Impeachment: The Deafening Silence Part 2: Going Deeper

The Content of Silence: Managers and Their Networks

In the 1993 August/September edition, the prestigious Dutch magazine Exposure outlined disturbing details about how the Tavistock Institute for Behavioural Analysis, premier behavioural research center in the world, planned to control the boards of the three major and most prestigious television networks in the United States: NBC, CBS and ABC. All three television networks came as spin-offs from the Radio Corporation of America (RCA). These organizations and institutions that theoretically are in "competition" with each other — this is part of the "independence" that ensures Americans enjoy unbiased news — are in fact closely interfaced and interlocked with countless companies and banks, making it an almost impossible task to untangle them.

According to then-U.S. Representative Bernie Sanders, NBC's owner General Electric is "one of the largest corporations in the world — and one with a long history of anti-union activity. GE, a major contributor to the Republican Party, has substantial financial interests in weapons manufacturing, finance, nuclear power and many other industries. Former CEO Jack Welch was one of the leaders in shutting down American plants and moving them to low-wage countries like China and Mexico."

NBC is a subsidiary of RCA, a media conglomerate. On RCA's board sits Thornton Bradshaw, president of Atlantic Richfield Oil, and member of the World Wildlife Fund, the Club of Rome, the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies, and the Council of Foreign Relations. Bradshaw is also chairman of NBC.

RCA's most legendary role, however, was the service it provided to British Intelligence during World War II. Of particular note: RCA's President David Sarnoff moved to London at the same time Sir William Stephenson (of Intrepid fame) moved into the RCA building in New York. During the war, Sarnoff was Eisenhower's top communications expert, overseeing the construction of a radio transmitter that was powerful enough to reach all of the allied forces in Europe. He campaigned for, and received, the honorary title of Brigadier General, and thereafter preferred to be known as "General Sarnoff." Today, the RCA directorate is made up of British-American establishment figures that belong to the other organizations such as the CFR, NATO, the Club of Rome, the Trilateral Commission, Bilderbergers, Round Table, etc.

Among the NBC directors named in the Exposure article were John Brademas (CFR, TC, Bilderberg), a director of the Rockefeller Foundation; Peter G. Peterson (CFR), a former head of Kuhn, Loeb & Co. (Rothschild), and a former U.S. Secretary of Commerce; Robert Cizik, chairman of RCA and of First City Bancorp, which was identified in Congressional testimony as a Rothschild bank; Thomas O. Paine, president of Northrup Co. (the big defense contractor) and director of the Institute of Strategic Studies in London; Donald Smiley, a director of two Morgan Companies, Metropolitan Life and U.S. Steel; and the above-mentioned Thornton Bradshaw, chairman of RCA, director of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Atlantic Richfield, and the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies (both of the latter headed by a Bilderberger, Robert O. Anderson). Clearly the NBC board is considerably influenced by the Rockefeller-Rothschild-Morgan troika, leading exponents of the New World Order initiative.

ABC is owned by the Disney Corporation, "which produces toys and products in developing countries where they provide their workers with atrocious wages and working conditions." It has 153 TV stations. Chase Manhattan Bank control 6.7% of ABC's stock — enough to give it a controlling interest. Chase, through its trust department, controls 14% of CBS and 4.5% of RCA. Instead of three competing television networks called NBC, CBS, and ABC, what we really have is the Rockefeller Broadcasting Company, the Rockefeller Broadcasting System, and the Rockefeller Broadcasting Consortium.

On the ABC board of directors is Ray Adam, director of J.P. Morgan, Metropolitan Life (Morgan), and Morgan Guaranty Trust; Frank Cary, chairman of IBM, and director of J.P. Morgan and the Morgan Guaranty Trust; Donald C. Cook (CFR, Bilderberg), general partner of Lazard Freres banking house, whose executives frequently attend Bilderberg meetings; John T. Connor (CFR) of the Kuhn, Loeb (Rothschild) law firm, Gravath, Swaine and Moore, former Secretary of the Nazy, U.S. Secretary of Commerce, director of the Chase Manhattan Bank (Rockefeller / Rothschild), General Motors, and chairman of the J. Henry Schroder Bank; Thomas M. Macioce, director of Manufacturers Hanover Trust (Rothschild); George Jenkins, chairman of Metropolitan Life (Morgan) and Citibank (Rothschild connections); Martin J. Schwab, director of Manufacturers Hanover (Rothschild); Alan Greenspan (CFR, Trilateral Commission, Bilderberg), chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, director of J.P. Morgan, Morgan Guaranty Trust, Hoover Institute, Time magazine, and General Foods; Ulric Haynes, Jr., director of the Ford Foundation and Marine Midland Bank.

