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May 26, 2024 - RFK Jr. The Defender

32:53

CIA Propagandizing Americans with Weston Sager

Weston Sager discusses the Smith Mundy Act and how the C.I.A. uses propaganda with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in this episode.

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	Hey, everybody.
	Welcome back to the show.
	Today's guest is Weston Sager, who is the leading scholar on legal issues surrounding what he calls U.S. state media, and I would call it the Thank you.
	Thank you.
	His work has resulted in government investigations into and reforms of the federal agencies regarding their domestic propaganda practices, the dissemination of U.S. state media to American citizens.
	Weston is a partner at Sager& Smith, a New Hampshire-based law firm.
	He was an assistant attorney general in New Hampshire, and interestingly, he He graduated from Dartmouth College with a degree in Arabic language and literature, which sounds like a spy curriculum vitae.
	And then he went and researched Arabic language newspapers as a Fulbright scholar in Morocco.
	Wow.
	So I've read your writings now.
	It's really interesting.
	And you've settled in this niche.
	Which is absolutely, I think, critical today to the kind of the rise of totalitarian elements in this country and a major threat to democracy that comes from the U.S. Control of our media, of the domestic media, and the U.S. capacity to propagandize us.
	It's an interesting conversation now because of the TikTok ban, and I want to talk to you about that.
	But let's do a little bit of history because there was always a huge reluctance in Congress and knowledge from the beginning of our history.
	That it was dangerous to allow a government to propagandize the citizens of a democracy.
	Let's talk about the history of it, about how we started doing that.
	I'm happy to.
	So I think that it's probably best to start at the beginning of what I would consider to be modern propaganda, which was World War I. So under the Wilson administration, they formed the Committee on Public Information, which was this state media or propaganda, public diplomacy.
	I use those terms interchangeably.
	I prefer state media because it's a somewhat neutral term.
	So they were a state media agency that existed around World War I. And what they did is they saturated the American market with U.S. state media to support the war effort because At the time, America was very much on the fence about whether to support World War I and the extent to which it should be,
	you know, in support of joining the conflict and, you know, I would argue that Americans were overwhelmingly against getting in Brooklyn.
	In fact, Woodrow Wilson won the election with his promise to keep us out of that war.
	My grandfather was deeply, deeply embedded in anti-war efforts at that time.
	It was universal.
	Americans did not want to get involved in a war that was And to your point,
	that's probably why there was such an emphasis on this domestic state media machine that was pumping out massive quantities in every single format you could think of of U.S. state media.
	I mean, we're talking about newspaper texts, we're talking about spoken word, we're talking about art, we're talking about everything under the sun to try and generate support for this conflict that was very controversial at the time.
	And people were really critical of this, not everyone, but certain people were really critical of the CPI, thinking that it was peddling false information and that it was because of the amount of saturation it was doing that it was a backhanded attempt at censorship of the American free press.
	So, So after World War I, that died down, relatively speaking.
	And then the next sort of, I would say, major event happens in World War II with FDR and creating the Office of War Information.
	So the Office of War Information was this similar to the CPI, where it was...
	The CPI was disbanded after World War I, right?
	Correct.
	Yes, correct.
	Yes.
	So that's disbanded.
	And now we have, fast forward, You know, roughly 25, 30 years to World War II, and now we have, in the early 40s, FDR creating the Office of War Information, which had a similar aim, which was to generate support for this conflict, which was going to take a major toll on the American people and American resources.
	And part of that, you know, Office of War Information, that office was Voice of America, which was Created to counter Nazi propaganda in Europe.
	It was primarily a radio station, you know, founded in 1941, 1942, and that became under the umbrella of the Office of War Information.
	And the Office of War Information also, you know, had this very strong foreign propaganda, U.S. state media effort, but also it was very domestic as well.
	There was a lot of collaboration with Networks that were in existence at the time, ABC, CBS. There was a lot of collaboration with Hollywood to generate these propaganda shorts, U.S. state media shorts for consumption by the American people to generate support for the war.
	So again, you had another saturation period in World War II. After World War II, there was a bit of a die down because there was no real need for the U.S. state media effort that people thought at the federal government that this was essential to the war effort.
	But that was very short lived because members of federal leadership, members of Congress went abroad and they saw how much and how effective Soviet anti-American propaganda state media was.
	And they were immediately concerned that America was losing the battle for hearts and minds around the world.
	So this effort culminated in what's commonly known as the Smith-Munt Act, which passed in 1948.
