The sidestream media is composed of two relatively distinct parts – the mainstream right-wing media and the so-called alternative media (which despite for the most part rejecting being labeled is largely aligned with the American right-wing). The two pillars of the mainstream right-wing media are Fox News and conservative talk radio. Newsmax and similar conservative publications (such as American Spectator), which straddle the line between alternative and mainstream, play a supporting role. In the 1990s and early 2000s, Newsmax/Chris Ruddy and friends acted as an instrumental right-wing media agenda-setter and served as the model for future alternative right-wing media operations, but since the Clinton and Bush II eras has lost significant pull.
The alternative media isn’t nearly as monolithic as the Fox News-conservative radio punditry nexus and is therefore a somewhat less accurate and useful categorization, but can still be analyzed. The most notable alternative outlets currently are Breitbart (for now – it is gradually becoming mainstreamed), Alex Jones/Infowars, Drudge, WorldNetDaily and Russia Today. The majority of these are right-wing/conservative in their politics, the major exception being Russia Today, which despite leaning slightly to the left politically, is more than willing to get into bed with the right-wing alternative media to push anti-government stories given their anti-American establishment prerogative. Legitimate left-wing alternative media outlets exist such as The Young Turks, Democracy Now, AlterNet, RawStory, SecularTalk, etc., but none has ever been able to even come close to the way that the right-wing alternative media has on occasion miraculously seized near complete control of the news cycle. Left-wing alternative media used to be much more influential during the heyday of Air America and HuffPo, but has since lost a considerable amount of influence. Currently, there is no disputing that the alternative media is largely dominated by the right-wing.
The history of the mainstream/liberal/traditional midtown Manhattan media’s liaising and outright plotting with the CIA, State Department, military and other powerful areas of government (be they public or private) is somewhat well known among those exposed to conspiracy (see: Operation Mockingbird).[1][2] However, the sidestream conservative media’s history with the CIA and America’s corporate and governmental elite is relatively obscure.
The right-wing counter establishment media is almost entirely the result of a massive concerted right-wing/conservative effort beginning in the mid-1970s through the early 1980s to 1) reassert themselves after decades of liberal/moderate political domination during the postwar era and 2) promote the Reagan/Bush I administration’s aggressively anti-communist Central America foreign policy. This effort involved the creation and financing of propaganda outlets such as media organizations like Fox and think tanks such as the Heritage and Koch Foundations, the promotion of certain politicians, the creation of a right-wing faction in academia and ultimately culminated in what is known as the “Reagan Revolution” and “New Right” (and today, we’re seeing many of the same players and tactics reappear). The early 1980s also saw the foundation of the Council for National Policy, whose (known) member list reads like a who’s who of the right-wing elite (Erik Prince, Oliver North, etc.) and very much represents a kind of modern analog to the John Birch Society. By far the most impacting and lasting component of the operation was the right-wing pro-Reagan propaganda machine that Reagan CIA director William Casey, CIA operative Walter Raymond Jr., Fox News‘s father as well as to-be kingmaker Rupert Murdoch, and heir to the Pittsburgh-based Mellon family’s multi billion dollar oil & banking fortune Richard Mellon Scaife orchestrated during the Reagan administration.[3]
As far as anyone knows based on recently declassified government documents, the operation was kicked off by two face-to-face meetings in 1983 between Rupert Murdoch and Ronald Reagan, mediated by none other than political fixer and Donald Trump mentor Roy Cohn and the director of the USIA Charles Wick. Quite obviously, Murdoch was instructed to bolster pro-Reagan propaganda through his various holdings controlled through Murdoch’s News Corp., whose core assets were Fox and the New York Post (today, Murdoch also has control over The Wall Street Journal through Dow Jones). While Murdoch’s empire was and still is very much the core and old guard of the right-wing media, the counter-establishment right-wing media did not stop at Fox in the slightest. Casey, Scaife, Roger Ailes (Murdoch’s long-time deputy), and others worked tirelessly to expand the conservative media nexus, an effort which continues to this day with the promotion of Donald Trump.