Isn't it strange how the same Rockefeller-Rothschild-Morgan characters on the board of the ABC network, which, we are told, is independent of NBC, appear to represent the competition? ABC was taken over by Cities Communication, whose most prominent director is Robert Roosa (CFR, Bilderberg), senior partner of Brown Brothers Harriman, which has close ties with the Bank of England. Roosa and David Rockefeller are credited with selecting Paul Volcker to chair the Federal Reserve Board.

CBS is owned by Viacom, which has over 200 TV and 255 radio affiliates nationwide. This huge media conglomerate owns, among other companies, MTV, Showtime, Nickelodeon, VH1, TNN, CMT, 39 broadcast television stations, 184 radio stations, Paramount Pictures and Blockbuster Inc. As an American intelligence officer, CBS founder William Paley was trained in mass brainwashing techniques during World War II at the Tavistock Institute in England.

The financial expansion of CBS was supervised for a long time by Brown Brothers Harriman and its senior partner, Prescott Bush (father and grandfather to Presidents), who was a CBS director. The CBS board included Chairman Paley, for whom Prescott Bush personally organized the money to buy the company; Harold Brown (CFR), executive director of the Trilateral Commission, and former Secretary of the Air Force and of Defense of the U.S.; Roswell Gilpatric (CFR, Bilderberg), from the Kuhn, Loeb (Rothschild) law firm, Cravath, Swaine, and Moore, and former director of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York; Henry B. Schnacht, director of the Chase Manhattan Bank (Rockefeller/Rothschild), the Council of Foreign Relations, Brookings Institution, and Committee for Economic Development; Michel C. Bergerac, chairman of Revlon, and diretor of Manufacturer's Hanover Bank (Rothschild); James D. Wolfensohn (CFR, Trilateral Commission, Bilderberg), former head of J. Henry Schroder Bank, who has close links with the Rothschilds and the Rockefellers, and who in 1995 was successfully nominated to head the World Bank by Bill Clinton; Franklin A. Thomas (CFR), head of the Rockefeller-controlled Ford Foundation; Newton D. Minow (CFR), director of the Rand Corporation and, among many others, the Ditchley Foundation, which is closely linked with the Tavistock Institute of London and the Bilderberg Group. The former president of CBS was Dr. Frank Stanton (CFR), who is also a trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation and Carnegie Institution. So, are the Rothschild and the Rockefeller families, who are leading groups in the tightly controlled field of communications, answering directly to the Bilderbergers?

FOX News Channel, part of the FOX network, is owned by Rupert Murdoch, who owns a significant portion of the world's media. His network has close ties to the Republican Party and among his "fair and balanced" commentators is Newt Gingrich, former GOP Republican House speaker. Murdoch, needless to say, is a luminary in the secret Bilderberg Group. He has most recently added the Wall Street Journal to his empire.

All these network are closely interlocked with Bilderberg, the Council of Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission. How, then, can it possibly be claimed that the majority of Americans get their news from independent sources?

Daniel Estulin. The True Story of The Bilderberg Group

The Means of Silence: The Newsroom

Terkel: Most editors discourage reporting which the owner of their news organization might dislike. How does the individual reporter get the message?

Bagdikian: What the journalist is told, when there's something that doesn't fit in, is, "Nobody's interested in that." And that's, you know, it's an acceptable reason -- if it's true.

Dedman: It happens less often that the stories are actually written and then they're spiked. It's really more subtle than that. You have an idea, and then the editor says, "No, I don't think we'd be much interested in that." And that's all it takes.

Sydney Schanberg [former correspondent, city editor and columnist, New York Times]: It happens sort of by osmosis. There are no notes posted on the bulletin board, and senior editors usually do not tell desk editors, like the city editor, "We don't want you to cover this. We want you to cover that instead."

Rawls: "Gee, I don't know. How long do you think that would take?" "Gee, I don't know. Would you have to do any traveling? "Gee, I don't know. Do you what else have you got on your plate right now?" So all of those are negative expressions to the reporter, that's basically telling him, "There's not a lot of enthusiasm for this."

Cohen: Everybody plays the game. And if you're at NBC or CBS or ABC, I don't care where, you're going to play whatever game exists in that news organization. And if you know that they don't want certain kinds of stories at the top, then you're not going to do those stories.

Terkel: Frances Cerra, an award-winning investigative reporter, ignored the cues she was getting from her editors at the New York Times to play the game.

Frances Cerra: They wanted me, supposedly, to do the same kind of consumer reporting which I had specialized in at Newsday, which was investigative reporting.

John L. Hess [former editor, New York Times]: So when you take a young reporter who's hired full of beans, like Frances Cerra, and she wants to do a good, hard-hitting investigative reporting job, she found herself up against the editors. They were very unhappy with her.

