Spies and Journalists: A Very Special Relationship
Their talking points come straight out of Langley
At the London bureau of Time Magazine, both the bureau chief, former military intelligence, and the deputy bureau chief filed to Langley and other organs of the National Security State. I know this because when my office was in use by a visiting grandee, I used their computers to file. The secret government has been embedded in media ever since Viscount Northcliffe, the owner of the Daily Mail figured out how to stampede Britain’s working class into the first World War.
At present I am running short - 1-3 minute reads - excerpts from a new book, Against the Corporate Media, 42 Ways the Media Hates You - a book of essays to which I contributed, along with forty-one others on just what happened. It will be published on September 10th. My purpose is that you come away from this somewhat enlightened as to what the hell happened, and how a once respectable profession became seedy and dishonest. The book provides a clear direction towards root and branch reform. And perhaps you will buy the book.
Spies and Journalists: A Very Special Relationship
An excerpt from Against the Corporate Media, coming Sept. 10 from Bombardier Books. "Spies and Journalists: A Very Special Relationship," by Kyle Shideler.
It’s hard to understate the irony of [Carl] Bernstein’s complaining about journalists collaborating with intelligence officials when he had served as the unquestioning recipient of leaks by Mark Felt, the onetime head of FBI counterintelligence, motivated by Felt’s bureaucratic beef against the elected president of the United States. Bernstein’s relationship with Felt can be thought of as the alternative model of intelligence-journalist cooperation, where the eyes of the intelligence services are not on foreign foes, but domestic political and bureaucratic opponents.
Even in exposing the CIA’s relationship with journalists, Bernstein was likely little more than a patsy. As the late Angelo Codevilla observed from his time as a staffer on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, a leftwing faction of the intelligence services used the Church Committee and other revelations of bad behavior, not to clean up shop but to target internal opponents—and to establish a dominance over the security organs which has never since been challenged. Instead of journalists being the eyes and ears of American spies, it’s now the spies who observe and report to their journalist assets, not to relay facts, but to spread narratives that serve the opaque purposes of the government mandarins.
Journalists seeking to remain in the good graces of the intelligence community have returned the favor by pre-emptively tailoring their reporting to the needs of the spies. The Intercept has reported how CIA favorite Ken Dilanian, first of the Los Angeles Times and later of the Associated Press, was one of several journalists who routinely gave the Agency preclearance of stories to ensure that the coverage portrayed the CIA in a positive light.
You really can't hate them enough.
Coziness between spies and journalists has grown exponentially worse as society has progressed further into the digital era. Media outlets have closed foreign news bureaus and sent veteran foreign correspondents into retirement. In their place have settled swarms of young, eager J-school grads, some responsible for writing as many as a half dozen articles a day, with no requirement for multiple sources and no fact checking, posted to news websites where the ability to stealth-edit an error has replaced pro-active high-quality and knowledgeable editors. Eventually even writing articles became too time consuming, and journalists now rush to scoop each other on social media, hammering out 140-character pieces for the benefit of their Twitter (now X) followers, who sometimes outnumber the total official subscribers of the outlets where they are employed.
These are the twenty-seven-year-olds who “literally know nothing” as former Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes once pointed out. Rhodes was describing the method by which, as an official in the Obama administration, he built a foreign policy “echo chamber” that would successfully spin a narrative to justify a nuclear deal with Iran. Rhodes’s partner in the scheme was a CIA officer seconded to the National Security Council, Ned Price. Price and Rhodes realized that reporters who lacked worldly experience or access to foreign correspondents of their own were completely reliant on intelligence officials in Washington to tell them what’s really going on.
What little HUMINT capability the intelligence agencies had was decimated in the 1970s, thanks in part to Bernstein and company. So today the intelligence doyens of D.C. don’t really have any better understanding of the ways of the wider world than do the know-nothing journalists to whom they leak. But what the intelligence services do have is extensive electronic surveillance. And this tool also has been turned inward, in attempts to produce more goodies to leak to their aligned journalists.
Accompanying Rhodes’s narrative-shaping was the tactic of unmasking identities of Americans caught in electronic surveillance, which began with congressional opponents of the Iran nuclear deal who were surveilled while they spoke with Israeli officials also opposed to the deal. As Lee Smith, author of The Plot Against the President has pointed out, the Iran deal surveillance was a dry run for the “Russian collusion” hoax launched against Donald Trump. The plot contained all the same elements: eavesdropping on political opponents engaged in conversations with foreigners—whether those conversations were legitimate, or the result of foreign assets being introduced by the services to justify surveillance—and using targeted leaks to favored reporters to create a false but prevalent narrative which in turn justified more extensive surveillance.