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| Trump and Murdoch (photo credit: Reuters) |
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| Ronald Reagan, Rupert Murdoch, Charles Wick, Roy Cohn, and Cohn law partner Thomas Bolan in the Oval Office on Jan. 18, 1983 (Photo credit: Reagan Presidential Library) |
Perhaps the most visible and important example was the facilitation of Rush Limbaugh by the Casey clique. Limbaugh’s ascent was part of what was a larger operation headed by Casey and fellow CIA-man Lowell Thomas to turn ABC into a centrist-conservative outlet as opposed to a strictly liberal news organization through the acquisition of ABC by Capital Cities, a media holdings company largely run by Casey and Thomas among others.[4] The acquisition was the subject of heavy scrutiny at the time due to the fact that Capital Cities was considerably smaller than ABC, which required that CapCities procure funding and protection from Warren Buffet to go through with the purchase.[5] ABC’s network president, Edward McLaughlin was tasked by ABC’s new owners to recruit conservative talent, which they found at an obscure Sacramento radio station in Rush Limbaugh, who had voiced a spirited defense of the Reagan administration and Oliver North during Iran-Contra. Limbaugh was promoted by his new bosses in New York, paraded on national television, and heavily advertised. He cemented his role in American politics after doing the most in the right-wing media to get Newt Gingrich elected Speaker of the House and propagandize for Gingrich. Limbaugh still to this day very much sets the intellectual tone for the right-wing at large and remains faithful to the right-wing/Republican power structure that brought him up and still likely handles him. It is interesting that CIA-facilitated Limbaugh from the beginning of the 2016 election season was the most effective communicator of Trump propaganda in the mainstream right-wing media, which largely consisted of Limbaugh constantly reiterating the blatantly false claim that Donald Trump was a political outsider.
Later, in the 1990s, this same Murdoch-Casey-Scaife clique birthed the Clinton (and later Obama) rumor-scandal-conspiracy mill and controversialization cottage industry. The Clinton Chronicles‘s producer, Pat Matrisciana, was funded by Richard Mellon Scaife and Casey as was Chris Ruddy/Newsmax (behind Vince Foster-Ron Brown story), the American Spectator (behind the Whitewater story), and Judicial Watch (which has been instrumental in advancing the Hillary Clinton email, and Benghazi stories).[6][7][8][9][10][11] Ken Starr, still a hack for the Republican party after all these years, who was connected to Scaife through tens of academic institutions, NGOs, and think tanks (one of them being the Council for National Policy) served as the seemingly legitimate face of several politically charged investigations into Bill Clinton, Lewinsky, Paula Jones, and Vince Foster being the most well known.[12] Indeed, the most effective contraversialization tactic against the Clintons has been the exposure of more than a few sex scandals involving everything from infidelity to outright rape, which never would have come out without agitation by the counter establishment media. Interestingly enough, Starr is now working for (or with) convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein’s legal team, likely covering Donald Trump’s tracks and negotiating a way out of Trump’s likely blackmail by Les Wexner, Epstein’s mentor and the man who had control over the surveillance equipment and blackmail material through a dedicated technician Wexner had fly in to Palm Beach from New Albany, Ohio (Wexner’s residence).[13]
Ann Coulter, who’s probably the most utterly rabid Trump-booster present in the media, was brought up and made in the media by the Paula Jones investigation where Coulter worked as an aide writing briefs for Jones’ lawyer while a member of the conservative Independent Women’s Forum and was instrumental in acquiring the Linda Tripp tapes for Ken Starr. (Strangely enough, rumor has it that Coulter was seen several times on Adnan Khashoggi’s yacht in the ’90s. Khashoggi is a prominent media financier among other things who’s been in bed with the American intelligence community his entire adult life.)[14]
