[Editor's Note: This is the full, original paper. The printed edition of NEXUS contains a condensed version of the paper below, without footnotes and references.]

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Extracted from Nexus Magazine, Volume 11, Number 2 (February-March 2004)

PO Box 30, Mapleton Qld 4560 Australia. editor@nexusmagazine.com

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By David B. Deserano, MS

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Information Control

It would not be impossible to prove with sufficient repetition and a psychological understanding of the people concerned that a square is in fact a circle. They are mere words, and words can be molded until they clothe ideas in disguise.

—Joseph Goebbels

The United States is the most media-saturated country in the world. We are bombarded daily with thousands upon thousands of images and sounds designed to get our attention, entertain, and inform us of everything from shoes to food to celebritydom to political ideology. Its been estimated that the average American is exposed to more than 3000 advertisements every day, but on top of that, there are the news programs, sitcoms, films, radio and other forms of media that we choose to consume. All of this works to shape our opinions of the world and a great deal of time, effort, and money is spent to guide our opinions down particular avenues. This used to be called "propaganda".

Today, with the negative, Nazi-esque connotation which comes with that word, euphemisms such as misinformation, disinformation, image consulting, political consulting, news consulting, advertising, infomercials, public relations, damage control, and the art of spin have taken its place in the English lexicon, all but concealing its true nature and omnipresence. And omnipresent, it is. The industries that deal with information control – in both the commercial and governmental sectors—work with hundreds of millions of dollars annually, for Schoolhouse Rock was right on target when it said, "Knowledge is Power!" Is it any wonder that our schools are suffering so badly while corporate CEOs and members of our government continually allot themselves raises? Uninformed, ignorant masses are far easier to manipulate then educated, thinking masses.

Who has the information? How is it being distributed? How is it contextualized?

Corporations and the US government have spent many decades and hundreds of billions of dollars researching how best to effect the American people. Much of this information is kept secret from the public (in the case of corporate research, it is their private property) and what is known has come from the more recent work done by scholars around the world – work that is dramatically under-funded by comparison. So, the information available to the average citizen – including the aforementioned academic scholars – is radically less than that which is available to the producers of media or information campaigns (i.e. advertising agencies, public relations firms, political consultants, etc.). However, an important fact that is known is that the human brain processes different mediums in different ways. Written and spoken words are put through a type of decoding process wherein the brain deciphers the words and the sentence structure in order to properly interpret what it is reading/hearing. In this process, both the conscious and unconscious mind go through an internal debate comparing what its interpreting with what it already knows to be true. With the image, however, the brain instantly processes it as truth, which means information presented in a visual format has a much greater impact on the unconscious. Over long periods of time, recurring imagery has a built-up effect on the viewer which allows for unconsciously conceived notions of truth to manifest as though from nowhere (keep this in mind as you read #69). Naturally, then, whomever has control over the mediums of communication has a tremendous amount of power over the populations who consume it.

NOTE: In no way is this intended to convince readers of any particular conspiracy theory, but rather to present a collection of facts – all of which are readily available to the average American – and allow readers to draw their own conclusions.

Part I: Media Intents, Capabilities, Practices, and Origins

Anyone who has the power to make you believe absurdities has the power to make you commit injustices.

- Voltaire

1.) The radio, the computer, and the Internet are all products of the military. The radio was invented by Guglielmo Marconi in the mid-1890's and his first sale was to the British War Office in 1896 during the Boer War. Three years later, he made sales to the US Navy. During World War I, the United States put all commercial, amateur, and military (except for the Army's) radio equipment under the control of the Navy, a monopoly pursued immediately after the war, as well. Marconi, by the way, was a staunch supporter of the Neo-Fascism which dominated Italy beginning in the 1920's and Benito Mussolini was the best man at Marconi's 1927 wedding. The first operational electronic computer, Colossus, was built as a part of the ULTRA project for the British Department of Communication in the Foreign Office to assist in the decoding of intercepted Nazi transmissions. The first electronic digital computer, ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) came out of a relationship between The Moore School of Electrical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania and the Ballistics Research Lab operated by the Army Ordinance Department at the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Aberdeen, Maryland. It was "designed expressly for the solution of ballistics problems and for the printing of range tables." The grandparent of the Internet is the ARPAnet, which came about in 1969. The Defense Agency Research Projects Administrations (DARPA) of the Department of Defense wished to create a communications infrastructure for the US military that could survive a nuclear attack. "Many of the best attributes of the Internet – including its architecture, technology, and gestalt – are the children of this military prototype," (Sussman, 1997, pp. 87, 89 and 90; Slater, 1987, pp. 16-17; Stern, 1981, pp. 1 and 15; Reid, 1997, p. xx).

2.) At the outset of World War I in Europe, President Woodrow Wilson (1913-1921) had to devise a way to convince the primarily pacifistic American public (still reeling from the effects of the Civil War) to want to send their boys thousands of miles away to fight a war that didn't involve them. President Wilson came up with the Committee of Public Information, also known as the Creel Commission. Made up of cartoonists, writers, editors, publishers and others whose profession was to convey information to the masses (including Edward Bernays, the father of the public relations industry, and Walter Lippmann, the dean of American journalists, a major foreign and domestic policy critic, and an important theorist of liberal democracy), they were, within a year, able to turn the American people into a fervent anti-German population. This exceedingly positive result caught the attention of two groups in particular. One was the intellectual community who saw these new propaganda techniques – and it was openly called propaganda at the time as there wasn't a negative connotation to that word until the Nazi's used many of the same techniques on their militaristic conquests thirty years later – as a general means by which they could control the population on a regular basis. The other were the business leaders, who saw a new window to increase their sales by turning the American people into a population of consumers. What was ultimately learned from all this was that in order to adequately persuade a population to do something, whether to go to war or buy a hamburger, one needed to appeal to them on levels of which they are unconscious (Chomsky, 1991, pp. 7-10 and 17-18; Chomsky & Barsamian, 2000, pp. 151-152; Boihem & Emmanouilides, 1996).

3.) Walter Lippmann "argued that what he called a 'revolution in the art of democracy,' could be used to 'manufacture consent,' that is, to bring about agreement on the part of the public for things that they didn't want by the new techniques of propaganda. He also thought that this was a good idea, in fact, necessary. It was necessary because, as he put it, 'the common interests elude public opinion entirely' and can only be understood and managed by a 'specialized class' of 'responsible men' who are smart enough to figure things out. This theory asserts that only a small elite…can understand the common interests, what all of us care about, and that these things 'elude the general public.' This is a view that goes back hundreds of years," (Chomsky, pp. 10-11).

