Ben Bagdikian, Visionary

[MinM]

1. Blacklist of advertisers on Air America Radio

Gravel was opposed to the war in Vietnam. He had filibustered on the floor of the Senate to block the draft. Ellsberg had given a copy of the papers to Ben Bagdikian, an editor at The Washington Post, on the condition that he give a copy to Sen. Gravel. Bagdikian met Gravel at midnight and transferred the papers from the trunk of one car to another outside The Mayflower Hotel. In order to enter these classified documents into the Congressional Record, Gravel found a loophole, which he recalled to me recently on the “Democracy Now!” news hour...

As Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Professor Ben Bagdikian puts it, whereas once the men and women who owned the media could fit in a “modest hotel ballroom,” the same owners (all male) could now fit into a “generous phone booth.” He could have added that, whilst a phone box may not exactly be the chosen venue for the likes of Rupert Murdoch and Sumner Redstone, these individuals do indeed meet at plush venues such as Idaho’s Sun Valley to identify and forge their collective interests...

Started in 1967, the CIA's Operation CHAOS was (is) an illegal domestic program to attack domestic dissent against the Vietnam War and activist groups in general.

When Ramparts Magazine started exposing CIA manipulation of Students for a Democratic Society and other illegal domestic tricks, Richard Helms cooked up a plan to target dissent under the cover of targeting terrorism...

One of Capital City's early founders was William Casey, who would later become Ronald Reagan's Director of the CIA. At the time of Casey's nomination, the press expressed surprise that Reagan would hire a businessman whose last-known intelligence experience was limited to OSS operations in World War II. The fact is, however, that Casey had never left intelligence. Throughout the Cold War he kept a foot in both worlds, in private business as well as the CIA. A history of Casey's business dealings reveals that he was an aggressive player who saw nothing wrong with bending the law to further his own conservative agenda. When he became implicated as a central figure in the Iran-Contra scandal, many Washington insiders considered it a predictable continuation of a very shady career...

By the 1980s, Capital Cities had grown powerful enough that it was now poised to hunt truly big game: a major television network. A vulnerable target appeared in the form of ABC, whose poor management in the early 80s was driving both its profits and stocks into oblivion. Back then, ABC's journalistic slant was indeed liberal; its criticism of the Reagan Administration had drawn the wrath of conservatives everywhere, from Wall Street to Washington. This was in marked contrast to the rest of the White House press corps, which was, in Bagdikian's words, "stunningly uncritical" of Reagan. Behind the scenes, Reagan was deregulating the FCC and eliminating anti-monopoly laws for the media, a fact the media appreciated and rewarded. The only exception was ABC. Sam Donaldson's penetrating questions during press conferences were so embarrassing to Reagan that his handlers scheduled the fewest Presidential press conferences in modern history...