This media-political machine continued working throughout the Bush II and Obama administrations (Trump’s Obama birth certificate fiasco may have been a sophisticated test), but only experienced a true rebirth once Trump and Hillary Clinton entered the arena together. Many of the old players have reasserted themselves this election season, such as Murdoch, Roger Ailes, Roger Stone, Gingrich, Giuliani, Limbaugh, Drudge, etc. Richard Mellon Scaife died in 2014, but the Mellon fortune continues to be distributed to various right-wing operations through the Sarah Scaife Foundation, named after Mellon’s mother. Murdoch, a friend of Trump’s in private, is now a seasoned operative and a kingmaker in his own right. Roger Ailes, formerly the head of FoxNews, met in private with Trump at least on two occasions that we know of and after leaving Fox has served as a media advisor to the Trump campaign/administration.[15][16] Roger Stone, a flagrantly and unabashedly dirty media and political operative who dates back to the Cohn days and was introduced to Trump by Cohn, has been instrumental in feeding distorted narratives and disinformation to the alternative media mostly through Alex Jones.[17]
Gingrich and Giuliani are typically thought of as politicians, but have recently brandished themselves all over FoxNews in the name of Trump. Both are political insiders deeply connected to the same faction that has promoted Donald Trump, particularly Giuliani, who’s served as one of the many faces of the national security and law enforcement establishments ever since he put the final nail in the coffin of New York’s Italian mafia (to clear way for the now dominant right-wing pro-Trump Jewish-Russian mafia) and 9/11. Giuliani and his close friend Erik Prince (founder of Blackwater, brother of Trump Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, & Council for National Policy member) are very likely the source of leaks out of NYPD and FBI investigations into Hillary Clinton, Anthony Wiener, and others within the Clinton circle. Prince and the many security contractors the Trump campaign hired during the election season are ex-cops or ex-FBI and all still have extensive connections in law enforcement.
Although the old network of think tanks, media outlets, PR firms, and politicians still exists, new blood had to be injected during the Obama administration in preparation for 2016. By far the most important new major media outlet has been Breitbart, which has a mile long laundry list of suspicious connections to the American right-wing power structure, national security establishment, and Israel. Andrew Breitbart, who got his start as an editor at Drudge then as a researcher for Arianna Huffington, founded the original breitbart.com in the mid-2000s as a news aggregation site. During a visit to Israel (Breitbart was Jewish), Breitbart supposedly on his own conceived the idea of the “Breitbart News Network.” However, current chief of Breitbart Larry Solov seemed to imply in the bizarrely suggestive Breitbart article “Breitbart News Network: Born in the USA, Conceived in Israel” that the “spirit, tenacity, and resourcefulness of the Israeli people” was instrumental in the foundation of Breitbart News Network, which to this day maintains a large bureau in Jerusalem.[18] What ‘Israeli people’ Solov refers to in the article, no one knows, but I’d be willing to bet that they’re in some way connected to the Israeli-Mossad right wing political machine.
During the transitory phase to a larger news network, Breitbart brought on Steve Bannon to obtain funding and head up Breitbart with him and Solov. Bannon, now the Trump administration’s “chief strategist” and senior counselor, has been lauded by the alt-right as an anti-establishment crusader hellbent on utterly destroying the establishment, but his history suggests otherwise. Bannon graduated from Georgetown with a master’s degree in “national security studies” then from Harvard with an M.B.A. While at Georgetown he served as an officer in the Navy, which itself isn’t indicative of much if it weren’t for the fact that Bannon served as a special assistant to the Chief of Naval Operations (i.e., he took care of the dirty work) under Reagan while stateside.[19] After leaving the military and graduating from Georgetown, Bannon went to Harvard then graduated to Goldman Sachs, where he worked in their mergers & acquisitions department specializing in media company buyouts. Bannon then went on to work as a producer in Hollywood on movies and documentaries with conservative messages.
