an American not-for-profit co-op news agency headquartered in NYC and founded in 1846. Its members are U.S. newspapers and broadcasters. The AP is governed by an elected board of directors with Gary Pruitt as President and CEO. Britannica wrote that most news throughout the world disseminates from three major agencies: the Associated Press, Reuters, and Agence France-Presse. According to German historian Harriet Scharnberg who unearthed archive material, the AP news agency entered a formal cooperation with the Hitler regime in the 1930s, supplying American newspapers with material directly produced and selected by the Nazi propaganda ministry. The AP is also responsible for counting all votes in US elections.
The Associated Press published ONE story, an attempted “rebuttal,” to the movie ‘2000 Mules’, which proves through geo-tracking and video confirmation that Democrats used ballot trafficking to steal the 2020 election in a conspiracy that involved every single battleground state. AP hack Ali Swenson was assigned by her editors to take down the movie and failed in her politicized attempt. Maybe she’s a recent college grad. Her arguments were certainly not impressive. The AP disregards video evidence that ballot traffickers were making their “rounds” to the different drop boxes in the urban center.
Five giant corporations control 90 percent of US mass media. And direct links connect all five of these media conglomerates to the political establishment and the economic and political power-elites of the United States. These five conglomerates are Time Warner, Disney, Murdochs’ News Corporation, Bertelsmann of Germany, and Viacom (formerly CBS). Their control spans most of the newspapers, magazines, books, radio and TV stations, movie studios, and much of the web news content of the United States. These conglomerates are in large measure responsible for inculcating the social, political, economic, and moral values of both adults and children in the United States.2
It was not always like this. Immediately after World War II three out of four US newspapers were independently owned. But the media-control numbers have been shrinking ever since then due to mergers, acquisitions, and other processes. By 1983, 50 corporations controlled 90 percent of US media. But today just five giant conglomerates control 90 percent of what most Americans read, watch, and listen to.
It is notable and should be emphasized that all the five major media conglomerates are corporate members of the Council on Foreign relations. This organization is a US think-tank whose members have been instrumental in formulating US government policies resulting in sanctions, destabilization efforts, and outright military attacks on nations which have never attacked the US.
With the control of the money came the control of the news media. Kent Cooper, head of the Associated Press, wrote in his autobiography “Barriers Down“: “International bankers under the House of Rothschild acquired an interest in the three leading European agencies.” Thus the Rothschilds bought control of Reuters International News Agency, based in London, Havas of France, and Wolf in Germany, which controlled the dissemination of all news in Europe.
The iron grip of the “London Connection” on the media was exposed in the book by Ben J. Bagdikian “The Media Monopoly“, described as “A startling report on the 50 corporations that control what America sees, hears, reads“. Bagdikian, who edited the nation’s most influential magazine, the Saturday Evening Post, until the monopoly suddenly closed it down, reveals the interlocking directorates among the fifty corporations which control the news, but fails to trace them back to the five London banking houses which control them.
He mentions that CBS interlocks with the Washington Post, Allied Chemical, Wells Fargo Bank, and others, but does not tell the reader that Brown Brothers Harriman controlled CBS, or that the Eugene Meyer family (Lazard Freres) controlled Allied Chemical and the Washington Post, and Kuhn Loeb Co. (now part of Lehman Brothers) controlled the Wells Fargo Bank. He shows the New York Times interlocked with Morgan Guaranty Trust, American Express, First Boston Corporation and others, but does not show how the banking interlocks.
The AP has counted the vote in U.S. elections since 1848, including national, state and local races down to the legislative level in all 50 states, along with key ballot measures. The AP collects and verifies returns in every county, parish, city and town across the U.S., and declares winners in over 5,000 contests.
The news agency entered a formal cooperation with the Hitler regime in the 1930s, supplying American newspapers with material directly produced and selected by the Nazi propaganda ministry, archive material unearthed by a German historian has revealed. When the Nazi party seized power in Germany in 1933, one of its first objectives was to bring into line not just the national press, but international media too. The Guardian was banned within a year, and by 1935 even bigger British-American agencies such as Keystone and Wide World Photos were forced to close their bureaus after coming under attack for employing Jewish journalists.
Associated Press, which has described itself as the “marine corps of journalism” (“always the first in and the last out”) was the only western news agency able to stay open in Hitler’s Germany, continuing to operate until the US entered the war in 1941. It thus found itself in the presumably profitable situation of being the prime channel for news reports and pictures out of the totalitarian state.
In an article published in academic journal Studies in Contemporary History , historian Harriet Scharnberg shows that AP was only able to retain its access by entering into a mutually beneficial two-way cooperation with the Nazi regime. The New York-based agency ceded control of its output by signing up to the so-called Schriftleitergesetz (editor’s law), promising not to publish any material “calculated to weaken the strength of the Reich abroad or at home”.
This law required AP to hire reporters who also worked for the Nazi party’s propaganda division. One of the four photographers employed by the Associated Press in the 1930s, Franz Roth, was a member of the SS paramilitary unit’s propaganda division, whose photographs were personally chosen by Hitler. AP has removed Roth’s pictures from its website since Scharnberg published her findings, though thumbnails remain viewable due to “software issues”.
AP also allowed the Nazi regime to use its photo archives for its virulently antisemitic propaganda literature. Publications illustrated with AP photographs include the bestselling SS brochure “Der Untermensch” (“The Sub-Human”) and the booklet “The Jews in the USA”, which aimed to demonstrate the decadence of Jewish Americans with a picture of New York mayor Fiorello LaGuardia eating from a buffet with his hands.
