When Did Our News Become a Slanted Mix of Truth and Lies?

The idea that we're fed slanted news with little bits of truth plus outright lies is not new, as Thomas Jefferson stated:

"[A despotic] government always keeps a standing army of newswriters who, without any regard to truth [invent] and put into the papers whatever might serve the ministers. This suffices with the mass of the people who have no means of distinguishing the false from the true in a newspaper.” Read more of Jefferson's insightful observations of the media here.

Formal control over what news we're fed came much later than Jefferson's presidency. J.P Morgan commissioned a study in 1915 to find out exactly how many newspapers he needed to buy to control the general consensus of knowledge in America. It turns out that only 25 of the largest were needed. So he bought them, installed his own editors, and made sure to promote the policies that pushed for war and presented financial elites in a positive light. 

Morgan had more than 1,000 journalists on the payroll in New England alone. In other cases, Morgan (and Rockefeller) controlled the media by their gigantic advertising budgets and direct payments to reporters. This is described very well in congressional testimony from 1917 here (the official archive of Congress goes back to 1925).

It worked well enough that America agreed to send thousands upon thousands of people to die in Europe in WWI after voting for Woodrow Wilson because he insisted we'd stay out of the war. This book of newspaper clippings from 1915-1917 via a Villanova archive documents the media's move towards war. The same media control also helped FDR convince America to send many thousands more to die in WWII despite running for president insisting he would keep America out of Europe's

war.

At the close of WWII, Voice of America became the conduit for the American government to disseminate news to the world. The question was raised whether we have the right to flood the world with propaganda during peace time and whether the American people may be exposed to what was known to be slanted and/or false information. The Smith-Mundt Act of 1948 established boundaries that effectively barred the federal government from knowingly lying to the American people. Text of the Act here.

That same year, the CIA established its now famous Operation Mockingbird, which involved secretly bribing and/or extorting journalists to publish CIA-produced news, per congressional testimony in 1975. The CIA reportedly spent $1 billion a year on under-the-table bribes to hundreds of American journalists who in return published fake stories. CIA-recruited journalists worked in most major news organizations, including CBS News, Time, Life, Newsweek and The New York Times, just to name a few. In-depth description here.

For decades, American post-war media pushed the idea of objective journalism and the people believed it wholeheartedly. Their falsehoods, when caught, were met with great scandal. The sacking of famous TV newsmen like Dan Rather and Brian Williams are two fine examples, though many more including Rachel Maddow, Mika Brzezinski, and Bill O'Reilly also admitted to lying on air. And there's the awful 1992 scandal where NBC Dateline was caught putting a rocket on a GM pickup truck to fake an explosion intended to damage General Motors. There's no shortage of more recent examples.

But all of that was addressed in 2013 when the Smith-Mundt Act of 1948 blocking the government from lying to America was nullified by the National Defense Authorization Act. This allowed the federal government to legally expose the American people to any information as desired regardless of facts, truth, or political agenda. Text of the Act here. Yes, it is now legal for federal agencies and the military to knowingly lie to the American people through the news media, or by any other method. And it has been legal for almost 10 years. Has anything happened in the last decade that, looking back, might seem now like we weren't getting the whole story?

As head of the CIA, Mike Pompeo bragged about lying, cheating, and stealing as standard procedure. See his interview here. It's no surprise. People insist most politicians are liars, crooks, and thieves then bow down to their every word as soon as they get scared of whatever they're told to fear.

Even if none of this were true and the government had no influence on the media then remember that many of the same evil corporations that Americans hate, boycott, and try to cancel actually own the news media. In fact, nearly all network and cable news sources are owned by the same tiny handful of corporations. These hated corporations are also the biggest advertisers. Yet many of the people who hate these big corporations actually trust their every word - as long as the words come from a TV...so how much of the news can you believe?

A fine rundown of corporate media control here.

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