4.) German television in the early 1930's had been conceived as primarily a tool of propaganda rather than a means of entertainment. "A limited number of cinemas were equipped with 180-line projector receivers so that Nazi Party propaganda could be disseminated easily, and cinema television was used throughout the war for troop entertainment," (Hugill, 1999, p. 197).

5.) Its been noted that "violence is to a dictatorship, what propaganda is to a democracy," and the Nazis used both. Joseph Goebbels, appointed Reich Minister for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda on March 14, 1933, combined the press, radio, film, theater, and propaganda into a single, large-scale organization and considered the media as "a piano…in the hands of the government" on which the government could play. Although monotony may set in if all means reported the same information, he developed a theory that the media should be "uniform in principles" but "polyform in nuances." This is a concept that has carried over to our media today. Although we have a tremendous amount of magazines and newspapers available to us, most of them are "highly centralized outlets that proffer a remarkably homogenized fare. News services for dailies throughout the entire nation are provided by the Associated Press…The New York Times and [the] Los Angeles Times-Washington Post wire services, and several foreign wire services like Reuters. The ideological viewpoint of these news conduits are pretty much the same, 'marked by a prefabricated standardization of news which is constricting and frightening,'" (Neale, Murphy, Mansky, Wintonick, & Achbar, 1992; Reuth, 1993, p. 174; Parenti, 1986, pp. 30-31).

6.) Fear is a powerful means for establishing social control over a population and the negative effects of media on its consumers are doing just that, for its been widely established for decades that regular viewers of violent films and/or television programming often look upon the world as being much more frightening, dangerous, and violent than those who view the same media in much less quantities or not at all. The same, by the way, is also true of regular viewers of the evening news. Furthermore, "psychiatrist Robert Coles writes that children in some parts of America are more frightened [about the world] than children in Lebanon or Northern Ireland;" this may very well have to do with the fact that some of the most violent programming on television are cartoons aimed at very young children. The potential consequences to this are staggering. A generation brought up to fear the world may be willing to do unhealthy things in order to protect themselves from things that aren't there, such as a readiness to sacrifice their basic civil liberties for a false sense of security (Jhally & Dinozzi, 1994; Pipher, 1994).

7.) Those who advocated the blacklisting practice in Hollywood did so on the grounds that "Communist and pro-Communist infiltration into the entertainment industries represented a serious peril to the American system of law and governance, and therefore to the freedoms which it enshrines." This clearly implies that both the government and Hollywood insiders considered the entertainment industry a powerful means of effectively communicating political thought (Cogley, 1956, p. viii).

8.) On October 24, 1947, Walt Disney testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee that films could be used successfully as a tool of propaganda and admitted his studios had already made several dealing with subjects such as the Treasury Department, the use of air power, and Hitler (Vaughn, 1972, p. 84).

9.) In the early 1950's, Radio Free Europe (RFE) and Radio Liberty (which eventually merged together) were organized by the CIA as nothing more than outlets of propaganda. Headed by General Rodney C. Smith of the US Army, its intent was to broadcast into the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe "to keep hope alive among our friends…to confuse, divide and undermine our enemies…" and, "…to encourage uprisings against their governments." Bing Crosby, Henry Fonda, Ronald Reagan, Rock Hudson, and Barbara Stanwyck all made propaganda films or radio broadcasts in support of RFE. This use of radio for propaganda purposes is happening today, as well (see 38). The November 8, 2001, Wall Street Journal mentioned that the Army's Fourth Psychological Operations (PSYOPS) Group (see 108) designed leaflets and radio broadcasts inside Afghanistan "to persuade enemy fighters to quit, and to convince civilians that U.S. bombs raining down on their country will result in a better future for their families" and an official of the US State Department told The New York Times that they wished to establish a radio station in either Iraq or Iran to "broadcast programs to many homes in Iraq. The content will be supporting democracy and freedom, identifying agents of the regime and mobilizing general support to get rid of Saddam," (Nelson, 1997, pp. 48-49, 52, and 144; Sussman, p. 169; Miller & Rampton, 2001; "Talk Radio", 2002).

10.) In the 1950's, ABC, CBS, and NBC offered Joseph McCarthy hours of free air time on television and the radio. Of course, he accepted (Bayley, 1981, p. 185).

11.) In his book The No Spin Zone, the right-wing host of FoxNews channel's The O'Reilly Factor wrote, "If you were a kid in the late 1950's, there's a good chance your thinking was shaped by two television programs, The Mickey Mouse Club and Howdy Doody. If you had asked me back then what I thought of these shows, I would have mocked them. Little wise guy that I was, I smirked at the sight of a bunch of kids wearing large rodent ears and grinning themselves into road maps of wrinkles. That, if you have to be told, was Mickey's gang, the Mouseketeers. As for the hokey puppet show, I was annoyed enough to talk back to the black-and-white TV. 'Hey, kids, what time is it?' some guy named Buffalo Bob yelled. A studio audience packed with kids screamed back, 'Howdy Doody time!' This gave me such a headache, I can't tell you. And my reply to Buffalo Bob's time line was, 'It's time for you to leave, buckskin man,' or words to that effect. The whole thing enthralled my sister but put me in a foul mood. I can still hear Sis singing, 'M-I-C – see you real soon – K-E-Y – why? Because we like you!' I was outraged! However, you will notice that more than forty years after first hearing these lines, I still remember them. That's the power of the tube," (O'Reilly, 2001, pp. 25-26).

12.) In the early 1980's, the US Army asked Atari to create a special version of the game Battle Zone as a training tool for drivers of the Bradley Fighting Vehicle. Since then, "talent and product have flowed between the two [the US military and video game manufacturers], creating a symbiotic relationship" in what has been coined the Military-Nintendo Complex. For example:

A. J.W. "Wild Bill" Stealy, the chairman of Interactive Magic, a North Carolina software company, is an Air Force Academy graduate and retired Air Force officer. His company produced Carrier Strike Fighter, a flight and combat simulator of the iF/A-18E, a fighter jet that had yet to be put into general operation.

B. MAK Technologies won a 1997 Department of Defense contract to make Marine Exed Unit 2000, an amphibious assault game intended for both military and commercial markets.

C. Every year, the US Government hosts the Connections Conference, which is intended to unite members of the Department of Defense and video game makers. "Attendees include personnel of the Defense Intelligence Agency and game companies like GT Interactive… Conference agendas have included such topics as 'Wargaming Design Fundamentals' and 'Department of Defense Wargaming 101' (Naisbitt, Naisbitt, & Philips, 1999, pp. 77-79).

