literally hundreds of books that spread its party line on the Cold War. It was particularly proud of The Penikovsky Papers, supposedly the memoirs of a KGB defector but actually completely ghostwritten by CIA scribes. A bit more embarrassing was Claire Sterling's book which advanced the now-discredited theory that the Russians were behind the 1981 attempt on the life of Pope John Paul II. Even the popular Fodor's Travel Guides started as a CIA front.
The CIA also owns dozens of newspapers and magazines the world over. These not only provide cover for their agents but allow them to plant misinformation that regularly makes it back to the US through the wire services. The CIA has even placed agents on guard at the wire services, to prevent inconvenient facts from being disseminated.
In 1977, famed Watergate journalist Carl Bernstein revealed that over 400 US journalists had been employed by the CIA. These ranged from freelancers who were paid for regular debriefings, to actual CIA officers who worked under deep cover. Nearly every major US news organization has had spooks on the payroll, usually with the cooperation of top management.
The three most valuable media assets the CIA could count on were William Paley's CBS, Arthur Sulzberger's New York Times and Henry Luce's Time/Life empire. All three bent over backwards promoting the picture of Oswald as a lone nut in the JFK assassination.
Among prominent journalists who've worked knowingly with the CIA are National Review founder William F. Buckley, PBS interviewer Bill Moyers, the late columnist Stewart Alsop, former Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee and Ms. magazine founder Gloria Steinem.
Bernstein's landmark article on the CIA and the media told of the agency's frantic efforts to limit Congressional inquiry into the matter, with claims that "some of the biggest names in journalism could get smeared." And while the CIA director at the time, George Bush, made a not-too-convincing show of discontinuing the agency's manipulation of the media, it's clear that the CIA regards the space between your ears as one of its most important battlefields.
- Operation Mockingbird
- The ESF And Its History
- The ESF’s Wurlitzer Is Slowly Dying
- The CIA and the term "Conspiracy Theory"
Spam
- 40% of New Mechanical Turkers' Work Requests Are Now For Spamming - What a Lost Opportunity!
- Amazon's Mechanical Turk Used for Fraudulent Activities
- MediaWiki Anti-spam_features
- Appropedia spam fighting cookbook
- UMassWiki spam fighting cookbook
The Internet Water Army
The Internet Water Army is a group of individuals who act as paid mercenaries to inundate the Internet with comments, gossip, or other content to build up or demolish credibility of articles, information, Websites and more. These people demolish the consumer ranking of products and services, create false images, provide a sense of false perception to destroy the truth. Some blame China as the pioneer of the Internet Water Army. China may be using the same but the list of abusers is vast. It is very common in the free world. The corporations are employing them, the unions are employing them, and even the political parties employ them. The Internet Water Army are typically tasked with registering on a Web site and then producing content in the form of posts, articles, links to sites and videos, etc. University of Victoria computer science researchers Cheng Chen, Kui Wu and Venkatesh Srinivasan went undercover as posters to expose the group's modus operandi. According to their analysis, paid posters post far more new comments than replies to other comments. They tend to post more often, and they move on from a discussion without completing a topic like a a legitimate users. These artificial perception creators take shortcuts, frequently cutting and pasting comments from a template they use. The researchers developed intelligent system to look for these patterns in the web sites to identify paid posters with more than 85% accuracy.
- Undercover Researchers Expose Chinese Internet Water Army - An undercover team of computer scientists reveals the practices of people who are paid to post on websites
Sites that support the propaganda
Apart from the sites that are just obvious mainstream news regurgitations, there are also many that support the propaganda by presenting themselves as offering the useful service of analysing other sites to sort out the truth from the disinformation, but many of these are simply acting to filter out any sources of information that are against the status-quo. Most of these sites are easy to pick as they don't usually engage in decent research, they base their arguments on opinion and emotion rather than facts backed up by references and coherent logical reasoning.
- RationalWiki - anything but rational, Good description of "RationalWiki", also mises.org's response
- Snopes
Other mechanisms of disinformation
One thing that's becoming very clear now is that nearly all of the false flag attacks have included intentionally planted "breadcrumbs" that lead to false, and usually outrageous conclusions about the nature of the attack. This method has the advantage to the perpetrators of getting a big portion of credible truth sources to follow the false trails, spreading disinformation and ultimately discrediting themselves. This has the additional effect of pulling all truth sources down to the same level of "conspiracy theorists", even those that have been careful not to follow these false trails of breadcrumbs.
