CIA Revelations Should be Issue Among Media and Presidential Candidates
The recent barrage of declassified records by the CIA revealing the agency’s illicit activity in the 1970’s, has received ample coverage from a wide range of media outlets throughout the United States. Not surprisingly, major newspapers like the Washington Post and the New York Times, radio news sources like National Public Radio, and television news stations such as MSNBC and Fox News have taken a strictly newsman’s approach to the revelations citing the details of the records which included the agency’s program of domestic spying, infiltration and blackmailing of dissident groups-especially anti-war protesters and anti-colonial movements.
The major news outlets also focused intense coverage on two other significant details of the revelations: the CIA’s lead role in orchestrating the botched Bay of Pigs Invasion (the attempted overthrow of Fidel Castro) and the agency’s role in conducting a series of “unwitting” tests on civilians which included exposing Americans to LSD. The major media outlets, while responsibly reporting the facts of the revelations have not however contributed in any significant way toward making the declassified report an issue that should be treated and discussed as one of the most pressing political issues facing the nation today.
Consider the treatment of the report by the major news outlets with that of a more critical perspective offered by the alternative media. Alternative online websites like Sam Smith’s progressive review blog and Amy Goodman’s news cast Democracy Now! tied the revelations to a systematic and deep rot within the American political system. Both Smith and Goodman linked the report to a deeply rooted, historical fear among US political elites to dissident activity at home and anti-capitalist protest activity abroad. Other alternative news sources like the independent website thirdworldtraveler.com, has responded to the revelations in part by including among the website’s book list John
Perkin’s The Secret History of the American Empire and William Blum’s
Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions. Both books provide important insights into the CIA’s historical record of clandestine intervention into other countries’ internal affairs.
Finally, the mainstream media (especially television news sources) have largely excluded the voices of those who treat the CIA revelations as one among many examples of the agency’s abuses as opposed to a one-time affair.
In failing to link the CIA revelations to the deeper political issue of how power is wielded in the United States, mainstream media outlets do the American people a disservice. In a truly functioning democracy, these revelations should be given full attention –including being given priority as a campaign issue- not for any degree of entertainment value or “news worthiness” but for the adverse effects they have on an open and free society.
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