	And this act established a peacetime, which was unusual, was not precedented in American history, arguably.
	That would allow the American government to have a robust international state media network to counter communist messaging, Soviet messaging, etc.
	So that, and the centerpiece of this was Voice of America, which was that radio station that was founded during World War II. So there was a controversy, though, that kind of came to the fore later on as to whether the original Smith-Munt Act in 1948 contained a ban on the domestic dissemination of U.S. state media, such as Voice of America broadcasts.
	In my research, I believe that there was, and I believe that there was for several reasons.
	First, the legislation really restricted how people could access these materials.
	They could really only access them at the State Department themselves, and only certain types of people could.
	The second thing is, after World War II, Americans were really tired of being propagandized by their government.
	So the odds of Congress wanting to do this Kind of reignite a domestic propaganda program was unlikely.
	The other issue was that the US time wanted to contrast themselves with the Soviet Union, which was widely believed to be inundating their people with propaganda.
	So that was an easy way for Congress to draw a firm distinction between, you know, free and loving and democratic America versus, you know, the totalitarian Soviets.
	Another issue was that the private broadcasters, as more of an economic consideration, didn't want to compete with a large-scale federal broadcaster in this country.
	So there was no appetite from the private sector to have the federal government act like they did during World War II, where they were really instrumental in generating media for the American people.
	So, that ban, which I call a de facto ban, became permanent in 1972.
	And then again, there was another piece of legislation that was passed in 1985 that did much the same thing.
	But if we go backwards a little bit, there was...
	What exactly did it do?
	It prohibited...
	Government-funded propaganda from reaching the American people or targeting or reaching the American people?
	Just reaching.
	You couldn't even access it.
	The targeting American people arguably is still illegal to this day, but now with the repeal of the domestic dissemination ban in 2013, now these U.S. state media outlets can disseminate and people can access the state media that they produce and Americans can access these materials You know, via the website, they can go to the agencies themselves, that type of thing.
	But one note I really want to touch on is the CIA's involvement also with U.S. state media.
	So this is a wild story.
	Despite the Smith-Munt Act and Voice of America and this Widespread support for international media broadcasting in the early 1950s, the CIA covertly funded and founded another US state media outlet called Radio Free Europe and also Radio Liberty, which were broadcasting primarily in Eastern Europe, you know, and the Soviet Union.
	And this covert funding went on for about 20 years until investigative journalists and members of Congress figured out that, wait a minute, the CIA is actually funding Radio Free Europe.
	And the reason I think the CIA did not want to disclose its involvement in Radio Free Europe, these state media radio stations, was because it gave the appearance that this was an organic movement rather than something coming from the American government.
	Which has been sort of a theme throughout this whole development of this state media empire that the US government has created, which is not wanting to necessarily come forth and disclose the fact that Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty, these other outlets are in fact fully funded by the federal government and are controlled by the federal government, I would argue, and also have to advocate for US policies.
	And you mentioned the CIA propagandizing through Radio Free Europe, but they were also operating Operation Mockingbird at that time, which was a covert operation that allowed the CIA to control through funding, through blackmail, through bribery.
	And through other incentives, journalists all over the world, but including, and then in 1973, Carl Bernstein published an article for Rolling Stone in which he talked about the 400 leading journalists in our country and editors who were actually part of this program and that their job was to propagandize the American people.
	And my memory of that was that the CIA then agreed to dismantle that program.
	in the United States domestically, which was clearly illegal under the Smith-Bunt Act.
	But they continued to fund journalism abroad, and mainly, I think, through USAID, which spends about $10 billion a year, and is the largest funder of journalism on Earth, and is funding and owning leading newspapers in countries all over the and is funding and owning leading newspapers in countries all over Is that an accurate summary in your view?
	I can't speak to all of what you said, but I can speak to some of what you said, in that there is a pretty good record of the CIA funding programs in the United States during the Cold War, including the abstract art movement, because they thought that was a contrast showing, you know, the freedom of expression and creativity of the American people versus the Soviet Union.
	I mean, there was a good deal of CIA involvement in funding different journalistic enterprises and artistic enterprises, cultural concepts in the United States and elsewhere that I'm familiar with.
	And when I first discovered that in the course of my research, I was blown away because I had no idea that part of our, you know, going to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, you know, some of those works may have been initially funded in part, at least by the CIA. It's...
	Pretty remarkable stuff.
