is close to the Washington DC scene.
One should keep in mind the long history of the WAPO and CIA.
The CIA, Washington Post, And Russia: What You’re Not Being Told
History reveals actual collusion between the CIA and news outlets, including the Washington Post.
By Carey Wedler | December 20, 2016
According to an unsubstantiated article by the Washington Post, anonymous CIA officials have confirmed that the Russian government hacked the United States election to favor Donald Trump. Though it’s entirely possible the Russian government attempted to influence the election, the Post has been widely criticized — for the second time in a month — for its failure to follow basic journalistic practices. Nevertheless, the narrative is sticking.
But the outlet’s behind-the-scenes relationship with the CIA is nothing new. In 2013, a conflict of interest arose shortly after Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon, purchased the newspaper. As the Nation reported at the time:
“[Jeff Bezos] recently secured a $600 million contract from the CIA. That’s at least twice what Bezos paid for the Post this year. Bezos recently disclosed that the company’s Web-services business is building a ‘private cloud’ for the CIA to use for its data needs.”
rest of article at: http://www.mintpressnews.com/cia-washington-post-russia-youre-not-told/223319/
more at: https://www.counterpunch.org/2013/12/18/the-cia-and-the-washington-post/
and: https://www.counterpunch.org/2016/11/30/the-cia-and-the-press-when-the-washington-post-ran-the-cias-propaganda-network/
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In the meantime, here is a brief historical note on how at the height of the Cold War the CIA developed it’s very own stable of writers, editors and publishers (swelling to as many as 3000 individuals) that it paid to scribble Agency propaganda under a program called Operation Mockingbird. The disinformation network was supervised by the late Philip Graham, former publisher of Timberg’s very own paper, the Washington Post.
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Almost from its founding in 1947, the CIA had journalists on its payroll, a fact acknowledged in ringing tones by the Agency in its announcement in 1976 when G.H.W. Bush took over from William Colby that “Effective immediately, the CIA will not enter into any paid or contract relationship with any full-time or part-time news correspondent accredited by any US news service, newspaper, periodical, radio or television network or station.”
Though the announcement also stressed that the CIA would continue to “welcome” the voluntary, unpaid cooperation of journalists, there’s no reason to believe that the Agency actually stopped covert payoffs to the Fourth Estate.
Its practices in this regard before 1976 have been documented to a certain degree. In 1977 Carl Bernstein attacked the subject in Rolling Stone, concluding that more than 400 journalists had maintained some sort of alliance with the Agency between 1956 and 1972.
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It would be naïve to believe that there is not an ongoing relationship between the CIA and the WAPO.
I am not making the claim that the relationship is all bad or evil, just that the relationship exists and is of long duration and maybe not all that democratic or egalitarian.
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