Manufacturing Consent_ The Political Economy of the Mass Media - Edward S. Herman [123]
If we ask the deeper question of why these experts should predominate in the first place, we believe the answer must be found in the power of their sponsors and the congeniality of their views to the corporate community and the mainstream media. Their messages passed quite easily through the filters of a propaganda system. Sterling was funded and published by Reader’s Digest, which gave her enormous outreach and immediate brandname recognition. The conservative network is fond of Sterling, so their large stable of columnists and think-tank affiliates, like the Georgetown Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) and the American Enterprise Institute, pushes her views. The Reagan administration was also delighted with Sterling—despite her frequent denunciations of the CIA and the State Department for their cowardice in failing to pursue terrorism and the Bulgarian Connection with sufficient aggressiveness!—and so were the New York Times, Time, Newsweek, CBS News, and many others. Sterling was the outstanding popular expositor of the theme urged upon the conferees at the Jonathan Institute meeting of July 1979 and advocated by the Reagan administration team anxious to create a moral environment for an arms race and global support of counterrevolutionary freedom fighters.30 Henze, an old CIA hand and protégé of Zbigniew Brzezinski, was also funded by the Reader’s Digest, and Ledeen was affiliated with both the CSIS and the Reagan political team. If the media transmit literal lies by this Big Three—which they did frequently—the flak machines remain silent. As one network official told one of the authors, if a critic of the Bulgarian Connection were allowed on the air, the official would “have to make sure that every i was dotted and t crossed; but with Sterling, there were no problems.”
Again in conformity with a propaganda model, it was of no apparent concern to the mass media that Sterling, Henze, and Ledeen were exceptionally biased sources, immune to the rules of evidence and, in fact, agents of disinformation. We discussed earlier Sterling’s dismissal of Agca’s commitment to Turkes and her handling of Agca’s gun, and similar cases could be cited in large number.31 Sterling’s Terror Network is notable for its gullibility in accepting at face value claims fed her by Israeli, South African, and Argentinian secret police, and, most notably, the Czech Stalinist defector, Jan Sejna,32 whose evidence for a Soviet terror network came from a document forged by the CIA to test Sejna’s integrity!33 A remarkable feature of Sterling’s Time of the Assassins and other writings on the Bulgarian Connection is her reiterated belief that the Reagan administration and CIA dragged their feet in pursuing the Red plot because of their interest in détente.34 And despite her phenomenal sales and uncritical reception in the U.S. media, Sterling bemoaned the “accepted position, the socially indispensable position . . . if you care to move in certain circles and if you care to be accepted at your job professionally” in the West, of doubting the Bulgarian Connection, which she attributed to the success of the KGB in pushing a forty-page booklet on the plot by Soviet journalist Iona Andronov.35
These evidences of charlatanry did not impair Sterling’s credibility with the U.S. mass media—in fact, the New York Times allowed her front-page space and a regular role as a reporter of news on the Bulgarian connection. By doing this, the Times guaranteed that editorial policy would control the news fit to print. This was displayed fully in Sterling’s front-page news story of prosecutor Albano’s report on June 10, 1984. The most