	I wasn't aware of that either.
	You mean they were funding art?
	Yes, they were funding art, yes.
	That's really interesting.
	I'll tell you just a side note that it doesn't really have much to do with anything, but my father was one of the first people allowed into parts of the Soviet Union in the late 1950s, and my mother went with them with a delegation, My aunt Eunice Shriver, my mother, and a couple of other people, and they were invited by the Soviet government.
	My uncle was the U.S. Senator who was on the Foreign Affairs Committee in the United States Senate and was a prospect for running for president.
	They all went over there, and they were the first Westerners allowed into the Hermitage, which is the big art museum in St.
	Petersburg.
	And before she went over, the CIA met with my mother and they gave her a little corsage that she was, they wanted to know about the paintings that were in the hermitage because a lot of those paintings had been captured by the Russians during World War II and they were,
	you know, they had been stolen from their owners by the Nazis and then they were captured by the Russians and brought back The CIA, for some reason, was intensely interested in what art they had over there.
	So they asked my mother, when she went on the tour of that museum, they gave her a little bubble to hold in her hand.
	And every time she squeezed it, her corsage had a camera hidden in it that would take a picture in the center of her flower.
	And she took pictures of all these and then was debriefed when she came back by the CIA. The only reason I say that is because I did not know about the CIA's interest in art until you just told me that.
	I'll say this too.
	My daughter-in-law, who's running my campaign, Amarillo Stocks, Was a spy in Asia and in the Weapons of Mass Destruction Program in the Mideast.
	And her commercial cover was as an art dealer.
	So that was her cover out there.
	So anyway, these are all three disconnected stories about the CIA and art.
	Anyway, go ahead.
	Let's get back on it.
	So returning back to the Smith-Munt Act and sort of the history of that, I mean, I could teach a college course on this, probably.
	So just the Smith-Munt Act and U.S. state media, it's a vast topic.
	So I'll try and hit the highlights.
	So the next highlight is in 2013, which I alluded to earlier, which is the repeal of the domestic dissemination ban.
	Now, the reason for the repeal of the domestic dissemination ban was multifaceted.
	People thought that with the advent of the internet and other forms of electronic communication that the domestic dissemination ban was just simply unenforceable.
	People could just access this information whenever they wanted anyway.
	The other reason for it was to actually try and reduce domestic terrorism.
	So it was a national security measure.
	The idea was if the federal government could disseminate information within the United States to certain diaspora communities, often who are not speaking English on a regular basis, that would be helpful to sort of spreading American media to certain groups to help prevent homegrown terrorists from You know, wreaking havoc in this country.
	So they had these...
	This is during the Obama administration.
	Yes.
	It's 2012 and 2013.
	So it's 10 years after 9-11.
	But the internet is now growing, you know, and the war on terror is now in full bloom.
	Exactly.
	And that's what's going on here.
	So that's the exact right context.
	So it was thought to be just a method of dealing with that potential issue.
	There was another issue, which was to promote government transparency.
	So taxpayers are paying for these materials to be disseminated abroad, might as well also allow these same taxpayers to access them and study them and research them, like I do.
	So those are the three main considerations for why this was repealed, at least on paper.
	I don't get the transparency issue.
	What does that have to do with it?
	So before the repeal of the domestic dissemination ban, theoretically, we couldn't access those materials legally.
	There was a case, I think, in the late 80s, where someone tried to do a Freedom of Information Act request for U.S. state media materials, and that was denied.
	So it was one of these things where you couldn't even access these materials on a regular basis, at least legally.
	That said, the USAGM, or then the Broadcasting Board of Governors, these are the supervisory, the U.S. Agency for Global Media, which is the current name.
	Back then it was the Broadcasting Board of Governors.
	Before that, it was the U.S. Information Agency.
	They've gone through many different iterations over the years, but they just couldn't disseminate these materials in this country.
	It was forbidden.
	In 1990, Congress did allow materials that were 12 years old or older to be distributed in the United States.
	People could access those because they were thought to be free of the ability to propagandize people.
	But if you wanted instant access, you could not do it before 2013, at least legally.
	But again, as a practical matter, you probably could just by logging on to like voanews.com or the Radio for Europe website because they weren't really making a very big effort to prevent Americans from accessing those materials.
	So where are we today, I think, you know, in terms of and where do you think we should be on this?
	So where we are today is it's a very uncertain time.
	We had a lot of Developments in the last decade since the domestic dissemination ban was lifted.