13.) Its very difficult for a human being to kill a member of their own species; they have to be manipulated to do so. During World War II, its been estimated that, when left to their own devices, only 15-20% of individual riflemen would fire their weapon at an exposed enemy target. This was blamed primarily upon the training they received in which they would practice shooting at a bull's-eye. Of course, bull's-eyes don't appear on the battlefield and after the war, the military switched to human-shaped targets. By the Vietnam War, 95% of the riflemen fired their weapons when the right opportunity arose. Today, the Marine Corps use a modified version of the first-person action game Doom (known as Marine Doom) as a training device, along with the traditional live ammunition range targets as a means of normalizing killing amongst their personnel. In fact, this has been so successful, the Marine Corps Combat and Development Command in Quantico, VA have evaluated more than thirty commercially available electronic games for their potential use as training tools. This brings up a very disturbing question. If the US military has acknowledged for decades the success of using human-like targets to normalize killing, what, then, is the effect of the same or similar games on kids, where the objective is the near indiscriminate killing of "the enemy" using toy guns? With this in mind, the rise of school shootings should come as no surprise (Jhally & Huntemann, 2000; Naisbitt, et al., p. 76-77).

14.) "As the United States prepared in 1976 to celebrate the bicentennial of the Declaration of Independence, a group of intellectuals and political leaders from Japan, the United States, and Western Europe, organized into 'The Trilateral Commission', issued a report. It was entitled 'The Governability of Democracies.' Samuel Huntington, a political science professor at Harvard University and a long-time consultant to the White House on the war in Vietnam, wrote the part of the report that dealt with the United States. He called it 'The Democratic Distemper' and identified the problem he was about to discuss: 'The 1960's witnessed a democratic upsurge of democratic fervor in America.' In the sixties, Huntington wrote, there was a huge growth of citizen participation 'in the forms of marches, demonstrations, protest movements, and cause organizations.' There were also 'markedly higher levels of self-consciousness on the part of blacks, Indians, Chicanos, white ethnic groups, students and women, all of whom became mobilized and organized in new ways…' There was a 'marked expansion of white-collar unionism,' and all this added up to 'a reassertion of equality as a goal in social, economic and political life.' Huntington pointed to the signs of decreasing government authority: The great demands in the sixties for equality had transformed the federal budget. In 1960 foreign affairs spending was 53.7 percent of the budget, and social spending was 22.3 percent. By 1974 foreign affairs took 33 percent and social spending 31 percent. This seemed to reflect a change in public mood: In 1960 only 18 percent of the public said the government was spending too much on defense, but in 1969 this jumped to 52 percent. Huntington was troubled by what he saw:

'The essence of the democratic surge of the 1960's was a general challenge to existing systems of authority, public and private. In one form or another, this challenge manifested itself in the family, the university, business, public and private associations, politics, the governmental bureaucracy, and the military services. People no longer felt the same obligation to obey those whom they had previously considered superior to themselves in age, rank, status, expertise, character, or talents.'

All this, he said, 'produced problems for the governability of democracy in the 1970's…' Critical in all this was the decline in the authority of the President. And:

'To the extent that the United States was governed by anyone during the decades after World War II, it was governed by the President acting with the support and cooperation of key individuals and groups in the executive office, the federal bureaucracy, Congress, and the more important businesses, banks, law firms, foundations, and media, which constitute the private sector's Establishment.'

This was probably the frankest statement ever made by an Establishment advisor. Huntington further said that the President, to win the election, needed the support of a broad coalition of people. However: 'the day after his election, the size of his majority is almost – if not entirely – irrelevant to his ability to govern the country. What counts then is his ability to mobilize support from the leaders of key institutions in a society and government… This coalition must include key people in Congress, the executive branch, and the private-sector Establishment,'" (Zinn, 1999, pp. 558-560).

15.) At the forefront of White House thinking is the global command and direction of the world economy through information control. While World War II was still ongoing, "U.S. leadership recognized the centrality of information control for gaining world advantage. Well before most of the world could do much about it, U.S. groups, private and governmental, were actively promoting information and cultural primacy on all continents." US films and television programs are "the primary fare of national systems in most countries. News programs, especially CNN, offer U.S. perspectives, sometimes the only perspective provided, to world audiences. U.S. recorded music, theme parks, and advertising now conspire a major part of the world's cultural environment." News consultants, a major part of US news programs, have spread their particular brand of program structure to television stations all over the world, resulting in a more Americanized style (shorter news segments, a de-emphasis on government and politics, fewer talking heads, more visual material, "warm and fuzzy" stories, etc.) and more American content. "No less remarkable is the ad hoc adoption of English as the world's second language, facilitated by the waves of U.S. pop culture that have washed across all frontiers for forty years. And once the preeminence of English had been established, Anglo-American ideas, values, and cultural products generally have been received with familiarity and enthusiasm. All this is well known and amply documented, though the domestic media and political establishments are shy about acknowledging their de facto cultural domination of what they like to refer to as 'the global market.' What is of special interest here, however, is the skillful combination of information instrumentation with philosophic principle – a mix that fuels the push toward concentrated cultural power. Not the laws of chance but strategic planning, rarely identified as such, underlies this development. It has succeeded well beyond the initial expectations of its formulators," (Schiller, 1995, pp. 18-19; Allen, 2000, pp. 87 and 89-99).

16.) One of the many by-products of news consultancy on the news industry has been the decreased time spent by news programs on individual stories. This emphasis on concision is a very subtle, but very real form of censorship in that only accepted truths may be told. For example, if Dan Rather, Tom Brokaw, or Diane Sawyer say that Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden are bad guys, the viewing audience just silently agrees; no evidence to support such claims are needed. However, if something out of the ordinary is told, something that contradicts common understanding, then the audience very rightly wants to know more: "Why did you say that? I've never heard that before. How can you support such a statement?" Such evidence cannot be presented in the allotted 30 seconds given to the topic. So, when dissenters from the mainstream appear on such programs, they often appear as radicals, because they aren't given the time necessary to adequately establish their claims (Allen, p. 87; Neale, et al).

