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Comment by md_ | Hacker News Reader

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2000/apr/12/julianborger

"Cable Network News (CNN) and National Public Radio, (NPR) denied that the "psy-ops" officers influenced news coverage and said the internships had been stopped as soon as senior managers found out . For its part, the army said the programme was only intended to give young army media specialists some experience of how the news industry functioned."

That...seems like a pretty reasonable explanation?

Just to be clear, the alternative theory you have is that the US government wanted to influence NPR's coverage, and thought the best, most inconspicuous way to do so would be by using an intern placement program targeting Army media officers?

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The point they’re making is the point they’re making. Take it exactly for what it is. If the same thing was reported to have happened In Russia, it wouldn’t be terribly controversial to label the media outlet “state-sponsored”.

It's insane to me that we're all just supposed to give a US army program literally titled PSYOPS the benefit of the doubt because their corporate partners said there was nothing to worry about. Does anyone remember that the entire mainstream media was in full support of everything the bush administration did in the middle east, NPR included?

I remember. I don't think it was because of some unpaid interns in the mail room or whatever.

I think this kind of cloak-and-dagger conspiracy theorizing trivializes the real, challenging, human issues of editorial independence, the complexity of fairly representing reality, etc, etc.

We must have very different trust levels in the military industrial complex then. I think it's worth pointing out this program happened in 2000. Do you think it just went away? Do you think that when obama legalized spreading propaganda in the US no one capitalized on it?

I agree that the issues you listed are indeed real and challenging, but I also think that the media's heavy reliance on the "intelligence community" making claims as evidence when there is none is a more pressing one.

> I agree that the issues you listed are indeed real and challenging, but I also think that the media's heavy reliance on the "intelligence community" making claims as evidence when there is none is a more pressing one.

I totally agree that an over-emphasis on "access" leads to inaccurate reporting. You're certainly right to tie that to the invasion of Iraq.

But I don't think there's any evidence that the US military is running domestic psyops, and certainly if they were doing so it would not be via unpaid internships.

Of course there are broader problems. A lack of trust in the media and a lack of attention span--no doubt driven by social media intermediation and a lack of accountability for individual publishers--reduces incentives to get stories correct, and increases incentives to get stories. A public that misunderstands the role of reporters thinks analysis equals bias and is obsessed with up-to-the-minute stories, and high production values--the latter of which can only be afforded in large metro and national markets, leading to a hollowing out of local content.

These aren't original observations, of course. But they are indeed real problems. I think they have very little to do with the prospect of Pentagon psyops, which, frankly, are unnecessary given the underlying structural flaws.

Plenty of evidence spanning decades: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mockingbird https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/02/06/john-bren... I immensely enjoy the opinion of the mainstream that "yes the CIA did bad things in the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, and 2000s but nobody was ever prosecuted an there were no reforms so now they don't do bad things today you conspiracy theorist."

I must be getting different webpages when I click those links than you do. Do you think it’s the cia?

Several years after Nixon's resignation,[0] Carl Bernstein published a piece in Rolling Stone alleging that over the course of 25 years, the CIA had tasked more than 400 journalists for special assignments, including Pulizer Prize winnders and a publisher for the New York Times.

"Some of these..relationships with the Agency were tacit; some were explicit. There was cooperation, accommodation and overlap. Journalists provided a full range of clandestine services-from simple intelligence gather to serving as go-betweens."

Laundering information.

[0] https://www.carlbernstein.com/the-cia-and-the-media-rolling-... [1] CIA Officer Frank Snepp discusses planting stories in Vietnam: youtu.be/UwerBZG83YM

I'd perhaps distinguish between 'state-sponsored' (i.e. all the operating funds come from a government) and 'state-affiliated' (i.e. media employees and government employees are intermingled and move back and forth from media to government jobs.)

If MSNBC hires a Biden spokesperson (Jen Psaki) or if CNN hires a intelligence officer (e.g. James Clapper) or if Fox hires a White House communications director (Hope Hicks), that's 'state-affiliated' in the same sense that if RT hired Putin's press secretary or some FSB/GU officer we'd say, 'oh, right, they're state-affiliated.'

News reports are more reliable if the people reporting on government activities are not themselves from the government, it's called an independent press and is generally held to be a critical component of democratic systems.

There’s another aspect you have to consider: the power dynamic. If MSNBC hired Jen Psaki or Fox News hired Hope Hicks because she got sick of working in government, they might have a bias towards their former colleagues but it would be voluntary and clearly a job either would be qualified for. That’s pretty different from, say, Russian government going to RT and giving them a list of qualified candidates or even, say, the Tories appointing their loyalists to the BBC because the decision isn’t being made by the government and there isn’t a threat explicit or implicit that there would be consequences for not hiring them.

Another power dynamic to consider is that MSNBC or FOX have owners (Comcast and Murdoch respectively) and those owners have shareholders (Blackrock, Fidelity etc.) who also have holdings in corporations that get their revenue from government contracts (Lockheed etc.) and so MSNBC executives feel pressure to hire employees who will generally take a positive view on the delivery of large government contracts to corporations, government-structured tax breaks and bailouts for corporations, and so on, and of course a government employee with an eye on possibly returning to a government career is an acceptable option, because they will promote the opinion that this is a great system that doesn't need say, more audits or investigation into misappropriation of public funds and so on.

Now the word for this kind of integration of the corporate world and the government world is....?

"Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power." — Benito Mussolini

> 'state-affiliated' (i.e. media employees and government employees are intermingled and move back and forth from media to government jobs.)

By that definition, every company in every significant industry is "state affiliated".

Yes, that's mostly true. In terms of the tendency of government regulators to have been ex-corporate middle managers, this is called 'the revolving door'.

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