The secret government has been embedded in media ever since Viscount Northcliffe, the owner of the Daily Mail, figured out how to stampede Britain’s working class into the first World War, Elizabeth Nickson writes.

Since the end of July, Nickson has been publishing short excerpts from the book ‘Against the Corporate Media, 42 Ways the Media Hates You’ which is due to be released next month. The above forms part of the introduction to the excerpt that she shared yesterday.

This excerpt highlights instances of journalists tailoring their reporting to the needs of spies and intelligence officials using leaks and surveillance to shape narratives. It also touches on the impact of digital media on journalism and the use of electronic surveillance for political purposes.

Spies and Journalists: A Very Special Relationship

By Elizabeth Nickson

At the London bureau of Time Magazine, both the bureau chief, former military intelligence and the deputy bureau chief filed to Langley and other organs of the National Security State. I know this because when my office was in use by a visiting grandee, I used their computers to file. The secret government has been embedded in media ever since Viscount Northcliffe, the owner of the Daily Mail, figured out how to stampede Britain’s working class into the First World War.

At present I am running short – 1-3 minute reads – excerpts from a new book, ‘Against the Corporate Media, 42 Ways the Media Hates You’ – a book of essays to which I contributed, along with forty-one others on just what happened. It will be published on 10 September. My purpose is that you come away from this somewhat enlightened as to what the hell happened and how a once respectable profession became seedy and dishonest. The book provides a clear direction towards root and branch reform. And perhaps you will buy the book.

Spies and Journalists: A Very Special Relationship

An excerpt from ‘Against the Corporate Media’, coming 10 September from Bombardier Books. ‘Spies and Journalists: A Very Special Relationship’, by Kyle Shideler. 

It’s hard to understate the irony of [Carl] Bernstein’s complaining about journalists collaborating with intelligence officials when he had served as the unquestioning recipient of leaks by Mark Felt, the onetime head of FBI counterintelligence, motivated by Felt’s bureaucratic beef against the elected president of the United States. Bernstein’s relationship with Felt can be thought of as the alternative model of intelligence-journalist cooperation, where the eyes of the intelligence services are not on foreign foes, but on domestic political and bureaucratic opponents.

Even in exposing the CIA’s relationship with journalists, Bernstein was likely little more than a patsy. As the late Angelo Codevilla observed from his time as a staffer on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, a leftwing faction of the intelligence services used the Church Committee and other revelations of bad behaviour, not to clean up shop but to target internal opponents – and to establish a dominance over the security organs which has never since been challenged. Instead of journalists being the eyes and ears of American spies, it’s now the spies who observe and report to their journalist assets, not to relay facts, but to spread narratives that serve the opaque purposes of the government mandarins.

Journalists seeking to remain in the good graces of the intelligence community have returned the favour by pre-emptively tailoring their reporting to the needs of the spies. The Intercept has reported how CIA favourite Ken Dilanian, first of the Los Angeles Times and later of the Associated Press, was one of several journalists who routinely gave the Agency pre-clearance of stories to ensure that the coverage portrayed the CIA in a positive light.

You really can’t hate them enough.

Cosiness between spies and journalists has grown exponentially worse as society has progressed further into the digital era. Media outlets have closed foreign news bureaus and sent veteran foreign correspondents into retirement. In their place have settled swarms of young, eager J-school grads, some responsible for writing as many as a half dozen articles a day, with no requirement for multiple sources and no fact-checking, posted to news websites where the ability to stealth-edit an error has replaced pro-active high-quality and knowledgeable editors. Eventually even writing articles became too time-consuming, and journalists now rush to scoop each other on social media, hammering out 140-character pieces for the benefit of their Twitter (now X) followers, who sometimes outnumber the total official subscribers of the outlets where they are employed.

These are the twenty-seven-year-olds who “literally know nothing” as former Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes once pointed out. Rhodes was describing the method by which, as an official in the Obama administration, he built a foreign policy “echo chamber” that would successfully spin a narrative to justify a nuclear deal with Iran. Rhodes’s partner in the scheme was a CIA officer seconded to the National Security Council, Ned Price. Price and Rhodes realised that reporters who lacked worldly experience or access to foreign correspondents of their own were completely reliant on intelligence officials in Washington to tell them what was really going on.

What little HUMINT capability the intelligence agencies had was decimated in the 1970s, thanks in part to Bernstein and company. So today the intelligence doyens of D.C. don’t really have any better understanding of the ways of the wider world than do the know-nothing journalists to whom they leak. But what the intelligence services do have is extensive electronic surveillance. And this tool also has been turned inward, in attempts to produce more goodies to leak to their aligned journalists.

Accompanying Rhodes’s narrative-shaping was the tactic of unmasking identities of Americans caught in electronic surveillance, which began with congressional opponents of the Iran nuclear deal who were surveilled while they spoke with Israeli officials also opposed to the deal. As Lee Smith, author of ‘The Plot Against the President’ has pointed out, the Iran deal surveillance was a dry run for the “Russian collusion” hoax launched against Donald Trump. The plot contained all the same elements: eavesdropping on political opponents engaged in conversations with foreigners – whether those conversations were legitimate, or the result of foreign assets being introduced by the services to justify surveillance – and using targeted leaks to favoured reporters to create a false but prevalent narrative which in turn justified more extensive surveillance.

Ironically, central to the scheme was the use of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (“FISA”) court, which had been instituted as a post-Church Committee reform, sold as an effort to rein in the intelligence community. Instead, provided they can sell their story to the court, the spies have carte blanche to indulge in bad behaviour with a judicially clear conscience. Exactly as Codevilla had repeatedly warned would happen. Like Bernstein with Felt, journalists are perfectly comfortable being the patsies of deep-throated spies if the target is a Republican and not some foreign foe.

About the Author

Elizabeth Nickson is a Canadian writer and journalist.  She began reporting for TIME, became European Bureau Chief of LIFE and has written for Harper’s, the Guardian, Observer, Independent, The Telegraph, The Sunday Times, The Globe and Mail, Bloomsbury, Knopf and Harper Collins US.  She is a Senior Fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy and has published several in-depth policy papers on environmentalism which you can find HERE.

As well as on her website, Nickson publishes articles on a Substack page titled ‘Welcome to Absurdistan’ which you can subscribe to and follow HERE.

She is not funded by any government, foundation, think tank or corporation. Please consider a paid subscription to fund her work. You can make a donation via PayPal.Me/ElizabethJNickson.