While in Hollywood, Bannon along with elite right-wing think tank Hoover Institute research fellow Peter Schweizer founded the Government Accountability Institute with funding from hedge fund billionaire elite GOP donor Robert Mercer (whose firm Renaissance Technologies has NSA connections through James Simons, was involved with the Bernie Madoff slush fund, is a market-maker and is largely tax exempt) and the Koch Foundation.[20] The GAI is where the Clinton Foundation corruption scandal came out of with the publishing of the book Clinton Cash, written by Schweizer. At Breitbart News, Bannon was instrumental in securing millions in funding from undisclosed sources for the network (one of them rumored to be wealthy right-wing Israel-booster Aubrey Chernick) and became executive chairman after Breitbart’s death in 2012.[21] Eventually, Robert Mercer (the largest donor to the pro-Trump Make American Number 1 PAC) became the primary beneficiary and financier of Breitbart.[22] Clearly, Breitbart and its management are not generally anti-establishment, but do serve as propaganda outlets for the right-wing national security establishment. (On a side-note, Bannon, after finding out he may have been in violation of voting laws because of his registered voting address being a vacant house in Miami, changed his voter registration address to Andrew Badolato’s address in Sarasota. Badolato, who supposedly worked on Clinton Cash, is a supremely shady businessman/grifter connected to the CIA and several drug traffickers.)[23]
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| Anthony Badolato (photo credit: Madcowprod.com) |
Of course, Breitbart isn’t the only alternative outlet with suspicious connections. News site WorldNetDaily of Obama birth certificate fame was founded by Joseph Farrah, who is a member of the Council for National Policy and brought up in media by Richard Mellon Scaife, who owned the Sacramento Union while Farrah was chief editor.[24]
In regards to the storied and undisputed paladin of alternative media, Alex Jones/Infowars, a solid above-table connection to any political paymasters, think tanks, or intelligence fronts eludes us. However, a preponderance of suspicious patterns and curious characters seemingly peripherally connected to Jones suggests there is more to him and his operation than meets the eye. As has already been discussed, Jones has more or less served as Trump’s PR arm in the alternative media. Roger Stone continues to operate as the liaison and point-man between the Trump campaign and Jones, continually feeding Jones and his audience disinformation about Donald Trump. Jones is not a stupid man and without a doubt knows Stone’s history as a media operative and disinformation artist. The very fact that Jones has provided Stone with an outlet is indicative of his actual agenda.
Jones goes to great lengths to avoid ever having to even briefly address the Jewish-Israeli-Mossad and (to a lesser extent) right-wing/national security establishment components of global conspiracy, instead choosing to pin nearly all conspiratorial power on a nebulous bogeyman Jones calls “globalism,” which is basically a drastically hyperbolic and oversimplified encapsulation of the liberal establishment, otherwise known as the Eastern Establishment, epitomized by organizations such as the CFR, Ford, Rockefeller & Carnegie Foundations, the liberal mainstream Midtown Manhattan media, and State Department. Jones has also fully endorsed incendiary anti-Muslim alarmism originating from within the national security establishment and the various PR firms that represent it, a pattern which can be seen all throughout the sidestream media. This is highly suspect given Jones’s various Israeli-Jewish connections through his Jewish ex-wife, his lawyer Elizabeth Schuring (who also represents the hyper-old money Zionist Bronfman family), and possibly even billionaire CIA-Mossad operative Adnan Khashoggi, whose communications and advertising company Genesis Intermedia (among others) resembles Genesis Communications Network (the flagship network of Jones’s) in almost every way imaginable from the name to logos and dubious marketing tactics.
