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Behind the Gemstone Files |
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The
Skeleton Key AUTHORSHIP ALPHA-1775 GEMSTONES A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P R S T U V W Y Z
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The
Mob and the Media
Certainly, there's no question of Eugene Meyer's purchase of the Washington Post. But like many of Bruce Roberts' claims, he just doesn't have it right. The purchase took place in 1933, not 1936, according to The Post itself. Meyer purchased The Washington Post at a bankruptcy sale for $825,000, according to The Post's website history. The Post itself recounts: On June 1, a public bankruptcy auction was held on the steps of The Post's E Street Building and the newspaper was sold for $825,000 to Eugene Meyer, a California-born financier. Meyer was not an experienced newspaperman, but he had strong convictions about publishing a newspaper which he expressed in this set of principles: -- The first mission of a newspaper is to tell the truth as nearly as the truth may be ascertained. -- The Newspaper shall tell ALL the truth so far as it can learn
it, concerning the important affairs of America and the world. -- As a disseminator of the news, the paper shall observe the decencies that are obligatory upon a private gentleman. -- What it prints shall be fit reading for the young as well as for the old. -- The newspaper's duty is to its readers and to the public at large, and not to the private interests of its owners. -- In the pursuit of truth, the newspaper shall be prepared to make sacrifices of its material fortunes, if such course be necessary for the public good. -- The newspaper shall not be the ally of any special interest,
but shall be fair and free and wholesome in its outlook on public
affairs and public men. 1933-1943 In 1934, before Roberts claims Meyer even bought the paper, his daughter was working as a copy girl for The Post while still in high school at the Madeira School. Now, whether Meyer's loft set of goals (above) was genuine, or whether it was just pablum for public consumption is a different story. The rest of Roberts' story here is also wrong, at least to some extent. It was never necessary - or even practical - for the Mafia to buy every business it controlled. In fact, it would have been downright stupid. For one, it would have taken an immense amount of money. Second, it would have attracted unwanted attention - just like the later Las Vegas casino operations. And third, there were much easier ways to accomplish the same thing. For example, newspapers depend on their truck drivers to make sure their papers get delivered. Who are those drivers? Teamsters, as the Kefauver hearings clearly pointed out (and as Robert Kennedy pointed out in his book The Enemy Within - which, by the way, is another glaring Bruce Roberts error). The owners of the media need the support of the bankers and financiers to buy their presses and transmitters and equipment, and keep it operating. The money flow was controlled to a large extent by the Mafia. As for television, it had been invented in 1927 (Farnsworth) but was certainly not a major player in the US news media until much later. It didn't make its way into most American homes until the late 1940s and early 1940s. The news media also depended on its advertisers for its income. A well-placed word or a smear campaign or boycott could make or break a struggling publisher. Advertisers, like the media itself, was heavily dependent on a peaceful labor situation. The Mafia had only to control labor to control the business and industry empire. This indirect control was often used to kill a story here, or create a story there. Bribes were often made on a case-by-case basis. One of the best examples involves Joseph P. Kennedy himself. "I just bought a horse for $75,000," he bragged to Cardinell Spellman over lunch one day. "And for another $75,000, I put Jack on the cover of Time." Joe, then 69, was ecstatic, according to Edward J. "Ned" Spellman, the nephew of Francis Cardinal Spellman, who was present at that luncheon at the cardinal's home at 452 Madison Avenue in New York. Sure enough, a few weeks later, on December 2, 1957, there was the new Time, with Jack Kennedy - the "Democratic Whiz of 1957" - gracing its cover, complete with a glowing story that gave his fledgling career a tremendous boost just in time for the upcoming 1960 presidential campaign. (4:1) That's the way the journalism game is played - with crude subtlety and bribes, direct or indirect. Many of the "puff pieces" you see in the press - newspaper or TV - are the direct result of such bribes, or even extortion. I've been there and I see it every day. "Well, if you want my advertising, I want a big story about my business." This "necessary evil" permeates every corner of the news media, down to the smallest weekly newspaper. You play the game or you die, figuratively - and sometimes even literally. When you become a newspaper publisher, as I have been at times in my life, it doesn't matter how "honest" you are when you start. It may be your purest intention to run an honest, truthful newspaper that "tells it like it is." But the truth settles in usually within a week or two, and you find yourself justifying your cave-in with the logic that "Well, one little story won't hurt and besides, with the income, I can do the kind of journalism I set out to do." We prostituted ourselves with that first small step. No, a "mob takeover" was never necessary. The powers that be simply found out what our price was and paid it. We accepted it, usually without threat or arm-twisting or takeovers. In a sense, Roberts was right. "News censorship of all major news media did go into effect," but it was largely self-imposed, not forced. Subscriptions and newsstand sales will never keep a newspaper or radio or TV station afloat; it takes advertisers, and those advertisers exert tremendous influence over content. Even today, as big as the networks are (CNN, ABC, CBS, NBC, etc.), they often air "news stories" that are no more than PR video aired just as they received it from their biggest advertisers. Probably no