Studs Terkel, Fear in the Newsroom

The Theory of Silence: Convenience

Every newspaper when it reaches the reader is the result of a whole series of selections as to what items shall be printed, in what position they shall be printed, how much space each shall occupy, what emphasis each shall have. There are no objective standards here. There are no conventions. Take two newspapers published in the same city on the same morning. The headline of one reads: "Britain pledges aid to Berlin against French aggression; France openly backs Poles." The headline of the second is "Mrs. Stillman's Other Love." Which you prefer is a matter of taste, but not entirely a matter of the editor's taste. It is a matter of his judgment as to what will absorb the half hour's attention a certain set of readers will give to his newspaper. Now the problem of securing attention is by no means equivalent to displaying the news in the perspective laid down by religious teaching or by some form of ethical culture. It is a problem of provoking feeling in the reader, of inducing him to feel a sense of personal identification with the stories he is reading. News which does not offer this opportunity to introduce oneself into the struggle which it depicts cannot appeal to a wide audience. The audience must participate in the news, much as it participates in the drama, by personal identification. Just as everyone holds his breath when the heroine is in danger, as he helps Babe Ruth swing his bat, so in subtler form the reader enters into the news. In order that he shall he must find a familiar foothold in the story, and this is supplied to him by the use of stereotypes. They tell him that if an association of plumbers is called a "combine" it is appropriate to develop his hostility; if it is called a "group of leading business men" the cue is for a favorable reaction.

It is in a combination of these elements that the power to create opinion resides. Editorials reinforce. Sometimes in a situation that on the news pages is too confusing to permit of identification, they give the reader a clue by means of which he engages himself. A clue he must have if, as most of us must, he is to seize the news in a hurry. A suggestion of some sort he demands, which tells him, so to speak, where he, a man conceiving himself to be such and such a person, shall integrate his feelings with the news he reads.

"It has been said" writes Walter Bagehot, "that if you can only get a middleclass Englishman to think whether there are 'snails in Sirius,' he will soon have an opinion on it. It will be difficult to make him think, but if he does think, he cannot rest in a negative, he will come to some decision. And on any ordinary topic, of course, it is so. A grocer has a full creed as to foreign policy, a young lady a complete theory of the sacraments, as to which neither has any doubt whatsoever."

Yet that some grocer will have many doubts about his groceries, and that young lady, marvelously certain about the sacraments, may have all kinds of doubts as to whether to marry the grocer, and if not whether it is proper to accept his attentions. The ability to rest in the negative implies either a lack of interest in the result, or a vivid sense of competing alternatives. In the case of foreign policy or the sacraments, the interest in the results is intense, while means for checking the opinion are poor. This is the plight of the reader of the general news. If he is to read it at all he must be interested, that is to say, he must enter into the situation and care about the outcome. But if he does that he cannot rest in a negative, and unless independent means of checking the lead given him by his newspaper exists, the very fact that he is interested may make it difficult to arrive at that balance of opinions which may most nearly approximate the truth. The more passionately involved he becomes, the more he will tend to resent not only a different view, but a disturbing bit of news. That is why many a newspaper find that, having honestly evoked the partisanship of its readers, it can not easily, supposing the editor believes the facts warrant it, change position. If a change is necessary, the transition has to be managed with the utmost skill and delicacy. Usually a newspaper will not attempt so hazardous a performance. It is easier and safer to have the news of that subject taper off and disappear, thus putting out the fire by starving it.

Walter Lippmann. Public Opinion

The Wish of Silence: Silence is Gold(en)

One common denominator of these and similar uses of silence is that they refer metaphorically to something which is either absent or ought to be absent.

Karlfried Knapp. Metaphorical and Interactional Uses of Silence

The Vehicle of Silence: The Medium is The Masses

The Political Sphere also only survives by a credibility hypothesis, namely that the masses are permeable to action and to discourse, that they hold an opinion, that they are present behind the surveys and statistics. It is at this price alone that the political class can still believe that it speaks and that it is politically heard, even though the political has long been the agent of nothing but spectacle on the screen of private life. Digested as a form of entertainment, half-sports, half-games (see the winning in American elections, or election evenings on radio or TV); it is like those old comedies of manners, at once both fascinating and ludicrous. For some time now, the electoral game has been akin to TV game shows in the consciousness of the people. The latter, who have always served as alibi and as supernumerary on the political stage, avenge themselves by treating as a theatrical performance the political scene and its actors. The people have become a public. The football match or film or cartoon serve as models for their perception of the political sphere. The people even enjoy day to day, like a home movie, the fluctuations of their own opinions in the daily opinion polls. Nothing in all this engages any responsibility. At no time are the masses politically or historically engaged in a conscious manner. They have only ever done so out of perversity, in complete irresponsibility. Nor is this a flight from politics, but rather the effect of an implacable antagonism between the class (caste?) which bears the social, the political, culture—master of time and history, and the formless, residual, senseless mass. The former continually seeks to perfect the reign of meaning, to invest, to saturate the field of the social, the other continually distorts every effect of meaning, neutralizes or diminishes them.

