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March 26, 2000

CNN AND PSYOPS
By Alexander Cockburn

Military personnel from the Fourth Psychological Operations Group based at Fort Bragg, in North Carolina, have until recently been working in CNN's hq in Atlanta.

However insignificant Eason Jordan and other executives at CNN may now describe the Army psyops tours at CNN as having been, the commanding officer of the Psy-ops group thought them as sufficient significance to mention at a high level Pentagon seminar about propaganda and psychological warfare. It could be that CNN was the target of a psyops penetration and is still too naïve to figure out what was going on.

It's hard not to laugh when CNN execs like Eason Jordan start spouting high-toned stuff about CNN's principles of objectivity and refusal to spout government or Pentagon propaganda. The relationship is most vividly summed up by the fact that Christiane Amanpour, CNN's leading foreign correspondent, and a woman whose reports about the fate of Kosovan refugees did much to fan public appetite for NATO's war, is literally and figuratively in bed with spokesman for the US State Department, and a leading propagandist for NATO during that war, her husband James Rubin.If CNN truly wanted to maintain the appearance of objectivity, it would have taken Amanpour off the story. Amanpour, by the way, is still a passionate advocate for NATO's crusade, most recently on the Charlie Rose show.

In the first two weeks of the war in Kosovo CNN produced thirty articles for the Internet, according to de Vries, who looked them up for his first story. An average CNN article had seven mentions of Tony Blair, NATO spokesmen like Jamie Shea and David Wilby or other NATO officials. Words like refugees, ethnic cleansing, mass killings and expulsions were used nine times on the average. But the so-called Kosovo Liberation Armmy (0.2 mentions) and the Yugoslav civilian victims (0.3 mentions) barely existed for CNN.

You don't know how relieved I am that so many Americans are up in arms over CNN. I was concerned that there were a majority of Americans that actually believed everything they saw on CNN, and I see now, after discovering Free Republic that this is not so. Whew!!!!! Up here in Ontario, we don't call it CNN, we call it the Ministry of Fear. (All anthrax, all the time). How refreshing to see it trashed south of the border as well.
Having said that, I find the presence of psy-ops at CNN not surprising. I think it is still possible that CNN is a government agency designed to enrage Republicans to action, (which it has done admirably) and give the appearance of placating the libs.
George Orwell's Ministry of Truth.