Speaking from direct experience, and with refreshing honesty, a former CBS correspondent openly confirmed that the mainstream media is being covertly manipulated by well-financed political forces who are also trying to sway public opinion through social media and by editing Wikipedia articles.
Sharyl Attkisson, who also served as a correspondent with CNN, suggested that real investigative journalism is disappearing in mainstream media due to the current editorial trend to push stories in an unnatural direction in order to serve establishment agendas.
“What I hope to do with ‘Stonewalled’ [her book], is explain to the public how images that they see every day – not just on the news, but including in the news – but on social media; on television; on billboards – how these images are manipulated in covert and surreptitious ways by political forces and financially-backed forces that they have no idea about,” she told The Daily Signal. “If you can become savvy to this manipulation, and sometimes, outright propaganda, you can learn to recognize it and, sort of, filter through it – which, I think, helps people make up their own mind about what’s really going on in the world.”
Attkisson also indicated that there’s a growing movement inside Washington D.C. to affect public opinion outside of direct lobbying.
“Now, there’s a whole industry set up around manipulating public opinion or swaying public opinion in other ways – through social media; maybe, setting up blind accounts or accounts through pseudonyms; through editing Wikipedia in certain ways; through posting on Twitter and Facebook,” she stated. “There all kinds of ways that people’s opinions are being shaped through forces that they don’t know are behind the shaping of those opinions, and I really think it’s important that people know who’s behind the efforts.”
And this movement is expanding at a breakneck speed. Just a few months ago, for example, social media giant Facebook began offering “public education ad space” with content written by anti-gun groups targeted at users interested in firearm-related content.
Fortunately, in contrast to this rising propaganda, an increasing number of former mainstream journalists such as Attkisson are now heading to alternative media where investigative stories, such as how the federal government used extremely premature babies in a dangerous study, won’t be buried in favor of false narratives intended to paint the Obama administration – and the over 500 federal bureaucracies which operate with little oversight – in a positive light.
Although it’s been well-documented that the mainstream media has practically been a government mouthpiece since at least the early 1950s, when the CIA’s Operation Mockingbird began, it is refreshing and revealing to see that a former network correspondent is not only openly talking about media control, but she also views the alternative media as the solution to the controlled press that is rapidly losing influence.
“More Americans than ever are losing faith in the establishment-controlled media and are seeking out alternative sources of information,” Michael Snyder of the Economic Collapse Blog wrote. “Is this a trend that the big media companies are going to be able to reverse at some point?”
Not likely.
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