17.) "Ripped from the headlines!" Although millions of Americans watch the evening news, even more watch the entertainment programming that surrounds it; and those who do watch the news are only getting a sound bite or two as a substitute for any real knowledge or contextual understanding of the events described. However, programs dedicated to bringing fictionalized accounts of real events give considerably more. For those viewers, reality is tainted with a blurring of fact and fiction. Generally speaking, this is nothing new; Hollywood has been skimming stories from headlines for decades and television has certainly followed suit, from three different renditions of the Amy Fisher/Joey Buttofucco story (one on each major network), to four different versions of the teenage, Kentucky, blood-sucking, thrill-kill, vampire cult (ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox), though, never has a program been so flagrant as to incorporate this practice into its own hype as NBC's Law & Order (see 92), which currently has four variations on the theme in production simultaneously (all of which are created and executive produced by Dick Wolf): Law & Order (L&O), Law & Order: Special Victims Unit (SVU), Law & Order: Criminal Intent (CI), and Crime & Punishment (C&P). Essentially, what these programs do – with the exception of C&P – is to take real crime stories from the news, fictionalize them just enough to avoid lawsuits (several of the programs' writers are lawyers), and air them as entertainment (despite their efforts, Carolyn Condit – Gary Condit's wife – sued NBC and the producers of L&O for their depiction of "her" as she appeared in their fictionalized account of the Chandra Levy case). According to Rene Balcer, executive producer of CI, "People see the headline, see what the story is supposedly about, and there's already a built-in set of expectations from the audience that when we write the stories we can play off of and play against." If this is true, then could not the reverse also be true? Could not fictional programming create a series of expectations as to what the real case is/was about? What pushes the blur even further is the fourth series, C&P, which even uses the same theme music as L&O and airs immediately following CI. With this show, cameras follow the lives of city prosecutors – in and out of court – as they prepare for and try a case. After editing weeks of footage to fit the forty-five minute remainder – after commercials – of a sixty minute time-slot, what the viewer ultimately gets is a highly sanitized version of reality: the prosecutors never lose and rarely make mistakes, the defendant is always evil incarnate, etc. In what ways are these programs altering the American public's views of the world under the guise of pseudo-reality? I think this is a question worth asking (Boychuk, 1996; Levin, 2002).

18.) On average, individuals in industrialized nations spend three hours a day watching television – roughly half their leisure time; only to work and sleep is more time devoted. At this rate, someone who lives to be seventy-five would spend more than nine years of their life just watching TV. Why do we watch so much? In studies, subjects claimed that television was a means of relaxation, to which electroencephalograph (EEG) readings confirmed via brain waves, skin resistance and heart rates of subjects while watching television. However, even though relaxation is associated with TV by the viewers, research also has shown that passivity and a lowered level of alertness also correlate. Furthermore, once the television is turned off, the sense of relaxation dissipates rather quickly, but the passivity and lowered alertness remain for a considerable time. "Within moments of sitting or lying down and pushing the 'power' button, viewers report feeling more relaxed. Because the relaxation occurs quickly, people are conditioned to associate viewing with rest and lack of tension. The association is positively reinforced because viewers remain relaxed throughout viewing, and it is negatively reinforced via the stress and dysphoric rumination that occurs once the screen goes blank again. Habit forming drugs work in similar ways. A tranquilizer that leaves the body rapidly is much more likely to cause dependence than one that leaves the body slowly, precisely because the user is more aware the drug's effects are wearing off." Like a drug, heavy television use has long-term negative effects. Generally, heavy viewers are more easily bored, more easily distracted, have poorer attentional control, are less likely to participate in community activities or sports, and are more likely to be obese; they're more anxious and less happy than light viewers in unstructured situations, such as doing nothing, day-dreaming, or waiting in line. "The difference widens even more when the viewer is alone." Part of the human attraction to television has to do with our biological orienting response. "First described by Ivan Pavlov in 1927, the orienting response is our instinctive visual or auditory reaction to any sudden or novel stimulus. It is part of our evolutionary heritage, a built-in sensitivity to movement and potential predatory threats. Typical orienting reactions include dilation of the blood vessels to the brain, slowing of the heart, and constriction of blood vessels to major muscle groups. The brain focuses its attention on gathering more information while the rest of the body quiets…. In 1986 Byron Reeves of Stanford University, Esther Thorson of the University of Missouri and their colleagues began to study whether the simple formal features of television – cuts, edits, zooms, pans, sudden noises – activate the orienting response, thereby keeping attention on the screen. By watching how brain waves were affected by formal features, the researchers concluded that these stylistic tricks can indeed trigger involuntary responses and 'derive their attentional value through the evolutionary significance of detecting movement…. It is form, not the content, of television that is unique'…. Annie Lang's research team at Indiana University has shown that heart rate decreases for four to six seconds after an orienting stimulus. In ads, action sequences and music videos, formal features frequently come at a rate of one per second, thus activating the orienting response continuously." Perhaps its time we heeded the wisdom of Umberto Eco who once wrote, "A democratic civilization will save itself only if it makes the language of the image into a stimulus for critical reflection – not an invitation for hypnosis," (Kubey & Csikszentmihalyi, 2002; Boihem & Emmanouilides).

19.) A standard argument made by media executives is that broadcast television is offered without charge to the viewer. "However, to assume therefore that TV is free also assumes that the viewers' time is not valuable, because viewers pay for TV with their time. For every forty-five minutes of programme, we have to tolerate [approximately] fifteen minutes of commercials. [Media scholar Sut] Jhally…even goes so far as to argue that a TV viewer is a type of 'labourer' in the political economy of television. Viewers 'work' by watching commercials in exchange for a 'salary' consisting of entertainment and information programming." With such deregulation established in the mid-1980's allowing for greater advertising content per hour (one result of which was the creation of the infomercial), this metaphor of viewer as laborer implies that television is demanding increased productivity with an accompanying cut in pay (McAllister, 2000, pp. 112-113).

