Recently, an article from the Intercept went viral titled “The History Channel Is Finally Telling the Stunning Secret Story of the War on Drugs.”

It said:

“The good news for Grassley, and for everyone else, is that starting Sunday night and running through Wednesday the History Channel is showing a new four-part series called “America’s War on Drugs.” Not only is it an important contribution to recent American history, it’s also the first time U.S. television has ever told the core truth about one of the most important issues of the past 50 years.”

The Intercept makes the point that it’s an important milestone, the mainstream History Channel finally covering the truth about the war on drugs.

But if you know how insidiously propaganda works, one might see that it’s not a good thing at all. Do you trust the History Channel, the epitome of propaganda, to do any justice to this story? How naive do people have to be, expecting the story to be told honestly on the History Channel? Propaganda is much trickier than that.

To understand why they are the epitome of propaganda, let’s take a  look at who owns the A&E Network, which owns the history channel: General Electric.

General Electric is a piece of the US military industrial complex, involved with activities from building Fukushima’s nuclear reactors to early efforts at geoengineering. If one researches “General Electric military industrial complex,” they will find a treasure-trove of info.

To understand why nothing the History Channel says will be trustworthy, one simply has to understand how television is controlled, and exactly what entities pull the strings of television content through corporations such as General Electric.

Further, the Intercept is a half-truth-speaking, suspect organization as well. It was founded out of the partnership between Glenn Greenwald, and PayPal billionaire/power player Pierre Omidyar.

According to Wikipedia:

“The Intercept is an online publication launched in February 2014 by First Look Media, the news organization created and funded by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar. The editors are Betsy Reed, Glenn Greenwald, and Jeremy Scahill.”

The Intercept represents a different archetype of propaganda: gate-keeping from deeper layers of truth. They do an excellent job, however: there is no doubt a lot of quality content that comes from the Intercept, but as a whole they cannot be trusted, because they are Pierre Omidyar, and he is an undeniably shady individual belonging to powerful circles of people.

Perhaps the most thorough expose of Omidyar and Greenwald was by James Corbett, in his article titled “Secrets for Sale?: The Greenwald/Omidyar/NSA connection”:

“But for those who are concerned about the fact that Greenwald is hoarding documents in order to entice publishers and movie producers to bid up his projects, more concerning still are details of the new journalism venture that he is entering into with billionaire eBay magnate Pierre Omidyar.

But the question is again raised: if Greenwald has continued to hold back documents from The Guardian and other outlets for his own personal use, did he use the allure of those documents as bait to attract Omidyar’s investment? Is he, in fact, selling Snowden’s leaked documents to a billionaire?

At this point, we have only speculation to go on. Very few details of Greenwald’s agreement with Omidyar have been so far presented to the public, and unless some insider is to come forward with a leak speculation of the specifics of their business partnership remain in the realm of speculation. But we do know that at the end of September, Greenwald and Scahill revealed that they were working on a ground-breaking story containing new details on the NSA’s role in the US assassination program gleaned from Greenwald’s private stash of Snowden documents.

Two weeks later the $250 million deal with Omidyar was announced and talk of the assassination program expose stopped. Three months later, no further details have been released about the story, and whether or not it will appear as one of the first big ventures on Omidyar’s new news venture.

More worrying still are Pierre Omidyar’s role in this saga. That this billionaire co-founder of eBay is suddenly so concerned with the state of journalism that he is willing to drop a quarter of a billion dollars purchasing the services of the very man who is sitting on a trove of tens of thousands (or more) NSA documents is odd, especially considering that Omidyar’s record on civil liberties and his network’s connections to the NSA and Booz Allen Hamilton are enough to raise serious red flags about his new venture.

As principal shareholder and chairman of eBay, Omidyar controls eBay’s child company, PayPal. PayPal has recently made headlines for prosecuting the so-called “PayPal 14,” the hacktivists who staged a virtual ‘sit in’ in protest of PayPal’s decision to cut off Wikileaks’ funding by organizing a Denial of Service attack on PayPal’s website. PayPal was co-founded by Max Levchin, a dedicated NSA supporter.

More worrying still, Sal Gambianco, one of the principal investment partners with the Omidyar Network, actually sits on the board of advisors of Globant, a software company in which both the Omidyar Network and Booz Allen Hamilton, Snowden’s former employer, are major shareholders. Philip Odeen, one of the Booz Allen Hamilton board members, also sits on the Board of Directors of Globant. The Omidyar Network and Booz Allen Hamilton are also both major investors in Innocentive.

Yet somehow none of these concerns are enough for Greenwald’s most ardent supporters to even raise the question of how he is using his personal collection of leaked NSA files and who he is getting into bed with financially to do so.

One truly independent media figure who has raised this question publicly in recent days is Sibel Edmonds of Boiling Frogs Post. In a recent series of articles she has been reporting on the Greenwald-Omidyar-PayPal-NSA connection, and has exclusively reported that a retired NSA source is claiming that PayPal involvement in the NSA is explicitly mentioned in some of the documents that Greenwald has yet to share with the public. Greenwald has issued denials to the effect that he has not encountered any such information in the leaks, but has stated that he has no doubt that PayPal has a relationship with the NSA. However, to those presuming to ask questions about the possible conflict of interest of the lead NSA leak reporter teaming up with a man whose personal financial empire rests on a company that ‘undoubtedly’ has a relationship with the NSA, Greenwald is surprisingly quick to issue ad hominem attacks and surprisingly slow to issue a substantive refutation of this concern.”

If you’d like to watch a video about Omidyar and the Intercept, here is another one from James Corbett.

Why is this relevant? People must know where information comes from. There are a few archetypes of propaganda that can be garnered from this story: the blatant propaganda represented by the General Electric owned History Channel, and then the gatekeepers who satisfy the mild curiosity of those barely getting into seeking truth. The half-truth-speakers exist to prevent the mildly curious from digging deeper.

From Alex Jones, to the Intercept, to Oliver Stone, an archetypal diversion is taking place: either intentionally or accidentally, following figures and organizations instead of critically disseminating their info can lead to a warped perception of the truth.

It would benefit people to stay away from idols and figureheads, and more towards the info they present.

(Image credit: Sf)