	My colleague, I was a Syracuse professor and I, we found through a Facebook ad database that the USAGM, the U.S. Agency for Global Media, was targeting Americans with Facebook ads, which is against the law, even under the revised Smith-Munt Act and even after lifting the domestic dissemination ban.
	And this It set off a whole firestorm within the federal government where the head of Radio Free Europe, and Radio Free Europe was the agency that was really responsible for disseminating these Facebook ads, he's had to step down.
	There was a report that was released in December 2018 that found even more widespread targeting of Americans, over 860 violations of the Smith-Mundt Act through social media ads.
	And also in a separate investigation, they found that something like over half a million Americans were exposed to US state media, which again is in violation of the current federal system, federal laws.
	So that was a major controversy.
	And then we had another major controversy under the Trump administration.
	So what happened before there was...
	So the Broadcasting Board of Governors, the USAGM, they were originally a bipartisan part-time board that oversaw all US state media in this country.
	And there was a federal report that came out saying, this is very inefficient.
	These guys, it's ineffectual.
	There's a lot of infighting.
	This isn't working very well.
	So the Broadcasting Board of Governors, USAGM, asked Congress to give them a CEO That could more adeptly and more nimbly take care of the day-to-day operations of U.S. state media in this country.
	So they got their wish, and in late 2016, early 2017, through a very large piece, the National Defense Authorization Act, which is this massive, massive defense spending bill, They passed these reforms to the leadership of the USAGM BBG. And what happened is that this CEO,
	this new position that they had created, had immense power to shape the US state media agencies to basically reflect The White House's desires.
	And that's exactly what happened.
	So Donald Trump nominated an individual named Michael Pack, who was a conservative filmmaker.
	And he was confirmed after a very lengthy process in June 2020, in the middle of the pandemic.
	And what he did was he cleaned house.
	The people who didn't resign, he fired and he replaced them with Trump loyalists really across the board.
	There were reports that came out subsequently that found that he was trying to make this U.S. state media agency, the USAGM, which is supposed to be editorially independent, into a mouthpiece for the Trump administration.
	And I think it speaks volumes because in 2021, one of the first things that President Biden did was remove Michael Pack from office.
	Congress also acted on this out of concern over the US state media agencies becoming politicized and they reformed them at the end of 2020 so that the CEO wouldn't have quite the same amount of power.
	But the rough structure is still there with the CEO really managing the day-to-day operations of this agency.
	So, where we are today is that the US state media is in a better place than certainly it was back in 2017 through 2020, in that it's less likely to politicize Americans, but we're still quite at risk because the domestic dissemination ban is the lifting of it, I should say.
	The federal government has been caught targeting Americans with US state media.
	The amount of viewership for the US state media agencies has increased dramatically in recent years.
	It is now, by my last check, over 450 million weekly viewers globally.
	And it's a billion dollar a year funded organization, which is not a lot by federal government standards, but by media standards, that's an immense amount of money.
	And what are the outlets?
	I mean, where would I watch if I wanted to watch a state on media?
	Where would I watch it?
	So there's five main outlets.
	I'll say that first.
	There's Voice of America.
	There's the Office of Cuba Broadcasting.
	There's Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia, and the Middle East Broadcasting Networks.
	Those are considered to be the five major state media outlets.
	some other pieces of the U.S. state media empire, but those are the main players.
	And if you, And if you, the easiest way to do this is you can just log on to your laptop and type in voanews.com and it'll bring you to the Voice of America website.
	And you can read news-like articles that they post there about world politics, about American politics, about cultural issues.
	If you go to the Radio Free Europe website, you'll find similar content, but the Radio Free Europe website, I would say, is much more aggressive in their messaging, much more anti-Russia, much more anti-Iran and, you know, American rivals.
	And they really focus more on Eastern Europe and Central Asia.
	So you can go, any American can go there.
	Part of the problem, though, from my perspective is that you know and I know that this is state media, this is propaganda, but they being Voice of America, federal government, isn't disclosing in the way that I believe they should that these are government-funded and Outlets that are attempting to advance U.S. policies.
	Because it's voanews.com.
	It makes it seem like that's an independent media entity, not a government entity.
	And the same is true for Radio for Europe.
	Their website is rferl.org.
	It should be.gov.
	So, to me, the problem is that Americans...
	They don't know.
	And they think that they're engaging with an independent media outlet.