Although Khashoggi potentially being intimately connected to Jones seems like a strange proposition on its face, it’s really not all that unrealistic of a claim given Khashoggi’s history with the right-wing and Zionist establishments and connections to Ann Coulter and John Gray (whose 9/11 “truth” book Mars & Venus was vigorously promoted and advertised by Khashoggi’s media conglomerate). It’s also rather bizarre that Jones, when first confronted about his possible relation to Khashoggi, denied knowing who Khashoggi was at all, which is simply impossible to believe given that Khashoggi had been involved in what seems like a majority of known conspiracies since the 1970s. Another interesting association of Jones’s is with Stratfor, a boutique propaganda mill and information clearing house disguised as a subscription “intelligence service” founded by Zionist and RAND Corp. alumni George Friedman. In 2012, it was revealed that Infowars had hired a former Stratfor intern by the name of Molly Maroney as an editor. After the issue blew up in Jones’s face and several callers questioned him on the connection, Jones even admitted that he had hired several Stratfor interns other than Maroney. Of course, this could be explained away as Jones having to hire from a relatively small pool of media professionals from in and around Austin, Texas, but it’s still highly suspicious in the context of Jones’s other connections.[25]
Matt Drudge rose to prominence after cultivating an astonishingly long list of seemingly exclusive sources in the media and politics for a relative nobody, eventually breaking the Monica Lewinsky scandal (only after top executives at Newsweek killed the story at the last minute) and was then given a primetime television show on Fox, which ended up being a short-lived venture. However, it became obvious that Drudge had been fully brought into the fold of the conservative establishment’s media machine after top Fox host Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh among others began showering him with publicity long after his departure from Fox. It’s also very telling that Drudge reportedly blocked Andrew Breitbart from publishing scandalous stories about CIA-facilitated Barack Obama to The Drudge Report during the 2008 election while Breitbart worked for Drudge.[26] Drudge is a hard-line conservative – what gives? Did someone deliver a message to Drudge to keep a lid on Obama scandals? (Of course Drudge and the rest of the right-wing alternative media have behaved in the exact opposite fashion in regards to Hillary Clinton.)
The aforementioned have all contributed to the growth of an awesome pro-Trump propaganda machine in addition to an equally impressive Clinton scandal mill which rivals its 1990s predecessor in size and impact and clearly operates for the most part out of the same playbook. However, any discussion of the sidestream media without mention of Wikileaks would be remiss – by far the most original and innovative propaganda technique utilized by the right-wing this election season has been the promotion of Wikileaks, which is very likely an intelligence operation, as I’ve surmised in a previous post. Julian Assange displays pretty much all the hallmarks of an intelligence asset – born with connections to intelligence through a cult he was born into, rose to prominence out of total obscurity, compromised by law enforcement at a young age then miraculously let off the hook, forces all whistleblowers who provide him with leaked information to sign nondisclosure agreements, releases information in tranches, receives loads of attention from establishment outlets on the right and left, etc., etc.[27]
Given Wikileaks’ suspicious background, “pizzagate,” which is derived from Wikileaks’ “leaked” Podesta emails, deserves considerable scrutiny. Despite there having been numerous credible reports of child sex rings orchestrated by and involving high-level government officials and Washington power players such as the Franklin scandal, DC call-boy ring, etc., pizzagate comes off to me as an utterly incredulous story. Podesta may very well be involved in pedophilia, but it certainly doesn’t involve a string of D.C. pizza restaurants or communications over an email account in Podesta’s name. Many of the supposed codewords used in the emails were simply fabricated in addition to several of the pictures claimed to have been pulled from James Alefantis’ Instagram account. Its complete implausibility, attention from the mainstream media, and origins in Wikileaks emails is suspicious enough, and its timing (in the run-up to Epstein’s deposition in the Virginia Roberts defamation case where he will likely name Donald Trump), while less obvious, elicits even more suspicion.
Simply put, the sidestream media is not at all what it’s made out to be by crusaders and apologists for Donald Trump and the corresponding “populist uprising,” which is an answer to the “fake” mainstream media. Most of the sidestream media is simply the conservative national security-focused wing of the establishment’s answer to the liberal establishment media; one side of the same coin. Fake (or, more accurately, inaccurate and/or biased) stories are circulated on both sides and it’s ridiculous for people in the alternative media simply to dismiss the mainstream media outright, especially given the fact that it’s still the source of the vast majority of original reporting while the alternative media is still largely confined to spinning or countering what has already been reported in the mainstream. Most reports put out by the mainstream media are well-sourced and, for the most part, specifically accurate – what we must pay attention to is bias, critical omissions and the narratives being spun (one of which has been that Donald Trump is a “political outsider” – in case you hadn’t already noticed this is one of the false narratives that the mainstream and alternative media have spun). If mainstream media is totally ignored and we remain confined to the echo chamber that is much of the alternative media, the critical and telling pieces of information that occasionally make it into mainstream reports will never be emphasized.
