MIKE BENZ: All of the initial broadcast news companies, NBC, ABC, and CBS were all created by the Office of War Information veterans from the War Department's effort in WWII.

Free speech is the bedrock of democracy.

That’s why it’s the FIRST Amendment.

Without free speech, all is lost. https://t.co/KfXodapTkA

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 16, 2024

19:42  Our mainstream media in any shape or form, even from its outset, independent from the national security state, from the State Department, from the War Department.  All of the initial broadcast news companies, NBC, ABC, and CBS were all created by the Office of War Information veterans from the War Department's effort in WWII.  You have these Operation Mockingbird relationships from the 1950s through the 1970s that continued through the use of the National Endowment for Democracy and the privatization of intelligence capacities in the 1980s under Reagan there is all sorts of CIA reading room memos you can read even on cia.gov about those continued media relations throughout the 1990s and so you always had this back door relationship between the Washington Post the New York Times and all of the major broadcast media corporations.  

20:39. By the way, Rupert Murdoch and FOX are part of this as well.  Rupert Murdoch was actually part of the National Endowment for Democracy Coalition in 1983 when it was formed as a way to do CIA operations in and above board way after the Democrats were so ticked off at the CIA for manipulating student movements in the 1970s.  

21:00. But essentially there was no CIA intermediary to random citizen journalists. There was no Pentagon backstop.  You couldn't get a story killed.  You couldn't have these favors for a relationship.  You couldn't promise access to some random person with 700,000 followers who's got an opinion on Syrian gas.  And so this induced . . . this was not a problem for the initial period of social media from 2006 to 2014 because there were never dissident groups that were big enough to be able to have a mature ecosystem on their own.  And all of the victories on social media had gone in the way of where the money was, which was from the State Department and the Defense Department and the Intelligence services.