1/03/03
By
J. Parnell McCarter
Puritan News Service
If
the CIA is as bad as much evidence suggests it is, why is not the major
media informing the public about it?We
have no definitive answer to that question, but the website
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Media/EstabPapersCIA_WMOZ.html
has an interesting insight:
“Dennis
McDougal, a former L.A. Times staffer, described the paper's editor, Shelby
Coffey in this way: "He is the dictionary definition of someone who wants
to protect the status quo. He weighs whether or not an investigative piece
will have repercussions among the ruling elite, and if it will, the chances
of seeing it in print in the L A. Times decrease accordingly."
The
New York Times and Washington Post have an even closer relationship to
the nation's elites, with connections to the CIA that go back nearly to
the agency's founding. In a piece on the CIA and news media written for
Rolling Stone two decades ago (10/20/77), Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein
wrote that "the agency's relationship with the [New York] Times was by
far its most valuable among newspapers, according to CIA officials. From
1950 to 1966, about 10 CIA employees were provided Times cover under arrangements
approved by the newspaper's late publisher, Arthur Hays Sulzberger. The
cover arrangements were part of a general Times policy - set by Sulzberger
- to provide assistance to the CIA whenever possible."
Bernstein's
former employer, the Washington Post, was also useful to the CIA; Bernstein
quoted a CIA official as saying of the Post's late owner and publisher,
"It was widely known that Phil Graham was somebody you could get help from."
Descendants
of these publishers still run their respective papers, and the attitude
that they have an obligation to provide covert help to the CIA persists
to the present era. In 1988, Post owner Katharine Graham, Phil's widow,
gave a speech at the CIA's Langley, Va. headquarters. "We live in a dirty
and dangerous world," Graham told agency leaders. "There are some things
the general public does not need to know and shouldn't. I believe democracy
flourishes when the government can take legitimate steps to keep its secrets
and when the press can decide whether to print what it knows."
Of course, given the influence of the Vatican over the CIA, what this effectively means is that the Vatican has significant influence over the mainstream American media. This is indeed the Vatican's goal. After all, Pope Paul VI boasted in his decree Inter Mirifica (1964), “It is the Church’s birthright to use and own the press, the cinema, radio, television and others of a like nature.”