20.) Antonio Mendez, a retired member of the CIA's Office of Technical Services (OTS), wrote an article in the Winter 1999/2000 issue of the CIA journal Studies in Intelligence, where he documents his involvement in the rescuing of six Americans trapped in Iran during the 1979-1981 hostage crisis. Apparently, he and other operatives posed as a Canadian film crew scouting locations near Tehran. Although posing as Canadians, the establishment of their false identities was done with the complete cooperation of Hollywood, including the use of Columbia Studios for their "production offices" and, as part of their disguise team, an award-winning makeup artist given the pseudonym of "Jerome Calloway", who was recently awarded the CIA's Intelligence Medal of Merit. The question arises, then, as to how unusual this cooperation was. In his twenty page article, not once is there a mention of the uniqueness of either the situation nor the Hollywood/government cooperation and, in fact, he even mentions that his relationship with "Jerome" at the time was already ten years in the making. It's not surprising, then, that the president and CEO of the Motion Picture Association of America since 1966, Jack Valenti (see 22, 26, and 77), is a former White House insider. In fact, a man like him in such a position of power may have been necessary to guarantee the cooperation governmental agencies required – and still require—from Hollywood. Upon a search of the webpage for the Hollywood trade paper Variety, the name Tony Mendez came up as a technical advisor for the CBS drama about the CIA, The Agency (see 24). Originally supposed to air on September 14, 2001, it was delayed for ten days because of references to Osama bin Laden and a different episode was chosen to kick off the series. However, that episode had to be replaced, as it dealt with an Anthrax attack on Washington D.C. Instead, one concerning an assassination attempt against Fidel Castro was aired in its place (Mendez, 1999-2000; "Tony Mendez", 2003; "Project: The Agency", 2002).

21.) Upon the release of Top Gun (1986), the United States Navy set up recruiting booths in theaters where the film was being shown to capitalize on the pro-military fervor the film encapsulated. It's been speculated by some that the film "single-handedly wipe[d] out the post-Vietnam image of the military," (Campbell, 2001, August 29; Rooney, 2002).

22.) In August of 1999, the US Army signed a five-year, $45 million deal with the University of Southern California, chosen because of its close proximity to Hollywood, to have the school's movie, special-effects and other technology experts help with troop training, including battle scenarios, virtual-reality combat, and large-scale simulations creating settings similar to Operation Desert Storm. This partnership is known as the Institute for Creative Technologies (see ). "The digital world, the world of virtual reality…is going to be part of the embrace of this great, new cooperative venture," said Jack Valenti (see 20, 26, and 77). However, according to James Der Derian, professor of international relations at Brown University, "What we're witnessing here today is perhaps not only the announcement of a new sort of technological center, but the creation of a military-industrial-media-entertainment complex," ("U.S. Army", 1999 [italics mine]).

23.) Col. Kenneth "Crash" Konwin, head of the Defense Modeling and Simulation Office, and Larry Tuch, a writer and designer with Paramount Digital Entertainment "detailed…how their organizations have adapted Hollywood multimedia technology and blockbuster movie storytelling skills to create realistic simulations that teach military officers how to make better decisions during international crises." This is a completely separate collaboration from the Institute for Creative Technologies (Brewin, 1999).

24.) In October of 1999, the CIA held a lavish gala film premier for In the Company of Spies, the first spy thriller ever to bear the CIA's stamp of approval. Starring Tom Berringer and Ron Silver, directed by Tim Matheson (Otter from Animal House), written by Roger Towne who wrote the screenplay for The Natural, and produced by David Madden and Robert W. Cort (who is, himself, a former CIA official), it was made directly for Showtime, a subsidiary of AOL Time Warner, the world's largest media corporation. "Never before has the CIA so fully embraced a movie – it even allowed [the] director…to shoot inside the agency's sprawling Langley headquarters and provided 60 off-duty employees to serve as extras." Bill Harlow, the CIA's director of public affairs, said "senior CIA officials realized several years back that assisting sympathetic filmmakers and authors was one way the agency could be more open and accountable to the tax-paying public without divulging operational secrets. They even persuaded Chase Brandon, a veteran paramilitary officer who has jumped out of airplanes for the CIA all over the world, to take a job in the public affairs office as the agency's liaison to Hollywood in 1996." This has proven most effective, "with scriptwriters even rewriting history to present an upbeat portrait of the agency." In 2001, three new television series (The Agency [see 20], Alias, and 24) and seven films (including Bad Company, The Bourne Identity, and The Sum of All Fears) were made with the CIA's approval (Loeb, 1999; Campbell, 2001, September 6; Patterson, 2001).

25.) Hollywood film-makers and the Pentagon have a long history of cooperation. The Pentagon sees the film industry as an important part of public relations; according to a recently released memo, "military depictions have become more of a 'commercial' for us,'" which explains the Air Force's eagerness to be a part of the short-lived 2002 CBS reality series, American Fighter Pilots, which followed three men as they trained to fly F-15s, and was executive produced by Tony Scott (director of Top Gun) and his brother Ridley Scott (director of Black Hawk Down). Due to the enormous expense of military equipment, it makes financial sense for a film-maker to get military cooperation. However, this often entails the altering of scripts to fit the needs and desires of the Pentagon (i.e. military and government personnel are to be depicted in more positive and heroic ways, American ideologies are re-enforced and not criticized, etc.). For example:

A. In Goldeneye (1995), "the original script had a US Navy admiral betraying state secrets, but this was changed to make the traitor a member of the French navy."

B. The Jackal (1997) "received help after the marines were given a better role. Major Nancy LaLuntas had objected that the helicopter pilots had no 'integral part in the action – they are effectively taxi drivers.' A letter from the film's director, Michael Caton-Jones, stated: 'I am certain that we can address the points that you raised…and effect the appropriate changes in the screenplay that you requested.'"

C. Cooperation had been given to the production of Top Gun after the character portrayed by Kelly McGillis had been changed from an enlisted person to someone outside the military, as relationships between officers and enlisted personnel are against the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

D. Although Hearts in Atlantis (2001) had no military in the plot, the film-makers wished to use land belonging to the Army. "The Pentagon agreed and suggested that the film could include a shot of an Army recruiting booth in a carnival scene."

E. Despite having made changes to characters in Independence Day (1996), the Department of Defense refused help because, "the military appears impotent and/or inept; all advances in stopping aliens are the result of actions by civilians."

F. Other films to have received assistance from the Pentagon are: Air Force One (1997), A Few Good Men (1992), Armageddon (1998), The Hunt for Red October (1990), Pearl Harbor (2001), Patriot Games (1992), Windtalkers (2002), Hamburger Hill (1987), The American President (1995), Behind Enemy Lines (2001), Apollo 13 (1995), Tomorrow Never Dies (1997), and A Time to Kill (1996).

G. Some films that were denied: Apocalypse Now (1979), Catch-22 (1970), Dr. Strangelove (1964), Full Metal Jacket (1987), The Last Detail (1973), Lone Star (1996), Mars Attacks! (1996), Platoon (1986), and The Thin Red Line (1998) (Campbell, 2001, August 29; Weiss, 2002).

