The CPB board is a cell of spooks and political insiders: Katherine Milner Anderson of Alexandria, VA is chair. From 1983 to 1984, Ms. Anderson was associate director of President Clinton’s cabinet office. Winter Horton hails from the communications staff of Republican Senator Robert F. Bennett of Utah, formerly director of Mullen and Co. -- the notorious CIA proprietary, housed in the same building as the CIA's domestic operations division, that employed E. Howard Hunt in his glory days. [http://www.metroactive.com/papers/sonoma/07.03.97/scoop-9727.html] Board member Christy Carpenter is former vice-president of the Hill & Knowlton public relations firm, a cover for CIA and military covert operations, a branch office of Oliver North’s illicit arms brokerage at the NSC. Kenneth Tomlinson served two years as director of VOA under President Reagan. Ernest J. Wilson III and Heidi Schulman come from the the U.S. Information Agency, the CIA/State Department disinformation front, home of “public diplomacy” (propaganda). Frank Cruz is the founder of Gulf-Atlantic Life Insurance Co. [http://www.cpb.org/about/corp/bios/board/]
The Congressional Pike Report on the CIA, leaked to the Village Voice and published in February, 1976, notes that if the sum of all media and propaganda projects could be determined, these would constitute “the largest single category of covert action projects undertaken by the CIA." The said actions included "support of friendly media.” The information flow “has been threatened [and] there are disturbing indications that the accuracy of many news stories has been undermined as well.” [CIA: The Pike Report, Spokesman Books, 1977] The relationship hasn’t changed over the years, and PBS is very “friendly media.”
The alliance recruited Charlie Rose to “public” television, a CBS newscaster for many years and before that an executive producer for Bill Moyers.
Some media activists on the left sneer at the “public” facade of PBS. Under Coonrod, Minneapolis media critic Rob Levine observes, the network “has eased its financial burden by watering down content to attract corporate underwriting.” As a result, “public television is rarely worth watching anymore” [Levine, “Money Public Radio,”
[http://www.citypages.com/databank/23/1107/article10161.asp?page=4]
Much of the network’s backing comes from corporate foundations. Activist James Petras: “the CIA uses philanthropic foundations as the most effective conduit to channel large sums of money.” Since its creation, “the CIA's intrusion into the foundation field was and is huge.” [James Petras, “The Ford Foundation and the CIA,” December 15, 2001. http://www.rebelion.org/petras/english/ford010102.htm]
The same goes for the “public” airwaves. CEO Kevin Klose holds court over at National Public Radio; before joining the network, he was broadcast director of the U.S. Information Agency, the aforementioned international propaganda mill that dominated VOA and Radio Marti. The About.Com web site reports that the “public” radio czar has planted CIA trainees in psychological operations at NPR during his tenure there - demonstrating a dangerously close connection between U.S. disinformation campaigns overseas and the domestic 'public' radio network. “ [http://pirateradio.about.com/library/hos/blhoskklose.htm]
The influence of the CIA and the foundations on the “alternative” media is as pervasive as it is erosive. “Welcome to a political culture defined by the MacArthur Foundation, the Rockefeller Family Fund, the Pew Charitable Trusts, the Ford Foundation, the Carnegie Endowment,” Alexander Cockburn wrote in a 1997 Nation column. “ What's impressed me most about ideological supervision in America on the liberal end of the spectrum is how well engineered the control systems are. ” Left-wing organizations controlled, tainted or polluted by the lure of big money include:
The Pacifica Network - This insular pillar of the left was founded on the inviolate principle of listener sponsorship. But today, the Pacifica administration holds some $270,000 in corporate stock. The network was subsidized by the Ford Foundation in the late 1990s. Carnegie Corporation and the Public Welfare Foundation also threw in generously to Pacifica, and the administration as been indebted to CPB, which subsidizes 20 percent of the budget of Pacifica's station in the District of Columbia, since the early 1970s. The Pacifica Foundation executive director at the height of the attempted coup was Lynn Chadwick, hailing from a number of CPB committees. Chadwick is also closely allied of former VOA deputy director Robert Coonrod, and received the CPB Edward Murrow Award in 1995. In 1997, Chadwick was an organizor of CPB's 30th anniversary bash.
