The Victory Of ‘Perception Management’
Joe Lauria: On CN Live! Wednesday night, as we were interviewing journalist Matt Taibbi of Twitter Files fame about the psychological aspects of Russiagate, I thought back to one of Robert Parry’s major revelations for Consortium News: the existence of a C.I.A. perception management program begun during the Reagan administration. It had the aim of selling false stories to the American people to further the interests of the national security state.
There had been previous programs of deception run by the C.I.A., including infiltrating the media and the arts. But the Reagan-era program was geared to a post-Vietnam public that had grown dangerously wise to U.S. militarism and official lying.
Parry discovered the documents outlining the program while rooting around in the Reagan presidential library archives, and he first wrote about it in CN on June 30, 2008 when he broke the story.