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Are the mass media on the side of power in the manipulation of the masses, or are they on the side of the masses in the liquidation of meaning, in the violence done to meaning and in the fascination that results? Is it the media which induce fascination in the masses, or is it the masses which divert the media into spectacle? Mogadishu Stammheim: the media are made the vehicle of the moral condemnation of terrorism and of the exploitation of fear for political ends, but, simultaneously, in the most total ambiguity, they propagate the brutal fascination of the terrorist act. They are themselves terrorists, to the extent to which they work through fascination. The media carry meaning and non-sense; they manipulate in every sense simultaneously. The process cannot be controlled, for the media convey the simulation internal to the system and the simulation destructive of the system according to a logic that is absolutely Moebian and circular—and this is exactly what it is like. There is no alternative to it, no logical resolution. Only a logical exacerbation and a catastrophic resolution.

Jean Baudrillard. In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities

The Paradigm of Silence: Official Truths

I have many friends among the mainstreamers, and I have sympathy for them. Their hands are tied. Their organizations are just too powerful. In decades past, musings about the Kennedy assassination never threatened the apple cart. The same cannot be said for such considerations by an agenda-setting corporation today.

Wondering about what really happened to TWA 800 on, say, ABC would have serious consequences. It would represent a powerful accusation that people could not ignore — as they have, say, The Press-Enterprise. The reporter could harbor little hope that he would win. He would know that the government would denounce him, with rage (as it has done to the skeptics, even prosecuting writer Jim Sanders and his wife). He would know that he might be professionally isolated, that other reporters might well describe him as a lunatic. And even if he stuck to his guns, he could have little hope that he would be shown to be right. And meantime, to the extent that anyone did take him seriously, he could well be seen as affecting global markets and come under huge pressure for doing so. The right-wing nuts who always said that one-world government would affect our sovereignty have a point: global media companies have to be as concerned with what sells in Singapore as well as in Seattle, which is hardly good news for the old free market of ideas.

That free market is alive and well, but it's marginalized. You have a wild and free debate of these issues in the fringe press, and on the internet, and no debate at all in the mainstream media.

This is hardly a new phenomenon, of course. The powerful have always published official truths. In Cuba they turned the cameras aside when Fidel fainted during a speech. In the kingdom of Tonga, where I've been to write a book, they do not allow public criticism of the king and members of the royal family. The old Soviet Union did not exactly embrace debate about communism. The American variant seems to be that in the headquarters of global capital, corporate media outlets cannot entertain serious questions about the legitimacy of the powers-that-be, even when spokesmen are shown to lie.

Philip Weiss, When Black Becomes White, from Into the Buzzsaw: Leading Journalists Expose the Myth of a Free Press

The Context of Silence: The Quest of the Wizard Behind the Curtain

It is of the nobility of man's soul that he is insatiable. For he hath a Benefactor so prone to give, that He delighteth in us for asking. Do not your inclinations tell you that the World is yours? Do you not covet all? Do you not long to have it; to enjoy it; to overcome it? To what end do men gather riches, but to multiply more? Do they not like Pyrrhus, the King of Epire, add house to house and lands to lands; that they may get it all? It is storied of that prince, that having conceived a purpose to invade Italy, he sent for Cineas, a philosopher and the King's friend: to whom he communicated his design, and desired his counsel. Cineas asked him to what purpose he invaded Italy? He. said, to conquer it. And what will you do when you, have conquered it? Go into France, said the King, and conquer that. And,what will you do when you have conquered France? Conquer Germany. And what then? said the philosopher. Conquer Spain. I perceive, said Cineas, you mean to conquer all the World. What will you do when you have conquered all? Why then said the King we will return, and enjoy ourselves at quiet in our own land. So you may now, said the philosopher, without all this ado. Yet could he not divert him till he was ruined by the Romans. Thus men get one hundred pound a year that they may get another; .and having two covet eight, and there is no end of all their labour; because the desire of their Soul is insatiable. Like Alexander the Great they must have all: and when they have got it all, be quiet. And may they not do all this before they begin? Nay it would be well, if they could be quiet. But if after all, they shall be like the stars, that are seated on high, but have no rest, what gain they more, but labour for their trouble? It was wittily feigned that that young man sat down and cried for more worlds to conquer. So insatiable is man, that millions will not please him. They are no more than so many tennis-balls, in comparison of the Greatness and Highness of his Soul.

Thomas Traherne. Meditations: First Century