The turmult they wrought peaked with the Listener Revolt of 1999. Pacifica, the most prominent progressive radio network in the country, is emerging from its struggle with the CIA-corporate axis licking its wounds. And Pacifica remains heavily infiltrated.
Peter Franck, Pacifica Foundation president from 1980-84, observed at a recent panel discussion that a “flying wedge from Washington” has exploited “a structural weakness that's always existed in Pacifica.” The network, says Franck, is perceived by Washington power brokers as “a dangerous institution and there is a strong impetus from Washington to mute it. It's no accident that one of the first targets of bombing in Belgrade was the television station. Media and information are very important, are very powerful and very subversive, especially when you're trying to create a consensus, and you have a major national network that can reach 25 percent of the U.S. population.” [http://www.zmag.org/CrisesCurEvts/Pacifica/franckint.htm]
There is a vast divide between listener-sponsored and government-run radio, says Bob Feldman, a New York writer active in the Free Pacifica movement. “Around 1986, the Pacifica administration began accepting CPB sponsorship of its radio network, while Pacifica stations, including KPFK in Los Angeles, continued to promote themselves as a listener-sponsored media alternative to government-sponsored NPR and PBS stations.” [Bob Feldman, “Listener-Sponsored Radio versus Corporation for Public Broadcasting-Sponsored Radio,” July 22, 1999, in e-mail to A. Constantine]
"It's crossing a very important line when those who run Pacifica are satanized," complained corporate loyalist Marc Cooper on the air. (http://www.savepacifica.net/990816_eyewitness.html)
Along with CPB grants came infiltration, lock-outs, lawyers, union busting, censorship and livid listener protest. On one side stood the banned and the fired, on the other Coonrod and his painted ladies of the left inside Pacifia, most prominent among thempolitical oomentators Marc Cooper and David Corn of The Nation.
The Nation - "If history teaches anything,” to pluck a leave from Ronald Reagan’s tree of wisdom, “it teaches self-delusion in the face of unpleasant facts is folly." At The Nation, self-delusion in the face of unpleasant facts is the routine. This bastion of “liberal” thought flamed Oliver Stone for proposing in JFK that Lee Harvey Oswald was a CIA dupe. David Corn, the magazine’s Washington editor, bills himself as an authority on the intelligence sector but denies the drug allegations. (Could one of the magazine’s key funding sources, the JM Kaplan Fund with its reputation as a CIA bank, have anything to do with The Nation’s position on the Kennedy murder and the CIA’s adventures in the narcotics trade?) After 9/11, Katrina vanden Heuval, the “liberal” editor of The Nation - and grandaughter of the mobbed-up founder of MCA, Jules Stein - knew war fever. G.W. Bush’s war, she wrote with professor Joel Rogers in the Los Angeles Times, "presents the opportunity of a lifetime." After all, war “heightens social solidarity,” those flags flapping from every Nissan, “while underscoring the need for government and other social institutions that transcend or replace the market." Pass the champagne and condoms, please. War is a welcome reminder that we cannot live without government. War heaves tax revenues into the defense industry’s pyres of waste. Dittoes, Ms. vanden Heuval.
The Nation also belched smoke at the Pacifica crisis. And had a shameful secret to conceal -- its own staff was implicated in attempts to destoy the network. In the May 19, 1999 issue, Marc Cooper, a contributing editor to the magazine and host of Pacifica’s RadioNation, attributed the struggle at the network to disagreement over policy, and characterized critics as “virulent and irrational” after the firing of the Berkeley station manager aroused “all their worst conspiracy fears.”
The Nation’s coverage of the coup has generally leaned to the “left eating its own” stonewall. One reason the magazine balked at endorsing the democritization of Pacifica, Feldman says, is because the CPB chairman (1996-97) was Clinton-Gore fundraiser Alan Sagner, a financial backer of The Nation. After his term at CPB ended, Sagner “continued to sit on the CPB board of directors until his term as a director expired at the end of 1998. “ The Nation supporter “was thus apparently one of the Clinton White House appointees who approved former VOA deputy director Robert Coonrod's selection as CPB president and CEO. [Sagner] was also apparently one of the CPB board members responsible for allowing the current situation of free speech denial and listener-sponsor/staff disenfranchisement at the CPB-funded Pacifica radio stations to develop.” [Bob Feldman, “Nation Magazine's CPB Connection,” February 21, 1999, http://www.radio4all.org/fp/sagner.htm]
Such conflicts are not unusual at The Nation. The magazine’s
Washington editor, David Corn, boasted in a November 9, 2001 AlterNet posting that he "had been dispatched to Trinidad by the U.S. State Department to conduct a two-day seminar on investigative reporting for local journalists." Reporters who eschew conflicting with the interests of their readers are not "dispatched" by the State Department, a branch of government that has no use for dissident writers, and has been known to plot their deaths.
