He kept himself occupied pounding, pressuring, harrassing, threatening, and worse corporate newspaper journalists who were still attempting to give the US public some idea of what was going on in Central America during Iran/Contra. Otto Reich, Cuban-American "exile" creep actually got into some trouble, legally for his excesses, as hard as that is to believe, considering the clout the right-wing has had, for decades.
He threatened journalists who were reporting from locations in Central America, fed stories that they were consorting with prostitutes, even with gay, male prostitutes, on, and on, and on, and on..... There's a whole lot about him to be located easily in any quick search.
Here's something from the Washington Post:
REAGAN'S PRO-CONTRA PROPAGANDA MACHINE
By Robert Parry and
Peter Kornbluh September 4, 1988
AS THE IRAN-CONTRA affair moves onto the dusty library shelf of history, one of its most troubling stories remains untold. To a degree little understood even by the congressional investigating committees, the Reagan administration attempted to manipulate American views of the war in Nicaragua through an unprecedented, covert propaganda bureaucracy.
The apparatus was coordinated by the National Security Council staff, used CIA experts and Army psychological-warfare specialists and worked to intimidate or discredit those who stood in the way of military aid for the contras. Ultimately, the campaign came to resemble the sort of covert political operation the CIA runs against hostile forces overseas but is outlawed from conducting at home.
. . .
The troubling aspects of the domestic propaganda operation include:
A CIA link. Iran-contra documents show that the propaganda campaign's chief architects were the late CIA director William J. Casey and Walter Raymond Jr., a veteran of CIA clandestine media operations overseas. In 1982, Casey detailed Raymond to the NSC staff where he set up the "public-diplomacy" machinery. One U.S. official described Raymond in an interview as the CIA's leading propaganda expert; Raymond told congressional investigators he was recommended for the NSC staff by another CIA veteran, Donald Gregg, national security adviser to Vice President George Bush.
One senior NSC official acknowledged in an interview that the public-diplomacy apparatus was modeled after CIA covert operations overseas. "They were trying to manipulate {U.S.} public opinion . . . using the tools of Walt Raymond's tradecraft which he learned from his career in the CIA covert-operation shop," the official said. To sidestep legal bars on CIA domestic activities, Raymond retired from the CIA in April 1983 so that, as he said in his deposition for the Iran-contra committee, "there would be no contamination of this."
Psy-war specialists. To staff the State Department public-diplomacy office on Central America, the administration recruited Defense Department personnel with propaganda training. One high-level operative, Lt. Col. Daniel "Jake" Jacobowitz, had a "background in psychological warfare," a senior public-diplomacy official, Jonathan Miller, told the Iran-contra committee. The office drew five other psy-war specialists from the 4th Psychological Operations Group at Fort Bragg, N.C. One was assigned to find "exploitable themes and trends," Jacobowitz wrote in a May 30, 1985 internal memo. The military men worked in the State Department office for stints ranging from several months to about a year.
According to military doctrine, psychological operations identify cultural and political weaknesses in a target country that can be exploited to induce the population to comply, whether consciously or not, with those carrying out the psy-op.
More:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1988/09/04/reagans-pro-contra-propaganda-machine/42d256fc-9d93-4174-b629-06d91f9124c6/?utm_term=.cd4db991a75c
~ ~ ~
MAY 7, 2001 ISSUE
Lie to the Media, Get a Job
By Eric AltermanTwitter APRIL 19, 2001
Perhaps I underestimate the joy of being given a silly nickname by the Leader of the Free World, but I’m having a hard time understanding why media big feet are so taken by the nation’s new Charmer in Chief. Leave aside the extreme right-wing agenda he’s pursuing when by any fair measure of voting he lost the election. Forget that he began his term by breaking his key campaign promises. And ignore his frequent and unapologetic lies about his commitment to bipartisan governance. What about the fact that, perhaps more than any President since Nixon, Bush holds the media and its denizens in utter contempt?
Take for example Bush’s decision to appoint Otto Reich to head the Latin American office in the State Department. As Peter Kornbluh discusses elsewhere in this issue [see “Bush’s Contra Buddies,” page 6], Reich’s job in the Reagan Administration was simply to lie to (and about) the media. He did it very well. According to Walter Raymond–the CIA propaganda specialist whom William Casey transferred to the National Security Council in order to circumvent the 1947 National Security Act, which restricted CIA involvement in domestic propaganda operations–the purpose of Reich’s Office of Public Diplomacy was to “concentrate on gluing black hats on the sandinistas and white hats on the UNO [contras].” Staffed by senior CIA officials with backgrounds in covert operations, military intelligence and psychological warfare, the OPD offered privileges to favored journalists, placed ghostwritten articles over the signatures of contra leaders in leading opinion magazines and on Op-Ed pages, and publicized nasty stories about the Sandinistas, true or not. In its first year, it sent attacks on the Sandinistas to 1,600 college libraries, 520 political science faculties, 122 editorial writers, 107 religious organizations and countless reporters, right-wing lobbyists and members of Congress. It booked advocates for 1,570 lecture and talk-show engagements. In just one week of March 1985, the OPD officers bragged in a memo of having fooled the editors of the Wall Street Journal into publishing an Op-Ed about Nicaragua penned by an unknown professor, having guided an NBC news story on the contras and having written and edited Op-Ed articles to be signed by contra spokesmen, as well as having planted false stories in the media about a visiting Congressman’s experiences in Nicaragua.
Among the OPD’s lies were stories that portrayed the Sandinistas as virulent anti-Semites, that reported a Soviet shipment of MIG jets to Managua and that purported to reveal that US reporters in Nicaragua were receiving sexual favors–hetero- and homosexual–from Sandinista agents in exchange for pro-Communist reporting. That last lie, published in the July 29, 1985, New York magazine, came directly from Reich.
More:
https://www.thenation.com/article/lie-media-get-job/
ETC., ETC.
~ ~ ~
It does seem as if Macri is stepping up his war upon dissent, doesn't it? Do you think he feels embolden by the growing fascist power in the Americas, especially encouraged by having a real super-scum headed for the Presidency right next door in Brazil? Two biggest countries in South America, with so many citizens affected by their decisions. So many people to control through fear. That's how the right-wing does it.
It would take a dedicated nazi-in-hiding not to acknowledge the familiar habit of using the media to mold the public's opinion of people the fascist presidents want to destroy, in order to get by with radical, murderous suppression. That's their thing. Keeps newspapers like Argentina's Clarín news corporation, and El Mercurio, in Chile clicking right along decade after decade after decade, when they have operated by white-washing even the most monstrous, fiendish, brutal criminality against the populations. They are not newspapers, they are propaganda organs.
Thank you, so much for this thread, and the very unhappy news about direct attacks on workers, from the back, yet, on their way to even more evil events.
= new reply since forum marked as read
