Anyone around at the time remembers Bell’s admittedly brilliant campaign to get Thatcher elected with billboards crowing that “Labour Isn’t Working” in 1979. The magnetic centre of Influence is Lord Bell himself, the company’s charismatic and probably sociopathic founder whose blunt acumen as an ad-man was harnessed by Margaret Thatcher early in her leadership of the UK Conservative Party. Made by Richard Poplak and Diana Neille, the tremendously entertaining Influence proposes an origin story for the modern alliance of politics and perception management with its look at the work of Bell Pottinger, a high-end British PR firm notorious for stoking violent unrest in South Africa prior to the end of Apartheid. Each is valuable in its own right, and each inadvertently exposes its role in the endless game of political truth-shaping. Wading into this fuzzy world of mis-and-disinformation are three movies playing at this year’s KDocs Film Festival. Others, including GrayZone journalist Aaron Mate, have pointed out that Bellingcat’s funding and consistently pro-NATO orientation suggest a more insidious and dishonest agenda. In the last five years, the independent online news outlet Bellingcat garnered a slew of awards for its mix of investigative and citizen journalism, representing to some observers the vanguard of the new free press. Social media has provided something of a harbour for dissident speech, but only inside a murky stew of bad faith actors doing what Mockingbird set out to achieve half a century ago. ![]() Public broadcasters in Canada and especially the UK fare no better, occupying a cynical centrist ground disguised as balance, where the left is faithfully and consistently silenced. Beginning in the '50s, this widespread and illegal project of domestic infiltration-which included plenty of propaganda directed at the US citizenry-was called Operation Mockingbird.Īlmost 50 years and a couple of info-tech revolutions later, Mockingbird sings louder than ever, but now it’s in harmony with a self-regulating corporate media that inhabits either the extreme right (Fox) or the less extreme right (MSNBC), and where ubiquitous “anonymous official sources” determine the narrow perspective of the news cycle. IN A 1977 cover story for Rolling Stone that has since passed into legend, Carl Bernstein revealed that the CIA had secretly retained some 400 prominent members of US media to advance the Agency’s anti-communist and pro-American business and political interests.
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