26.) In November, 2001, President George W. Bush's top political strategist, Karl Rove, met with many entertainment executives to discuss the war on terrorism and ways that Hollywood stars and filmmakers might work together with the administration's communications strategy. It was spearheaded by Rove and Jack Valenti (see 20, 22, and 77), and organized by Sherry Lansing of Paramount Pictures. Among those represented at the meeting were CBS, Viacom, Showtime, Dreamworks, HBO, and MGM. According to the CNN article on which this section is based, "Valenti is a periodic visitor to the White House for briefings on major issues and initiatives. He was described as eager to help arrange [the] meeting," (King, 2001).

27.) To assist in the preparedness of possible future terrorist attacks, the Pentagon "put out a mayday call to filmmakers skilled at imagining potential terrorist acts," including writers Steven E. DeSouza (Die Hard) and David Engelbach (TV's MacGyver), and directors Joseph Zito (Invasion U.S.A.), David Fincher (Fight Club), Spike Jonze (Being John Malkovich), Mary Lambert (The In Crowd), and Randal Kleiser (Grease). They were asked "to engage in apocalyptic brainstorming of the kind that has yielded acts of cinematic terrorism." The group, a part of the Institute for Creative Technologies, was assembled by Army Brigadier General Kenneth Bergquist (Roberts, 2002; Grossberg, 2001).

28.) On February 19, 2002, The New York Times reported that the Pentagon's Office of Strategic Influence (OSI) was "developing plans to provide news items, possibly even false ones, to foreign media organizations in an effort to influence public sentiment and policy makers in both friendly and unfriendly countries." The OSI was created just after 9/11 "to publicize the U.S. government's perspective in Islamic countries and to generate support for the U.S.'s 'war on terror.' This latest announcement raises grave concerns that far from being an honest effort to explain U.S. policy, the OSI may be a profoundly undemocratic program devoted to spreading disinformation and misleading the public, both at home and abroad….The government is barred by law from propagandizing within the U.S., but the OSI's new plan will likely lead to disinformation planted in a foreign news reports being picked up by U.S. news outlets," ("Media Advisory", 2002).

29.) Usamah bin Mohammad bin Laden, known to the world as Osama bin Laden, has degrees in management and economics from King Abdul Aziz University in Jedda, Saudi Arabia. With such an education, its not surprising that he has a firm understanding of the purposes of the mass media, for he has been quoted as saying, "The media sector…strives to beautify the persons of the leaders, to drowse the community and to fulfill the plans of the[ir] enemies through keeping the people occupied with the minor matters, and to stir their emotions and desires until corruption becomes widespread." I don't think I could have said it any better, myself ("The New Powder Keg", 1996).

30.) In early 2003, ABC aired a short-lived reality series entitled Profiles from the Front Line. Executive produced by Jerry Bruckheimer (Black Hawk Down) and Bertram van Munster (The Amazing Race), it followed various members of the armed forces as they took part in the invasion of Afghanistan during the summer of 2002. It was made with the complete cooperation with the Pentagon who insisted upon screening the series before it was aired, though Bruckheimer insists no changes were made. "Vince Ogilvie, who was the Pentagon's project officer for the series, said the interactions of the film crews and military personnel provided 'a prelude to the process of embedding' media representatives in military units for war coverage." As of February, 2003, Bruckheimer and van Munster already had two crews assigned to accompany troops into Iraq (Gillies, 2003; Young, 2003).

31.) On a recent trip to Havana, actors Danny Glover and Harry Belafonte criticized the Hollywood corporate machine and claimed the war movies and violent films that are now so prevalent are "molded by the interests of the Pentagon and the White House." This is not the first time Glover has been critical of the Bush administration or its actions. In October of 2001, he compared Secretary of State Colin Powell to a "house slave," (Burns, 2002).

Part II: Corporate Media and Content Control

Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.

—A. J. Liebling

32.) In 1953, the infamous Republican Senator from Wisconsin, Joseph McCarthy, was harassing the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) "over the assignment of television licenses in Wisconsin, trying to switch channel 10 in Milwaukee from educational use to commercial so that it could be assigned to the Hearst Corporation, publishers of the Milwaukee Sentinel, the largest paper supporting him in Wisconsin and trying to prevent the assignment of a UHF channel in Milwaukee to Bartell Broadcasters, a Madison group that included persons active as Democrats," (Bayley, p 178).

33.) The FCC was created to regulate interstate communications that run over radio, television, wire, satellite, or cable. Its authority is based on the idea that its decisions will serve the "public interest, convenience, or necessity…. The public owns the airwaves that radio and TV stations use and profit from. Media companies are allowed to use them on the condition that they serve the public; its part of the FCC's job to enforce that." However, their record for doing so is hardly impressive. Its current chairman, Michael K. Powell, a free-market zealot ("my religion is the market") – who happens to be the son of Secretary of State Colin Powell—isn't even trying to maintain the illusion he's upholding the standards he's supposed to. Upon his appointment as FCC chair, he was asked what the public interest was; Powell replied, "I have no idea," (see 36). It should be of no surprise, then, that the National Association of Broadcasters referred to him as "an outstanding choice" when he was nominated by George W. Bush. Michael Powell (Republican), Kathleen Q. Abernathy (Republican), Michael J. Copps (Democrat), Kevin J. Martin (Republican), and Jonathan S. Adelstein (Democrat) are the five members on the FCC commission and are "unknown to the general public and have virtually no contact with them. They are surrounded instead by corporate CEOs, lawyers and lobbyists. As one FCC Chairman put it, 'the job of the FCC is to regulate fights between the super wealthy and the super, super wealthy. The public has nothing to do with it.'" Members of the FCC tend to move on to extremely lucrative careers working for the very firms they once regulated. "When a firm comes before the FCC, FCC members don't know whether to regard it as an entity to be regulated or as a prospective future employer. This applies across the board, to Republicans and Democrats alike. The FCC Chair who preceded Michael Powell, Democrat William Kennard, has gone on to making big bucks working on telecommunication deals for the Carlyle Group," ("Speak Out", n.d. [italics mine]; "FCC Homepage", 2003; McChesney, 2003).

34.) In 1996, Congress passed the Telecommunications Reform Act, which amended the Communications Act of 1934 and drastically reduced the restrictions placed upon media owners as to just how much they could own. "The 1996 Telecom Act was a corrupt piece of work, being the product of the largest corporate lobbies" like the National Association of Broadcasters and corporations like News Corporation and Viacom, "all salivating at the prospect of rewriting the law to provide them a larger slice of the action." The public played no role and it received virtually no news media coverage, except in the business and trade papers where it was covered as an issue of importance to owners and investors, not citizens in a democracy (McChesney, 2003).