Coming just before Associated Press’s 170th anniversary in May, the newly discovered information raises not just difficult questions about the role AP played in allowing Nazi Germany to conceal its true face during Hitler’s first years in power, but also about the agency’s relationship with contemporary totalitarian regimes.
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An AP spokesperson told the Guardian: “As we continue to research this matter, AP rejects any notion that it deliberately ‘collaborated’ with the Nazi regime. An accurate characterisation is that the AP and other foreign news organisations were subjected to intense pressure from the Nazi regime from the year of Hitler’s coming to power in 1932 until the AP’s expulsion from Germany in 1941. AP management resisted the pressure while working to gather accurate, vital and objective news in a dark and dangerous time.”
The new findings may only have been of interest to company historians, were it not for the fact that AP’s relationship with totalitarian regimes has once again come under scrutiny. Since January 2012, when AP became the first western news agency to open a bureau in North Korea, questions have repeatedly been raised about the neutrality of its Pyongyang bureau’s output.
In 2014, Washington-based website NK News alleged that top executives at AP had in 2011 “agreed to distribute state-produced North Korean propaganda through the AP name” in order to gain access to the highly profitable market of distributing picture material out of the totalitarian state. The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea comes second from bottom in the current World Press Freedom Index.
Continue Reading at The Guardian…
Associated Press = Associated Propaganda
by Michelle Malkin
If nothing else, the past two years have demonstrated with blazing clarity how the ruling elites live by one set of rules and impose an entirely separate set of rules on the unfavored, ostracized, dispossessed and deplatformed.
As a member of the print, broadcast and internet media for the past 30 years, I cannot emphasize enough how complicit so-called mainstream journalists are in perpetuating such double standards and stoking hatred of dissidents. The Fourth Estate will spare no one — not even the dead — in its ruthless pursuit of absolute power over political narratives.
Let us consider a widely disseminated hit piece by Associated Press investigative reporter Michael Biesecker published on Jan. 3. Here’s the bias-laden title that reads more like an MSNBC op-ed whine than a straight news headline:
“Ashli Babbitt a Martyr? Her Past Tells a More Complex Story.”
Ashli Babbitt, as you may know, is the 35-year-old Air Force veteran and Trump supporter shot and killed by a Capitol police officer one year ago this week during the Jan. 6 “Stop the Steal” rally in Washington, D.C. The fetid article under the fetid headline is victim-blaming at its rock-bottom lowest.
So, what exactly is the “more complex story” that the once-venerable AP wire service believes is so important for the public to know? Babbitt was involved in a complicated personal love triangle, had “bad blood” with her husband’s ex-wife, faced “numerous misdemeanors” related to a traffic encounter with the ex, and then was — wait for it, it’s buried deep down in the article — acquitted by a judge of all the criminal charges.
That’s it.
The rest of Biesecker’s steaming pile of vile is padded with disgruntled attacks against Babbitt by the still-seething ex-wife, plus extended point-and-sputter condemnations by the “investigative reporter” against Babbitt’s ideological stands and internet posts, topped off by resentful references to the fact that President Donald Trump and countless American citizens remain stalwart in their defense of Babbitt’s memory.
The AP makes a grand performative show of its commitment to fighting bias. “We must be fair,” its online statement on “news values and principles” asserts. “Whenever we portray someone in a negative light, we must make a real effort to obtain a response from that person.”
Just to reiterate: Ashli Babbitt is dead. She is unable to defend herself against the clearly calculated and anniversary-timed sliming and smearing by “investigative reporter” Biesecker. That doesn’t seem to have bothered the AP ethics gurus one bit. Biesecker’s bio touts his status as a “2019 Pulitzer finalist,” but his trashy piece of trash trashing Ashli Babbitt doesn’t even rise to the level of People magazine or TMZ. It’s pure manure.
Look: We all know if Ashli Babbitt had been black and had been shot and killed at a Defund the Police rally, the AP (which I’ve long said stands for Associated Propaganda) would be ramming the martyr narrative down our throats instead of debunking it. But because Babbitt and countless thousands like her were white Trump supporters, we’ve been bombarded with agitprop about how every single Jan. 6 protester was engaged in “riot,” “siege” or “insurrection” and whose “underlying grievance” about election integrity — to borrow AP’s own simp words for BLM and antifa’s agendas — is relentlessly framed as a dangerous “conspiracy theory” and “misinformation” instead of a legitimate concern.
I remind you that it was the AP that issued “stylebook” guidelines four months after BLM and antifa set America on fire after the George Floyd incident ordering its journalists not to use the term “riot” to describe the mayhem because it “suggests uncontrolled chaos and pandemonium” instead of focusing on the “underlying grievance” of black protesters against the system. The AP pooh-bahs advised their minions to employ the kinder, gentler euphemism “unrest” to describe “a condition of angry discontent and protest verging on revolt.”
I will also remind you that a year ago this week, the AP published a false story that then-President Trump had pressed a lead Georgia elections investigator to “find the fraud” and promised he would make the investigator a “national hero.” The AP was forced to acknowledge that a “recording of the call made public two months later revealed that Trump did not say either” and that it had “erroneously reported” the untruth. The retraction came two months after the original lie was manufactured.
Conspiracy theories and misinformation, anyone?
The power of the AP to deceive, defame and destroy cannot be understated. The organization, more than 170 years old, brags in its ethics statement that “more than half the world’s population sees AP news content on any given day.” Holier than thou as they commit their evil deeds, these propagandists pledge to report the news “accurately and honestly” while spitting on the graves of patriots.
Ashli Babbitt, your sacrifice will not be forgotten. Your honor will be defended.
Michelle Malkin’s email address is MichelleMalkinInvestigates@protonmail.com. To find out more about Michelle Malkin and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.
