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Thursday, 23 July 2020, 11:06 amArticle: Eric Zuesse

Eric Zuesse,originally posted at StrategicCulture

Back in July of 2016, I did a two-partarticle, American Samizdat Publication Forbidden in U.S., which went down therabbit-hole of news-suppression (censorship) in the UnitedStates but left, for the future, a more detailed descriptionof the money-track back to the individuals who control thatcensorship in serving the economic interests of the samebillionaires who control both the Democratic NationalCommittee and the Republican National Committee both ofAmericas two national political Parties (and they thusdetermined, forexample, in the Democratic Party, that Bernie Sanders wouldnever get that Partys Presidential nomination, though hehad the highest approval-rating of any politician in thecountry, and far higher than Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump,and Joe Biden ever had yet the billionaires fooledthe majority of Democratic Party primary voters to thinkthat he was too radical to be able to beat Trump, eventhough, in all polled hypothetical matchups against Trump,Sanders beat Trump by far higher margins thanClinton did, and basicallyequal to whatBiden did, so the electability issue wasfabricated by the billionaires press, in order to get acandidate who was acceptable to the billionaires tobe running against Trump).

A dictatorship functions bynews-suppression and other forms of censorship, even morethan it does by its own lying. It functions by deceit, butthe main way it deceives is by prohibiting the truth to bepublished on any of the billionaires (or other rulinggroups) media including all of the media that havelarge audiences.

News-suppression used to becontrolled by the CIAs OperationMockingbird, in which the owners andtop executives of the major news-media took theCIAs orders and trusted it to represent in the mostreliable way the collective interests of Americaswealthiest persons, so as to weaken those individualsforeign economic competitors. However, gradually, after the1976 Frank-Church-led U.S. Senate hearings into the CIAsdeceptions of the American public, Americas wealthiest the same people whom Wall Street firms also represent relied increasingly upon the nonprofits (foundationsetc.) that they controlled, in order to transfer some ofthis censorship-function over to those nonprofits privatize the censorship function. It was done so that thesame people who controlled the U.S. Government would be ableto continue controlling it and would allow into thebillionaire class new members (mainly technocrats) of thenations aristocracy. This would enhance the U.S.aristocracys collective control over the U.S. Government.There is less need, than before, for the CIA to do thecensoring. (So: the group collectively also constitutesits own gatekeepers. They dont rely onlyupon market-forces in order to determine who is us,and who is them, but any misbehaving member willincreasingly become treated as being one ofthem, and this will be reflected in the groupsnews-media. Its an oligarchy here, and not only anaristocracy. It is an exclusionary aristocracy.)

HughWilfords 2008 THEMIGHTY WURLITZER: How the CIA Played Americadescribed how, starting in the late 1960s, Americassuper-rich began transferring (privatizing) some of theircensorship-functions away from the Government, and intotheir own controlled news-media andnonprofits.

As the former Washington Postreporter Carl Bernstein headlined on 20 October 1977, THECIA AND THE MEDIA, in the wake of the ChurchCommittees report, and described that Senate reportscontext:

During the 1976 investigation of the CIAby the Senate Intelligence Committee, chaired by SenatorFrank Church, the dimensions of the Agencys involvementwith the press became apparent to several members of thepanel, as well as to two or three investigators on thestaff. But top officials of the CIA, including formerdirectors William Colby and George Bush, persuaded thecommittee to restrict its inquiry into the matter and todeliberately misrepresent the actual scope of the activitiesin its final report. The multivolume report contains ninepages in which the use of journalists is discussed indeliberately vague and sometimes misleading terms. It makesno mention of the actual number of journalists who undertookcovert tasks for the CIA. Nor does it adequately describethe role played by newspaper and broadcast executives incooperating with the Agency.

Ever since that time,the CIAs direct control over U.S. media has eroded andbecome privatized largely into the billionairesnonprofits, even while the CIAscontrol over the media in U.S.-allied foreignaristocracies has continued unabated, so as to extendyet further the American empire.

At the top in Americaare the billionaires who donate the most to politicians, andwhose tax-exempt foundations collectively carry out whatused to be the CIAs Operation Mockingbird thecensorship-function.

Two organizations especiallyshould be cited here as leaders of todays Americanbillionaire-class and privatized censorship operations, andany reader here should keep in mind that the largest fundersof these two organizations are themselves only hints at thebillionaires who control each one of them, and, furthermore,since these are only two such organizations, there might beother similar organizations that, perhaps in other ways, areequally important as these two determiners of the news thatthe vast majority of the U.S. public are, and will be,blocked from seeing and hearing (such as this).

Firstis a crucial operation that serves the Democratic NationalCommittee, the DNC (for links to sources, click onto theURL):

https://www.prwatch.org/cmd/index.html

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The Center for Media and Democracy (CMD)is a nationally recognized watchdog that leads in-depth,award-winning investigations into the corruption thatundermines our democracy, environment, and economicprosperity.

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CMD files morethan 1,000 public information requests each year. Thisinvestigative watchdog work has broken through in thenational debate. For example, CMD exposed EPA AdministratorScott Pruitt's deep ties to the fossil fuel industry andrevealed lobbyist efforts to hide Chamber of Commercemembers overwhelming support for raising the minimum wageand providing paid sick leave, among other groundbreakinginvestigations.

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Weaponsof Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush's War onIraq

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The Best War Ever: Lies, Damned Lies and the Mess inIraq

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Second is a crucial operationthat serves the Republican National Committee, the RNC (forlinks to sources, click onto the URL):

More here:
Who The Democratic And Republican Party Censors Are, For The 'News' You See & Hear - Scoop.co.nz