Ironically, central to the scheme was the use of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court, which had been instituted as a post-Church Committee reform, sold as an effort to rein in the intelligence community. Instead, provided they can sell their story to the court, the spies have carte blanche to indulge in bad behavior with a judicially clear conscience. Exactly as Codevilla had repeatedly warned would happen. Like Bernstein with Felt, journalists are perfectly comfortable being the patsies of deep-throated spies if the target is a Republican, and not some foreign foe.
It is arguable we have never had a completely free media, but today, independent media is pretty much there. Readers are exercising their choice and subscribing to the writers they trust. If you are inclined, you can buy a inexpensive annual subscription to Absurdistan here. I will have Buy Me A Coffee up soon, since some of you prefer not to use PayPal (quite rightly). And you can continue to Absurdistan’s reporting fund here. For now you can send $ via: PayPal.Me/ElizabethJNickson
Elizabeth Nickson was trained as a reporter at the London bureau of Time Magazine. She became European Bureau Chief of LIFE magazine in its last years of monthly publication, and during that time, acquired the rights to Nelson Mandela’s memoir before he was released from Robben Island. She went on to write for Harper’s Magazine, the Guardian, the Observer, the Independent, the Sunday Telegraph, the Sunday Times Magazine, the Telegraph, the Globe and Mail and the National Post. Her first book The Monkey Puzzle Tree was an investigation of the CIA MKULTRA mind control program and was published by Bloomsbury and Knopf Canada. Her next book, Eco-Fascists, How Radical Environmentalists Are Destroying Our Natural Heritage, was a look at how environmentalism, badly practiced, is destroying the rural economy and rural culture in the U.S. and all over the world. It was published by Adam Bellow at Harper Collins US. She is a Senior Fellow at the Frontier Center for Public Policy, fcpp.org. You can read in depth policy papers about various elements of the environmental junta here: https://independent.academia.edu/ElizabethNickson
No single topic has proved to me that journalism is dead more than that of the Hunter Biden Laptop. Yes, the lack of investigating and reporting on the stolen 2020 election as well as all the lies around Covid and the vaccines come to mind - but the single issue of the Hunter Biden Laptop proves unequivocally that only a small handful of people in the WORLD would go near this story (Miranda Devine comes to mind, as well as Steve Bannon's team). Garrett Ziegler (founder of Marco Polo) stuck his neck out to publish an entire report on the contents of the laptop and then sent copies to EVERY member of Congress. Crickets. You would think that this would be a career defining story for someone, anyone, a small core team of people perhaps - but no! Nothing! Not a peep! If that doesn't tell you all you need to know about journalism, than I don't know what would.
Bismarck had in his pay all, or almost all, the important journalists in 19th century Germany.
Significantly, he also invented the combination of welfare state and militaristic State. The big social programs we take for granted in 21st century nations were pioneered in Bismarck’s Prussia, which became a unified Germany under his rule.
Of course, the crucial third pillar of Bismarck’s ruling model was the press, whose purpose was—and is in all modern States—to shape public opinion according to the mold of official government policy.
The American ideal, of a free press guaranteed by the First Amendment as a bulwark against tyranny, has morphed in its own country almost imperceptibly into the Bismarckian model. The process started in the 19th century under Pulitzer and Hearst, and the deathblow was struck during Watergate—a Deep State coup against the most popular President ever elected—which with fitting cynicism was celebrated by the narrative that Woodward (a Naval Intelligence operative) and Bernstein demonstrated the cleansing power of the press. Actually, their information source, as you point out, was Felt, Head of FBI Counter-Intelligence, and Jaworski and Sirica and the Democrats colluded to suppress exculpatory evidence and imply that Woodward and Bernstein’s source was a member of Nixon’s inner circle—a lie still promoted to this day.
X, Substack and Telegram have re-established the original American model. We must defend these platforms or we can say goodbye to the rest of our freedoms.
Sorry, Elizabeth, but the halcyon days of yore when journalists were noble probably never existed. With present company excepted, honorable journalists were and are about as rare as honorable mercenaries and hookers: they exist, but the ones who do are startling exceptions to the breed.