	And it's somewhat dishonest, in my opinion, because if they were to know that they were, in fact, engaging with the American government, I think they would look at the material differently and consume it differently.
	And I don't think there's necessarily anything wrong with the American government putting forth their perspective on things.
	But I think it is wrong for them to try and claim that this is someone else's perspective, an independent perspective.
	And does the Smith-Munt Act prohibit the intelligence agencies from propagandizing us?
	The Smith-Munt Act does not.
	However, there's other parts of the federal code that do prohibit, at least on paper, covert action in this country.
	And also, according to my best knowledge, the Department of Defense has looked towards the Smith-Munt Act for guidance as to how it should be distributing materials in this country.
	So again, though, the words and the laws of the federal government and the actions of the federal government aren't always aligned.
	So it's just very important for the American people to be on alert if they see anything that they think is Maybe not on the up and up coming from the federal government because very few Americans know that, at least with the Smith-Munt Act, that the American government can disseminate these materials because they didn't have to worry about it for 65 years.
	It's only in the last decade that Americans have needed to be aware of this potential issue.
	So, and what do you think we should be doing?
	So there's many different approaches to this, and it depends sort of on your view of how U.S. state media should be disseminated or used or not used in this country.
	Probably the simplest thing would be to reinstitute the domestic dissemination ban and to say, hey, federal government, you can't be trusted to not target Americans, and also put some teeth in that legislation, because my concern is that When the federal government has overstepped its boundaries, there hasn't really been much disciplinary action or repercussions for those in charge.
	So having some new legislation, a new domestic dissemination ban with teeth would certainly be a very straightforward way to help protect Americans and shield Americans from being propagandized by their own government.
	Another way would be to have a domestic dissemination ban, but also to promote transparency by allowing people to access materials that are a certain amount of time old, like the 12 years old that Congress passed in 1990, maybe shortening that timeline a little bit, two years, three years, five years, something like that.
	Another method, which I advocate in actually the first piece of research that I published through Northwestern University Law Review, Is to just have better government attribution of these materials, and that can come through legislation.
	So saying that, hey, this is a government production, it should have a label on it that says produced by the US government, and everything would have a label so that way Americans and others understand what they are consuming better than they do now.
	Those are a few options.
	And actually, on the last one, the attribution, there was legislation introduced in 2005 called the Truth in Broadcasting Act that would have done that.
	It failed to gain traction in Congress, but it was this attempt by The federal government, federal leadership, to have government materials be labeled in such a way that people knew what they were consuming.
	And that was in response to the Bush administration and the federal government at that time distributing these things called video news releases, which were these prepackaged news stories that didn't necessarily have government attribution that were being re-aired on private broadcasters.
	So that was something that I think people were kind of ticked off about because they felt that they were consuming material that was actually produced by the U.S. government, but they did not necessarily know that.
	Last question.
	What is the danger?
	Summarize for us the danger of having a government that is operating these news sites without being clear about where people are getting their news.
	Well, I think the news sites is the first step, but it's really what could happen, which is the major issue.
	So if the US government wanted to, with the current law, and probably some tweaks to the law would need to occur, but it has so much manpower and so much funding, That it could,
	in a short amount of time, overwhelm the independent media in this country and really compromise the free and independent press as we know it, and make America akin to a totalitarian regime like, you know, Russia or China or some of these other places.
	The concern, I think, is rooted in In also this effort by the federal government to counteract foreign disinformation.
	So I'm not going to sit here and say that foreign disinformation is not a big issue.
	It is.
	But the issue is, how do we address that?
	Okay?
	So we have disinformation coming from Russia, China, and other actors.
	And the question is, how do you address that problem?
	A lot of people are advocating for the federal government to come in and correct the record and say, hey, this is actually what's going on.
	This is the truth.
	This is what Americans should be doing and thinking.
	And if that's allowed to continue, there's certainly a bit of a trajectory.
	That's where a lot of federal government leaders are thinking that that's what we should be doing.
	I could very easily see this becoming a major issue whereby the federal government is inserting itself into free public discourse and becoming a dominant player in the media space to the expense of free public discourse and independent media outlets.
	So it's something that I think is best addressed at this point by the American people and by social media platforms and others to effectively label These U.S. state media outlets, because if people at least know what's going on and they can at least recognize what the American government is doing, hopefully we'll never get to that point.
	Weston Zegard, thank you very, very much.
	Thanks for educating us about the Smith-Bundt Act and the phenomena of state-owned media.
	Thank you so much.

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