The GOP Media Machine Churns On

Sometime after 2009, when historians pick through the wreckage left behind by George W. Bush's administration, they will have to come to grips with the role played by the professional conservative media infrastructure.

Indeed, it will be hard to comprehend how Bush got two terms as President of the United States, ran up a massive debt, and misled the country into at least one disastrous war – without taking into account the extraordinary influence of the conservative media, from Fox News to Rush Limbaugh, from the Washington Times to the Weekly Standard.

Recently, it's been revealed, too, that the Bush administration paid conservative pundits Armstrong Williams and Maggie Gallagher while they promoted White House policies. Even fellow conservatives have criticized those payments, but the truth is that the ethical line separating conservative "journalism" from government propaganda has long since been wiped away.

For years now, there's been little meaningful distinction between the Republican Party and the conservative media machine.

In 1982, for instance, South Korean theocrat Sun Myung Moon established the Washington Times as little more than a propaganda organ for the Reagan-Bush administration. In 1994, radio talk show host Limbaugh was made an honorary member of the new Republican House majority.

The blurring of any ethical distinctions also can be found in documents from the 1980s when the Reagan-Bush administration began collaborating secretly with conservative media tycoons to promote propaganda strategies aimed at the American people.

In 1983, a plan, hatched by CIA Director William J. Casey, called for raising private money to sell the administration's Central American policies to the American public through an outreach program designed to look independent but which was secretly managed by Reagan-Bush officials.

The project was implemented by a CIA propaganda veteran, Walter Raymond Jr., who had been moved to the National Security Council staff and put in charge of a "perception management" campaign that had both international and domestic objectives.

In one initiative, Raymond arranged to have Australian media mogul Rupert Murdoch chip in money for ostensibly private groups that would back Reagan-Bush policies. According to a memo dated Aug. 9, 1983, Raymond reported that "via Murdock [sic], may be able to draw down added funds." (For details, see Parry's Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq.)

Besides avoiding congressional oversight, privately funded activities gave the impression that an independent group was embracing the administration's policies on their merits. Without knowing that the money had been arranged by the government, the public would be more inclined to believe these assessments than the word of a government spokesman.

"The work done within the administration has to, by definition, be at arms length," Raymond wrote in an Aug. 29, 1983, memo.

In foreign countries, the CIA often uses similar techniques to create what intelligence operatives call "the Mighty Wurlitzer," a propaganda organ playing the desired notes in a carefully scripted harmony. Only this time, the target audience was the American people.

Journalists As Domestic Propaganda Machines

In the 1980s, there were also propaganda operations directly comparable to the payments to Williams and Gallagher.

In a May 13, 1985, memo, which surfaced during the Iran-Contra scandal, Reagan-Bush official Jonathan Miller boasted about what he called "white propaganda" successes. As an example, he cited the Wall Street Journal's publication of a pro-administration opinion piece on Nicaragua that had been written by a government consultant, history professor John Guilmartin, Jr.

"Officially, this office had no role in its preparation," wrote Miller, who worked out of the State Department's Office of Public Diplomacy. "The work of our operation is ensured by our office's keeping a low profile."