Vigilant Citizen
By VC | May 4th, 2011
In the last twenty years, it has been reported several times that army specialists in propaganda and psychological warfare have been embedded in the staff of television networks.
In the 1980s, officers from the 4th Army PSYOPS group staffed the National Security Council’s Office of Public Diplomacy (OPD), a shadowy government propaganda agency that planted stories in the U.S. media supporting the Reagan Administration’s Central America policies. In an article in the Miami Herald in 1987, a senior US official described OPD as a “vast psychological warfare operation of the kind the military conducts to influence a population in enemy territory.” An investigation by the congressional General Accounting Office found that OPD had engaged in “prohibited, covert propaganda activities,” and the office was soon shut down as a result of the Iran-Contra investigations. But the 4th PSYOPS group still operates.
An unofficial strategy paper published by the U.S. Naval War College in 1996 and written by an Army officer entitled “Military Operations in the CNN World: Using the Media as a Force Multiplier” urged military commanders to find ways to “leverage the vast resources of the fourth estate” for the purposes of “communicating the [mission's] objective and endstate, boosting friendly morale, executing more effective psychological operations, playing a major role in deception of the enemy, and enhancing intelligence collection.”...[Full Article]