35.) "The FCC conducted biennial reviews of the ownership rules in 1998 and 2000, and determined the rules should remain in place. At this point the biennial review was regarded as a benign and unreviewable process. The industry lobby went through the court system to get the rules thrown out. In 2002 a right wing federal appeals court demanded that the FCC provide a justification for keeping the ownership rules, or else they would have to be thrown out. Be clear that it was the appeals court, acting as the advocate of corporations that put the new aggressive pro-industry spin on the Telecommunications Act of 1996. The appeals court interpreted the law to mean that unless the FCC could provide compelling, even overwhelming evidence to justify keeping media ownership rules, they should be scrapped." Michael Powell is supposed to go before the courts and make the case on behalf of keeping media ownership rules in the public interest; Powell is famous for his pro-industry "rah-rah sentiments" and his hostility to regulation in the public interest. Furthermore, "the research that the FCC has developed to justify relaxing the media rules has been kept top secret; members of Congress and leading media scholars have asked to see it and been turned down," (McChesney, 2003).

36.) FCC commissioner Michael Copps has "pressed FCC chairman Powell to hold public hearings around the nation on the matter. Powell attended a portion of the first unofficial hearing in New York in January and convened one official public hearing in Richmond in February. But otherwise he has refused to attend any of the ten public hearings that have been held subsequently all across the nation. None of the three Republicans has attended any of these ten hearings. Copps, on the other hand, has attended all of them, and [John] Adelstein some of them…. Powell has explained his absence from the ten media ownership hearings on the grounds the he is too busy to attend them and that he knows enough about what the public thinks [see 33]. At the same time, Powell finds time to address the corporate media trade association meetings and he has an open door policy for corporate media CEOs like Rupert Murdoch." Most likely, Powell hasn't attended the hearings because their outcome is irrelevant. Even though, as of May 8, 2003, 9,065 statements on media ownership were submitted to the FCC by citizens unaffiliated with a self-interested corporation or trade organization and only eleven of them supported the proposed changes, "Commerce Secretary Donald Evans wrote to Powell telling him to move full speed ahead with the rules changes regardless of Congressional or public opposition." "Most people in this country have no idea what's about to happen to them," says dissenting FCC commissioner Jonathan Adelstein, "even though their very democracy is at stake." One of the impending rule changes would allow a single company to own TV stations reaching 45% of the nationwide audience (instead of the current on-paper limit of 35%). But that understates the impact, as Andrew Schwartzman of the Media Access Project pointed out: "The 45% number that has been floated is a fake number. It will realistically be much higher." Another FCC change would end the ban on a single firm's cross-ownership of daily newspapers and TV stations in four-fifths of the country's media markets. Commissioners Copps and Adelstein requested that Powell publicly air the proposed media concentration rules and allow a brief postponement to allow public reaction, but Powell refused. In response, Copps said, "This is really disappointing. The Chairman's decision not to make these proposals public, nor even to grant a short delay in voting, runs roughshod over the requests of the American people and the precedents of this Commission. This rush to judgment means that we will not fully understand the impact of the specific proposals on our media landscape before we are forced to vote. We are rushing to passage of new rules without letting the American people know who is going to own and control the public airwaves for years to come and without gaining the benefit of their input on what is being proposed. This is no way to do business when critical issues affecting every American are at stake. I am disappointed that the Chairman refuses to heed the calls of colleagues, as well as many Members of Congress, to let the sun shine on his proposals before the Commission decides on further media concentration." (McChesney, 2003[italics mine]; Solomon, 2003; "FCC Commissioner", 2003).

37.) Before he retired, AOL Time Warner CEO Gerald Levin told MSNBC that his company's Internet division had already helped terror investigators, "apparently providing access to e-mail traffic." According to Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, "there's an implicit quid pro quo here…the industry seems to be saying to the administration, 'we're patriotic, we're supporting the war…now free us from constraints.'" Although that may or may not be true, on June 2, 2003, the FCC voted 3-2 to relax the rules on media ownership (Roberts; Kirkpatrick, 2003).

38.) Whereas the FCC was developed to oversee the commercial sector of media, the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), with an annual budget of $544.5 million, was developed to oversee all civilian, non-military international broadcasting funded by the US government. This includes such outlets as Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) (a creation of the CIA [see 9]), Radio Free Asia (RFA), Voice of America (VOA), and the Office of Cuba Broadcasting (OCB). Their mission statement spells out their purpose very clearly: "to promote and sustain freedom and democracy by broadcasting accurate and objective news and information about the United States and the world to audiences overseas," with an ultimate goal of creating a "Worldwide US International Broadcasting System." Some of their current projects include: Voice of America, with programming in 53 languages to more than 90 million listeners and television and Internet viewers around the world, "broadcasts daily editorials reflecting the views of the U.S. government", with a recent creation of programs for North Koreans, "including North Korean Periscope and North Korean Defectors' Odyssey to provide a forum for defectors"; Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty "continued its emphasis on regions in the front line of the U.S.-led war on terrorism. The result: more than half the languages broadcast by RFE/RL are aimed at areas where the majority populations are Muslim"; the Office of Cuba Broadcasting, which oversees Radio and TV Marti, "emphasize[s] U.S.-Cuba relations, the state of the Cuban economy, international human rights, [and] dissident movement on the island…" Clearly, this is all designed for the purposes of propaganda, despite the fact that the terms "balanced" and "objective(ly)" are used many times throughout their 32 page 2002 Annual Report. Among the board of directors for the BBG are Kenneth Y. Tomlinson, a former managing editor of Reader's Digest who was appointed director of VOA by Ronald Reagan in 1982; Joaquin F. Blaya, a former CEO of the Telemundo Group, Inc., the nation's second largest Spanish-language television network; D. Jeffrey Hirschberg, a former special attorney of the US Justice department and deputy chief of the criminal division's special litigation section; Norman J. Pattiz, founder and Chairman of Westwood One, America's largest radio network (owner, manager or distributor of the NBC Radio Network, CBS Radio Network, the Mutual Broadcasting System, CNN Radio, and Metro Networks, among others); Steven J. Simmons, Chairman and CEO of Patriot Media and Communications, LCC, a new company formed to purchase cable companies in the US; and as an ex-officio member of the Board, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell. With this, then, Colin Powell and his son, Michael, have a controlling influence in a tremendous section of the media available throughout the world ("Strategic Plan", n.d.; "2002 Annual Report"; 2003).

