The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) penetrated US media organizations decades ago to suppress and censor the freedom of press and news broadcasting, says an American academic and analyst.
“Suppression of reports about the brutal, sadistic murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Turkey is only the latest manifestation of censorship by the [US] media of where the CIA began infiltrating newspapers and radio back in the 1950s,” said James Henry Fetzer, a retired professor of philosophy at the University of Minnesota.
“The United States today has become a world dominated by mass illusions because of the propaganda by network news [outlets],” Fetzer told Press TV on Thursday.
“It’s a great tragedy in a country that is purportedly committed to freedom of speech and freedom of the press, but that’s the way it is today in the USA,” he added.
A senior Arab journalist has disclosed how he and his family members had been pressured and threatened over his bid to condemn the Saudi government in US media for killing his dissident colleague Jamal Khashoggi.
Just one year ago on October 2, Khashoggi entered the Saudi consulate in Istanbul to obtain papers to marry his fiancée but never exited the building. Audio tapes that the Turkish government later shared with the world verified that he had been killed and then dismembered by 15 Saudi hitmen.
On the first anniversary of his death, Arab journalist Hassan Hassan – a co-author of best-selling 2015 book ‘ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror’ and a leading columnist – sent a series of tweets to disclose how Saudi operatives in the US pressure journalists to discourage them from publishing articles against Riyadh, and how such censorship has become normal in the US media.
Hassan says even his family members living in the UAE and Saudi Arabia were put at risk after he finally published his article regarding Riyadh’s role in the assassination of Khashoggi.
The journalist says Arab operatives, including a “senior” official, even pressured his new American employer, The Atlantic, not to hire him because of his critical articles about Saudis and Emiratis.