STORY AT-A-GLANCE
- Most of the international news coverage in Western media is provided by three global news agencies — The Associated Press (AP), Reuters and Agence France-Presse (AFP)
- Until or unless at least one of these news agencies sends out a notice, national and local media are unlikely to report on an event. Even photos and videos are typically sourced directly from these global news agencies. This way, people hear, see and read the exact same message everywhere
- Intelligence agencies and defense ministries are well aware of the power of these news agencies and use them with regularity. In 2009, then-president of the AP, Tom Curley, let it slip that the U.S. Pentagon has more than 27,000 PR specialists that spin up stories, and an annual propaganda budget of nearly $5 billion
- The rest of the technocratic apparatus uses these news agencies in the same way and for the same reasons — to proliferate certain narratives while burying or “debunking” others
- The Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) is partnered with a censorship consortium called the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP). Through this consortium, the DHS is illegally censoring Americans
Google promised to bring us the world, and for decades dished up tens of thousands of results to any given search. It was a clever trap. Get the world’s population hooked on an information monopoly, and then, when the time was ripe, funnel everyone toward specific narratives and hide everything else.
Google can do it because the primary way anyone “researches” a topic online is by using the Google search engine; Google controls well over 95% of the searches done on the internet across the entire planet. A similar trap was laid within the media landscape. As reported by Swiss Policy Research:1
“… most of the international news coverage in Western media is provided by only three global news agencies based in New York, London and Paris. The key role played by these agencies means Western media often report on the same topics, even using the same wording.
In addition, governments, military and intelligence services use these global news agencies as multipliers to spread their messages around the world. A study of the Syria war coverage by nine leading European newspapers clearly illustrates these issues: 78% of all articles were based in whole or in part on agency reports, yet 0% on investigative research.
Moreover, 82% of all opinion pieces and interviews were in favor of a US and NATO intervention, while propaganda was attributed exclusively to the opposite side.”
Propaganda on the one hand, and censorship on the other, are the primary…