Endnotes:
[1] The CIA and the Media
http://www.carlbernstein.com/magazine_cia_and_media.php
[2] Correspondence and Collusion Between the New York Times and CIA
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/aug/29/correspondence-collusion-new-york-times-cia
[3] Murdoch, Scaife and CIA Propaganda
[4] The Seizing of the American Broadcasting Company
https://kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-articles/the-seizing-of-the-american-broadcasting-company
[5] ABC Is Being Sold for $3.5 Billion; 1st Network Sale
[6] The Council for National Policy
http://watch.pair.com/database1.html
[7] Newsmax – A Compass For Conservative Politics
[8] Clinton Eulogizes Scaife
http://www.politico.com/story/2014/08/bill-clinton-richard-mellon-scaife-eulogy-109670
[9] Scaife: Funding Father of the Right
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/special/clinton/stories/scaifemain050299.htm
[10] Almost $2 Million Spent in Magazine’s Anti-Clinton Project, but on What?
[11] Recipients by amounts granted by all Scaife foundations
http://www.mediatransparency.org/scaifeaggregate.php
[12] Myth: There’s No “Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy” to get Clinton
http://www.huppi.com/kangaroo/L-clintonrightwingconspiracy.html
[13] Defendant Bradley J. Edwards’s Statement of Undisputed Facts: Attachment 19
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/1508967-deposition-excerpts.html#document/p76/a263754
[14] The Blonde Flinging Bombshells at Bill Clinton
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/special/clinton/stories/coulter101698.htm
[15] New Debate Strategy for Donald Trump: Practice, Practice, Practice
[16] How Roger Ailes Made Donald Trump
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/08/17/how-roger-ailes-made-donald-trump/?utm_term=.e03acea5007c
[17] Bad Old Days: Political Provocateur Roger Stone Talks about his Long Friendship with Trump
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/05/02/the-political-provocateur-roger-stone-talks-trump
[18] Brietbart News Network: Born in the USA, Conceived in Israel
http://www.breitbart.com/big-journalism/2015/11/17/breitbart-news-network-born-in-the-usa-conceived-in-israel/
[19] Trump’s controversial new adviser promoted conservatism even in the Navy
http://www.militarytimes.com/articles/trumps-controversial-new-adviser-promoted-conservatism-even-in-the-navy
[20] Why Buy The Ad When You Can Get The Press For Free?
http://crooksandliars.com/2015/04/swiftboat-2016-why-buy-ad-when-you-can-get
[21] Breitbart Raises Money for… Something
http://fortune.com/2011/09/27/breitbart-raises-money-for-something/
[22] Hedge-fund magnate backing Cruz is major investor in Breitbart News Network
http://www.politico.com/blogs/media/2015/04/hedge-fund-magnate-backing-cruz-is-major-investor-in-breitbart-news-network-205434
[23] Trump campaign chief’s hidden ties to Sarasota grifter
http://www.madcowprod.com/2016/09/21/trump-campaigns-bannon-ties-to-sarasota-grifter/
[24] The Council for National Policy: Behind the Curtain
https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2016/05/17/council-national-policy-behind-curtain
[25] The growing complexity of Alex Jones’ Israeli connections
https://fitzinfo.wordpress.com/2013/05/31/the-growing-complexity-of-alex-jones-israeli-connections/#_edn6
[26] Mediaite’s John Ziegler to Beck: Breitbart would be ‘furious’ at what his site has become
Mediaite’s John Ziegler to Beck: Breitbart Would Be ‘Furious’ at What His Site Has Become
[27] Wikileaks and Assange
http://akamaitree.blogspot.com/2016/10/wikileaks-and-assange.html