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SIDEBAR- CRACKED FIREWALL (CORRODED FIREWALL, FISSURED FIREWALL)

The fissured firewall between government and the media first surfaced in the US consciousness during the mid-1970s, through press reports such as those by Stuart Loory in 1974 for the Columbia Journalism Review, Joe Trento and Dave Roman in Penthouse, and most importantly Carl Bernstein writing in Rolling Stone. At the same time, Congress was investigating the US government/media relationship, the results of which were released in the Church Committee report and Pike Committee report. The news was stunning: some 400 journalists were shown to have maintained covert relationships with the CIA, either participating in undercover assignments or in some form of CIA contractual relationship; and many more journalists did not have an official relationship, but occasionally traded favors with CIA officers. According to Carl Bernstein in his 1977 Rolling Stone piece "The CIA and the Media," during the 1950s, the CIA had been conducting a formal training program to teach its agents to behave like journalists, where intelligence officers were trained "to make noises like reporters." He listed the following media outlets as participants in the CIA/media relationship: Columbia Broadcasting System, Copley News Service, Time, Inc., New York Times, the Louisville Courier Journal, American Broadcasting Company, the Associated Press, United Press International, Reuters, the Hearst Newspapers, Scripps-Howard, Newsweek magazine, the Mutual Broadcasting System, the Miami Herald, the old Saturday Evening Post and the New York Herald-Tribune." Indeed, it appeared that the press was riddled with government agents.

In response to the public outcry at the time, the new director of the CIA under President Carter, Admiral Stansfield Turner, issued a two-page directive called "New Regulations Approved on CIA Relations with U.S. News Media" in which was designed to give the impression that it prohibited the CIA from entering into any relationships with accredited full- or part-time journalists for intelligence purposes without senior management approval of the organization concerned; or enter into any relationships with non-journalist staff employees for intelligence purposes; or use the name of any U.S. news media or organization to provide cover for any CIA employees or activities. However, the second page of the directive allowed voluntary "open" and "unpaid" relationships with U.S. accredited journalists, and also permitted journalists "to perform translating services or to lecture at CIA training courses." But, quite unnoticed at the time, the last sentence allows the CIA director to make any exceptions to the rule. And worse, neither the CIA's policy nor the law applies to freelance journalists nor to foreign journalists, which the CIA is free to use, or to have its operatives pose as.

So how does it all work? Government influence/manipulation of the press generally falls into one or more of the following categories:

Outright government ownership and control of press outlets, such as Voice of America, BBC, Radio España and Deutsche Welle. Surprisingly, government control of certain western European and North American new outlets does not appear to have a lot of influence on their content these days. But, this often crosses the line during war, when George Orwell in WWII propagandized for the British Broadcasting Company of the 1940s, and later the Voice of America propagandized against the Soviets and anyone they could tie to them during the cold war. More serious examples of the line being crossed are the examples Rwanda urging citizens to participate in genocide, and Salvadoran government radio "Cuscatlán" in 1989 urging the death of the Jesuit priests on the days before they were killed.
The media giving "journalistic cover" or credentials to government agents. Recently, on a few occasions, reporters have allowed police to go into hostage-taking situations disguised as journalists. Even worse is when a news entity gives full-time "journalistic cover" to a government agent, especially when this "cover" involves long periods of time. During the 1972 overthrow of Chilean President Salvador Allende, both the US media and right-wing Chilean media gave "journalistic cover" to US agents involved in working on the coup. But that was then. And now? There are those who believe that the media should continue to give journalistic cover to spies. Richard Haas, former director of the Brookings Institute and former National Security Council member now heads the Office of Policy Planning in Bush State Department. He believes that NOT using journalists as spies is a luxury that the US can ill afford, and that renewing the use of agents under journalistic cover would make the agency more "effective." Journalist Frank Smyth expresses the majority sentiment when he says: "Allowing CIA agents to pose as journalists not only needlessly puts reporters at risk but also undermines their ability to report foreign news properly or at all, limiting the information available to policy makers and the public. The CIA should be ordered to end it for real."
Client status of government agencies to news services. The CIA is a "client" of the major wire services, such as Reuters, AFP, and AP., as if it were a newspaper or magazine. This differs from the photo agency/intelligence agency situation described in the story in the amount of photographs there is access to. In the case of the photo agencies, thousands of photos were viewed. In the case of the wire services, only edited photographs intended for publication are viewed and copied.
Journalists as directly paid by the government. As late as 1996, then CIA Director John M. Deutch stated that the agency maintained the right to use U.S. journalists or their organizations as cover for intelligence activities. In the same year, former Time editor Henry Grunwald and former New York Times columnist Leslie Gelb, then members of the Council on Foreign Relations signed onto a report backing giving a "nonofficial" cover to CIA agents in the form of journalists or religious workers.
Journalists volunteering or "trading" information with the CIA. This has never been officially discontinued, and there is no reason to believe that it doesn’t happen today.
Government-run press accreditation offices can exert much pressure on journalists by either withholding or giving accreditation to journalists. In many foreign countries, the press office that issues your credentials is run by security force members, and is therefore in a position to influence reporting. Here in the US, foreign journalists often complain that they are mistreated when they have to register with city police departments to receive their accreditation documents.
The payment of stipends or all expenses paid trips to journalists by governments is a very common way of currying favor with journalists in the third world. A "bonus" may or may not be paid, depending on the outcome of the articles produced. In the US, this can mean free trips on Air Force One. The hundreds of thousands of dollars in grants provided by the United States Information Agency to foreign journalists for visits here can only be seen a way to influence their reportage.
The "blowback" effect, where the US or another government pays to publish false or misleading articles in another country’s press, which are then cited and republished by the US press. "CIA officials insist that they make no attempt to influence the content of American newspapers, but some fallout is inevitable: during the Chilean offensive, CIA-generated black propaganda transmitted on the wire services out of Santiago often turned up in American publications" – Carl Bernstein "The CIA and the Media" Rolling Stone, October 20, 1977.
Changes of journalists’ job status by a government through editors and editorial staff. When US and Salvadoran government officials disliked Raymond Bonner’s New York Times article on a massacre in 1981 in El Salvador, they put pressure on the Times to have him removed. Mr. Bonner was sent to cover sub-Saharan Africa. As Carl Bernstein noted in 1977, the opposite also happens: "A foreign correspondent with ties to the Company [the CIA] stood a much better chance than his competitors of getting good stories."
The US Federal Broadcasting Information Service (FBIS) translates much of the foreign press into English, and provides this service for the USG as well as for various University libraries and the press. FBIS is a part of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
A more subtle yet equally dangerous practice here in the US concerns government advertising campaigns in the name of the "war on drugs". Recently, Daniel Forbes writing in Salon online showed that a half-dozen of the major US magazines have submitted anti-drug articles they have published over the past year to the government's Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) in an attempt to qualify for financial credits under the same federal advertising program that has benefited the television networks.

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