39.) Conservative pundit Bill O'Reilly, in an interview with CBS News anchor Dan Rather, stated that news on the corporate owned networks refused to challenge "people of power" (presumably of the government or corporate world) because "the corporations have to do business with the powerful and they don't want to make enemies" to which Dan Rather responded, "You're absolutely accurate about that," (O'Reilly, pp. 153-154).

40.) After World War II, Allied forces restricted media concentration in occupied Germany and Japan "because they noted that such concentration promoted anti-democratic, even fascist, political cultures." In the 1950's, the majority of the American mass media (i.e. television stations, radio stations, film studios, magazine publishers, newspaper publishers, book publishers, advertising agencies, etc.) were owned by more than 1,500 corporations. By 1981, they were owned by less then fifty. Today, that number is six; they are: AOL Time Warner, The Walt Disney Company, Bertelsmann, Viacom, News Corporation, and Vivendi Universal – with Sony, Liberty Media Corporation, and General Electric close behind (for a thorough listing of media owners and what they own, see The Columbia Journalism Review at ). In our current electoral process, "reaching audiences has become the substitute for what used to be called garnering constituencies. Just as advertisers sell products to audiences, political consultants market candidates to those same audiences. In contemporary media-driven elections, programme, advertising, and film audiences become targeted markets of voters. In the larger sense, citizens are transmuted into consumers, connecting with a media product instead of a political platform." According to The Alliance for Better Campaigns, a non-profit co-chaired by Walter Cronkite, television broadcasters earned around $771 million from political ads in 2000 (McChesney, 2000, p. 61; Nichols & McChesney, 2000, p. 28; Bagdikian, 2000, pp. 21-22; Andersen, 2000, p. 251; Taylor, 2002).

41.) William J. Casey was Reagan's CIA director and considered by many to be the second most powerful person in the Reagan administration; he was also one of Capital Cities' "founders, long-time counsel, board member[s] and largest stock holders." He had put pressure on ABC and all of the major US news organizations to be more supportive of the Reagan administration's conservative agenda. "In November 1984, he asked the FCC to revoke all of ABC's TV and radio licenses in retaliation for the network's airing of an ABC News report suggesting that the CIA had attempted to assassinate a U.S. citizen." Four months later, Capital Cities bought ABC for $19.2 billion, while Casey owned 34,000 shares of Capital Cities stock worth about $7 million (Mazzocco, 1994, pp. 2-3; Sussman, p. 189).

42.) Proctor & Gamble is one of television's largest advertisers, which gives them a great deal of power. If they don't like the content of a program, they can—and will—pull their sponsorship, potentially costing the offending network millions of dollars. They had a policy for many years that stated, in part, "There will be no material that may give offense either directly or by inference to any commercial organization of any sort. There will be no material on any of our programs which could in any way further the concept of business as cold, ruthless and lacking in all sentimental or spiritual motivations… Members of the armed forces must not be cast as villains. If there is any attack on American customs, it must be rebutted completely on the same show." In 1990, Neighbor to Neighbor, a peace organization, got actor Ed Asner (of The Mary Tyler Moore Show [1970-1977] and Lou Grant [1977-1982] fame) to do a public service spot calling for a boycott of Folgers Coffee for buying its coffee beans from El Salvador, which was ruled by a brutal military regime at the time. Proctor & Gamble, owners of Folgers, threatened to pull its sponsorship from any station airing it. Boston television station WHDH ran the ad and lost about $1 million in advertising revenues (Parenti, 1992, pp. 186-189).

43.) News Corporation, the fifth largest media corporation in the world (owner of 20th Century Fox, Fox Television Broadcasting Corp. [including all subsequent Fox channels such as Fox Sports Channel, Fox Movie Channel, etc., as well as F/X and The National Geographic Channel]; magazines such as The Weekly Standard, Inside Out and TV Guide; newspapers such as The New York Post in the U.S., 22 papers in Australia and nine in England, including The Times, The Sunday Times, and The Sun; furthermore, it owns the publishing houses HarperCollins and Regan Books) is owned by Rupert Murdoch, who has used his media power to nuzzle up to some of the most influential leaders of recent history, including Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, Margaret Thatcher, and Tony Blair. Or, rather, they have nuzzled up to him. In the case of Tony Blair, in exchange for the support and endorsement of Blair in Murdoch's publications during his campaign, once elected, Blair was able to change British policy on media ownership to Murdoch's favor. In fact, Murdoch, himself, has been quoted as saying, "When you are the monopoly supplier, you are inclined to dictate," (Williams, 2000; "News", 2003; Jhally, 1997).

44.) Upon the invasion of Kuwait by Iraq on August 2, 1991, the Kuwaiti government hired at least twenty law and lobby firms to help shape the opinion of the little known country in the eyes of the American people. Hill & Knowlton (H&K), at the time the largest PR firm in the world, organized most of Kuwait's publicity, including the official Citizens for a Free Kuwait, which sponsored "Kuwaiti Liberation Day" on college campuses across the nation – passing out tens of thousands of T-shirts and bumper stickers – and costing the Kuwaiti government more than eleven million dollars, of which $10.8 million was billed to H&K as "service fees". H&K was soundly connected to both Washington and the news industry. The senior vice-president, Thomas Ross, was a Pentagon spokesman during the Carter administration; vice-chairman Frank Mankiewicz was a former press secretary and advisor to both Robert F. Kennedy and George McGovern and had served as president of National Public Radio; Robert Gray, the chairman of H&K's US offices had leading roles in both of Reagan's presidential campaigns and was rumored to have been on the payroll of the CIA; Lauri J. Fitz-Pegado, who was the supervisor of the Kuwait account, was a former Foreign Service Officer at the US Information Agency and a former associate of the Democratic lobbyist Ron Brown as he represented Haiti's Duvalier dictatorship; Lew Allison, producer of H&K's video news releases – which were distributed to news channels and often broadcast unedited as "news" – was a former producer of both CBS and NBC news. The president of H&K was a man by the name of Craig Fuller, who had been Reagan's Chief of Staff and a longtime friend of George Bush, Sr. After Reagan's second term, Fuller left the White House for his position at H&K, which was immediately hired by the Bush, Sr. presidential campaign team to handle his PR during the 1988 elections. After his stint at H&K, Craig Fuller went on to become Phillip Morris' top public relations executive. This governmental use of public relations firms is not uncommon in the least, either before or after Desert Storm. The Rendon Group's (see 98) past clients "include the CIA, USAID [United States Agency for International Development], the government of Kuwait,