This one is more scary than anything else. In the former USSR, or in China, or various other repressed countries, you at least have the benefit of knowing that the Press has been bought and sold by the government. But in the U.S., supposedly, the press is and has been free. In the late 1940's, the Cold War was more frigid than ever. It was under this climate that the CIA began to infiltrate and even outwardly control the U.S. News Media. Code named "Operation Mockingbird", an undercover State Department official, Frank Wisner, recruited Philip Graham, publisher of the Washington Post to direct the program.
By the early 1950s, Wisner owned the New York Times, Newsweek, and CBS. All told, Mockingbird influenced 25 newspapers and wire agencies agreed to act as Pawns of CIA propaganda. Many of these were already run by men with reactionary views, among them William Paley (CBS), C.D. Jackson (Fortune), Henry Luce (Time) and Arthur Hays Sulzberger (N.Y. Times).
In the 1950s, Global propaganda encompassed a third of the CIA's covert operations budget. Some 3, 000 salaried and contract CIA employees were involved in Propaganda efforts. The cost of misinforming the world cost taxpayers an estimated $265 million a year by 1978, Larger than the combined expenses of Reuters, UPI and the AP news syndicates.
It was not until the early 80's that the agency came clean about this.