The Nation, like Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), is generously supported “by foundations controlled by extremely wealthy folks,” Feldman says. “In 1992, for instance, the Nation Institute received at least $85,000 worth of grants from the MacArthur Foundation, the Diamond Foundation, the Mertz-Gilmore Foundation and the Schumann Foundation.”
Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) - For years, checks to FAIR, the media watchdog, have been written by the Florence and John Schumann Folundation, based in Montclair, New Jersey, Bill Moyers presiding. Reporter Rick Edmunds, in a study distributed by the Poynter Institute, an environmental think-tank, recalls that “Schumann made a rare appearance in a number of newspaper stories in late 1999” with the revelation that Bill Moyers [drew] a salary of $200,000 per year as Foundation president. (http://www.poynter.org/centerpiece/foundations/dart.htm)
The foundation is a nest of conflicted interests. Joan Konner, former publisher of Columbia Journalism Review, was a director of Schumann Foundation in the late 1990s. In the same period, Bill Moyers' Schumann Foundation gave CJR a $1 million-plus grant. (Feldman letter to A. Constantine, April 21, 2002)
Like its chairman, the Foundation’s “progressive” reputation is a hot air balloon. Schumann is heavily invested in oil, tobacco, war and media conglomerates. According to a 1999 IRS form, Schumann's $92 million potfolio included shares in Lockheed Marietta ($196,000), Raytheon ($185,000), Viacom ($1.1 million), Cablevision Systems Inc. ($1 million), Time-Warner ($723,000), Seagram ($225,000), Philip Morris ($343,000) and Exxon Mobil ($1 million). Dividends for 1999 alone totalled a net of $2.7 million.
Most programs aired by NPR conclude with the announcement, "Made possible by generous grants from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation ...” Yet CounterSpin, FAIR’s syndicated radio program, offers no such announcement. The ethics of an “anti-corporate media” watch group that relies on corporate foundation grants are dubious. Feldman: “It doesn't seem politically appropriate for foundation-subsidized, anti-corporate journalists to engage in alternative media empire-building activity or to promote the censorship of conspiracy researchers on Pacifica's airwaves. The for-profit telecommunications corporation which helps fund and promote FAIR, Working Assets Inc., takes in about $140 million a year in revenue. “ (Feldman 5-23-02 letter to A. Constantine)
The “non-profit” organization is doing just fine, thanks. According to FAIR's 990 form, says Feldman, CounterSpin “costs about $43,000 a year to produce. Yet the same 990 form indicates that FAIR's total expenditures for the fiscal year ending Jume 30, 2000 was $912,201. Between 1998 and 2000, FAIR’s Jeff Cohen was receiving $41,000 a year from part-time executive director/vp job at the same time the Murdoch media conglomerate was apparently paying him about $12,500 a year for just an hour a week on its NewsWatch panel show.” (Feldman)
For recent years, Janine Jackson, Counterspin co-host, has been engaged in the founding of Citizens for Independent Public Broadcasting [CIPB]. According to the 2002 Foundation Directory, Feldman notes, “the foundation president is long-time PBS commentator Bill Moyers. So don't expect CounterSpin to allow CIPB to reform the public broadcasting system beyond the political parameters set by Bill Moyers.”
We all rely on the creative use of words and images. Why perpetuate past rifts between journalists and PR professionals? Why polarize when we can synthesize?
Where are the moderating spokesmen of the left, the activists who rally against war, challenge the intelligence community and the Pentagon, the depraved geoplolitics of the corporations and the docile media? They are not to be found at FAIR, NPR or any of the other foundation-supported “progressive” pablum factories. Legitimate reporting on hardcore issues, particulrly fascism in American politics, far-right conspiracies, has been banned from the most accessible organs of the left. Representatives of the anti-fascist left have been, with few exceptions, shut out entirely.