CIA Admits Using News To Manipulate The USA (1950)

If tyranny and oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy... The loss of Liberty at home is to be charged to the provisions against danger, real or imagined, from abroad..." - James Madison

This is an old clip showing admittance of the CIA that they use the mainstream media to manipulate the thoughts and ideas of American citizens in the USA. This has not changed much in 60 years. It is good to know what happened in the past.

Propaganda is a deliberate attempt to persuade people to think and then behave in a manner desired by the source; public relations, a branch of propaganda, is a related process intended to enhance the relationship between an organization and the public. Both, in turn, are related to advertising. Bill Backer, in The Care and Feeding of Ideas (1993), suggests that advertising and propaganda are half brothers. An advertisement connects something with human desires; propaganda shapes the infinite into concrete images.

Not surprisingly, propaganda came of age in World War I, as all major combatants created agencies to regulate and censor the flow of information, aid in recruitment, and sell the moral validity of the war effort to those on the home front and battlefront. The most effective recruiting device for the American military in World War I was arguably James Montgomery Flagg's recruiting poster, "Uncle Sam Wants You." American war propaganda was shaped through the efforts of President Woodrow Wilson's Committee on Public Information, headed by journalist George Creel.

The 1920s saw the emergence of public relations, a term first used in 1807 by Thomas Jefferson in a message to Congress. Edward L. Bernays introduced public relations counsel in his Crystalizing Public Opinion (1923), and the decade saw the general acceptance of the profession by business and government, if not by every military commander.

The military got the picture. During World War II, the army's Bureau of Public Relations did a better job of managing news from the battlefront than a competing civilian agency, the Office of War Information (OWI). All newsreel footage shot in various theaters of war was first subject to military censorship; and all photographs were subject to censorship, particularly if they showed the faces of American dead.

As Philip M. Taylor points out in his Global Communications (1997), in October 1995, the U.S. Air Force created its first Information Warfare Squadron (the 609th Squadron, stationed in South Carolina). Enemies today target civilian airlines; they slip bombs into checked luggage; today's terrorists can also engage in chemical, biological, or electronic warfare and be capable of greater destruction than an entire regiment in the field, impervious to attack by conventional armed troops. Accordingly, one now sees the addition of Information Warfare to the military arsenal. No longer is there a clear dividing line between public information and military psychological operations; "infowar" entails all of the following: command and control warfare, intelligence‐based warfare, electronic warfare, psychological warfare, computer hacker warfare, economic information warfare, and cyberwarfare. In such an interconnected military environment, one can predict a vastly enhanced role for propaganda and public relations, a decline in the disdain with which many hold such practitioners, and a realization that the military commander becomes ever more dependent on the weaponry of an electronic world—a world in which one side's disinformation is another's information; one side's "flack" another's public relations officer.