Jun 27: Unfreedom of Speech

Unfreedom of Speech

Big media keep telling us the “debate is over,” that “all credible sources agree,” that any dissenting voice is a “conspiracy theorist.” Funny thing is, when you actually dig through declassified documents, congressional testimony, SEC filings, and on-the-record corrections, you find a paper trail longer than the Keystone XL pipeline.

History offers an un-redacted warning label. In 1975 the Church Committee hauled CIA officials before Congress and pried loose details of “Operation Mockingbird,” a program that quietly placed hundreds of journalists on the Agency’s payroll. Frank Wisner bragged that his network was like a Mighty Wurlitzer: press one key and newspapers from Manhattan to Manila played the desired tune. The CIA insists the program was mothballed decades ago, yet Freedom of Information Act requests still return pages of black ink whenever reporters ask whether similar relationships exist today. If there is a wall between national-security operatives and newsrooms, it is made of tissue paper.

Fast-forward to October 2020, when the New York Post published emails suggesting Hunter Biden traded on his family name. Within hours Twitter locked the paper’s account and Facebook buried the link under the label “potentially hacked material.” The authors of that pre-emptive strike later turned out to be wrong; outlets such as the Washington Post and New York Times verified large portions of the laptop cache eighteen months after it could have influenced a presidential election. Yoel Roth, then Twitter’s head of Trust & Safety, would testify that the FBI held regular briefings with social-media companies warning about possible “hack-and-leak” operations. Government officials caution a platform, the platform throttles a story—call it cooperation, call it pressure, but do not pretend it is neutral.

Even when the stakes are life and death, the pattern repeats. In the run-up to the 2003 Iraq invasion, networks booked 393 guests who favored war and just three who opposed it, according to a FAIR media study. The New York Times later issued a mea culpa for front-page pieces that relied on single-source intel fed by exile groups friendly with the Pentagon. The result: trillions spent, thousands of Americans dead, and not a single stockpile of WMDs found. Yet the same faces who sold that war remain invited back as “experts,” usually on programs financed by defense-industry ad buys. OpenSecrets data show Raytheon, Lockheed, and Boeing ranking among the most frequent sponsors of the very Sunday shows that treat ex-executives from those firms as dispassionate analysts.

Skepticism is not some fringe neurosis; it is the prevailing mood of the country. Gallup’s 2023 survey found only thirty-two percent of Americans still trust the mass media—a fifty-year low. Pew reports that seventy-two percent believe news organizations “do not understand people like them.” That chasm widens when you trace the money. Pharmaceutical giant Pfizer spent roughly $2.8 billion on advertising in 2022, much of it across the same networks that conduct our nightly vaccine discussions. If you wonder why conflict-of-interest disclaimers rarely flash during those segments, remember who keeps the lights on.

When journalists do buck their editors, the consequences are swift. Glenn Greenwald co-founded The Intercept, won a Pulitzer for the Snowden revelations, and still found himself unable to publish an article about Hunter Biden without managerial “revisions.” He resigned instead. Sharyl Attkisson tells a similar story about investigative pieces critical of the Obama administration getting spiked at CBS. Courts later released internal emails verifying that her pitches were quashed before airtime.

Add it all up and the narrative that only wild-eyed conspiracy buffs detect manipulation becomes impossible to sustain. We have congressional testimony confirming state infiltration of newsrooms, social-media disclosures showing federal agencies flagging posts for removal, and documented financial entanglements that make genuine watchdog reporting a career-ending gamble. The evidence is in the public record for anyone willing to read more than a headline.

So the next time a talking head waves away your doubts with “all credible sources agree,” remember that the phrase “credible sources” often boils down to six corporate gatekeepers, a government agency or two, and a sponsor footing everyone’s bill. That is not journalism; it is choreography. And once you notice the dance, you can never un-see the strings.