advertising group exerts more influence than automobile dealers. They make up the bulk of sales and they can easily kill stories that are criticial of auto safety, for example. In other cases, and I'll use the 2000 Democrat Presidential Candidate Al Gore, Jr. as an example, the press lets the politicians write their own stories. The Tennessean staffers admitted that Gore himself, who had been a Tennessean reporter in his younger days, would come into the newsroom and write up his own stories after he became Congressman. He wrote them, and he edited them. No one questioned it. In most cases, at least the smaller papers rely on press releases for their stories, and these are printed virtually verbatim, providing an unfettered PR vehicle for any politician or company willing to write them. Sometimes a young reporter (or even a stubborn old one) forgets who buttered his bread, and pays the price. One time, I wrote a story quoting local residents critical of the local power utility for its slow reaction after a devastating tornado. The very next week, the utility canceled its advertising (which was supposed to be spread equally among a group of weekly newspapers). This was a quasi-official corporation, under local city jurisdiction, and its actions were clearly illegal. But I couldn't say anything without worsening the situation. We suffered from a the loss of a major advertiser for months and had to kiss butt all that time to bring them back on board, with favorable stories about their tree-trimming program, etc. My publisher took it well and didn't come down on me (the story was accurate, as were the quotes), but I still felt bad because I knew my story had cost my boss a lot of money. And I'll readily admit, had I been aware of the advertising situation at the time, I probably would have reworded the story to make it less critical - even though it was the residents, not me, doing the criticizing. Until then, I hadn't paid that much attention even to who the advertisers were. That's how the media game is played. "Mob takeovers and buyouts" are rarely necessary. Often, though, especially as the huge conglomerates take over the nation's media, organized crime does make its way right into the boardroom and the media empire controlled this way will use brutal tactics against its competition. The story of Nazi sympathizer William Randolph Hearst is a classic example. I won't mention the ones in this era, because I still depend on the profession for my living, but you might want to check out a book called The Chain Gang to get an idea of just how brutal this business is today. In 1936-1940, the ownership of the press was spread much farther and the multinational corporations didn't have the stranglehold they do today. Today, control and censorship often does come from the top down. Back then, it came from the bottom up - in the form of the Teamster's union, clearly controlled by the Mafia, in case you've forgotten the story of Jimmy Hoffa and Dave Beck - or are too young to remember those days. It was also an era of "yellow journalism" in which the press looked more like The National Enquirer or Weekly World News than the bland product we see today. It was the era of sensationalism. Al Capone was, in the beginning, a Robin Hood hero, while the likes of Bonnie and Clyde were the villains. If the Mafia had had the total control Roberts claims, most of the stories of the 1930s to 1950s about organized crime would never have been published. We would never have heard about political scandals such as the Teapot Dome scandal or even Watergate. There is one important point to remember, though, even in reading or viewing today's news: the "scandal stories" have a secret, hidden agenda behind them. Politicians are "outed" because someone in high places of power wants them outed, not because the press is such righteous defender of the First Amendment or the people's right to know. A favorite joke among the media, even today, is that the New York Times, for example, doesn't print "all the news that's fit to print" (as its motto so piously claims) but simply "all the news that fits." Fits its private agenda, that is. Understanding the nuances of press bias would require a book in itself (and indeed many have been written), and would go far beyond the resources and scope of this work. Briefly, though, the greatest danger to our future from "the free press" lies in its alliance with what some would call the "New World Order" (even "Illuminati" powers) that wish to see a one-world government, one-world army, one-world religion and, most importantly, a one-world economy controlled not by the people, not by votes, but by the multi-national corporations who seek to "privatize" everything from armies to food and water. This, too, can be well-documented. Check out DuPont, for example, and its efforts to control the world's food supply. Even the late Enron Corporation was a major player in this game of global greed. Or study the relationship of what happened September 11, 2001 to the rush for Caspian Sea oil, control of the opium pipelines and poppy fields, and break-up of sovereign nations - the subject of another book I'm working on called, tentatively, Big Oil - Big War. It's not a Republican crime or a Democrat crime; it spans both political parties. Back in 1936-1940, all of this was still in the future. The League of Nations, an early attempt to formalize this New World Order, had failed, and the United Nations had not yet even been born. The efforts were still being made behind the scenes, by the Rockefellers, the Baruchs, the Rothschilds, the Warburgs, the remnants of Cecil Rhodes' empire, and many, many others, but the one-world corporate movement was not institutionalized as it is today. Roberts' Gemstone Files was such a small window into this huge, multi-generational conspiracy that that is the reason I have chosen to present at least a cursory timeline of that conspiracy going back much, much farther than the Roberts documents - and every single line of that timeline can be expanded (thanks to the Internet and its search engines) to fill thousands and thousands of volumes. |
The
Washington Post is sold at auction June 1, 1933 to Eugene Meyer.
