Behind the bias: instead of investigating and exposing the actions of the power elite, the major media are complicit in that elite's drive for total control. (The Media Cartel).

"We are grateful to the Washington Post, the New York Times, Time magazine, and other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected their promises of discretion for almost forty years." The speaker was David Rockefeller, the "Chairman of the Establishment." The scene was the June 5, 1991 Bilderberg meeting in Sand, Germany -- an ultra-elite conclave of banking, political media, and industrial elites committed to world government. The subject of this particular address was the media's role in promoting the power elite's objectives.

"It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subject to the bright lights of publicity during these years," continued Rockefeller. "But the world is now more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world government which will never again know war but only peace and prosperity for the whole of humanity."

The way in which Rockefeller's remarks were made public ironically illustrates the power elite's chokehold on the mass media. Excerpts from Rockefeller's opening address were leaked to two independent French publications. They then came to the attention of Hilaire du Berrier, an international correspondent living in Monaco, who published them in his newsletter, HduB Reports. As he relayed Rockefeller's breathtakingly brazen admissions to his readers, du Berrier knowingly commented that he would "lay odds that not a word of Mr. Rockefeller's speech will be reported in America." As far as the major media are concerned, du Berrier's prediction came true.

"Nonsense," you say? "The power elite would never conspire to consolidate economic and political power on a global scale." Many Europeans reacted in a similar way when they heard certain "alarmists" outside their mainstream media claim that elitists among them had created the Common Market for the purpose of gradually building it into a government of Europe. Now that the Common Market has become the EU through a series of steps, and the EU has begun sapping political and economic powers from once-sovereign European nations, a power grab once dismissed as preposterous is widely recognized as fact. But that power grab could not have succeeded without the complicity of the media moguls on both sides of the Atlantic, who portrayed earlier manifestations of the EU as a "free trade" agreement, thereby providing protective coloration for their counterparts in the political elite.

Thomas Jefferson once famously remarked that it is better to have a newspaper without a government than a government without a newspaper. The free press, in whatever manifestation -- from Revolutionary-era broadsides to "streaming video" and "blogs" on the Internet -- plays an indispensable role in holding government accountable to the public. But the media cannot perform this duty if it is itself part of the ruling Establishment -- the self-appointed elitists like Rockefeller who busy themselves planning the future, supposedly on behalf of "the whole of humanity."

Origins of the Media Elite

Control over the media has been a long-term objective of the globalist elite. In February, 1917, Congressman Oscar Callaway placed a statement in the Congressional Record describing the origins of what he called the "newspaper combination." According to that account, the J.P. Morgan Banking interests and their allies "got together 12 men high up in the newspaper world and employed them to select the most influential newspapers in the United States and [the] sufficient number of them to control generally the policy of the daily press in the United States."

Beginning with a list of 179 papers, the 12 men pared down the list. Ultimately, the cabal "found it was only necessary to purchase control of 25 of the greatest papers. The 25 papers were agreed upon; emissaries were sent to purchase the policy, national and international, of these papers; an agreement was reached; the policy of the papers was bought, to be paid for by the month; an editor was furnished for each paper to properly supervise and edit information ... [on matters] considered vital to the interests of the purchasers."

The Morgan interests figured prominently in the "international Anglophile network" identified by the late Georgetown University historian Carroll Quigley as the spine of the global power elite. Quigley was more than just another tweedy academic: From his position at Georgetown, he played a key role in mentoring many individuals who went on to occupy critical positions. Among his students was Bill Clinton, who paid homage to Quigley in his acceptance speech at the 1992 Democratic convention.

In his 1966 work Tragedy and Hope, Quigley -- after writing disdainfully of "conspiracy theorists" -- admitted the existence of a partially submerged elite that "operates, to some extent, in the way the radical Right believes the Communists act. In fact, this network, which we may identify as the Round Table Groups, has no aversion to cooperating with the Communists, or any other groups, and frequently does so. I know of the operations of this network because I have studied it for twenty years and was permitted for two years, in the early 1960s, to examine its papers and secret records. I have no aversion to it or to most of its aims and have, for much of my life, been close to it and many of its instruments." The network's "aim," Quigley continued, is "nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole."

The "Round Table Groups" stemmed from a secret society (Quigley's phrase) created by British magnate Cecil Rhodes to unite the world -- beginning with the English-speaking dominions -- under "enlightened" elitists like himself. World War I and the postwar proposal for a League of Nations resulted from the Round Table cabal's machinations. During the post-war Versailles "Peace Conference," noted Quigley, this covert network decided to establish "in England and in each dominion, a front organization to the existing Round Table Group. This front organization, called the Royal Institute of International Affairs, had as its nucleus in each area the existing submerged Round Table Group. In New York it was known as the Council on Foreign Relations...."

The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) boasts a membership of only about 4,000. But its roster includes literally hundreds of powerful figures occupying key positions in the media -- not merely writers, reporters, and news anchors who deliver the news, but also editors, publishers, and executives who define what news is and how it is covered. (See page 13 for a partial list of CFR members in the media.) Just as significantly, the tiny CFR clique has for decades had a virtual stranglehold on the executive branch of the U.S. government, as well as much of academe.

Voice of the "Ruling Class"

Carroll Quigley -- like David Rockefeller -- specifically identified the New York Times and the Washington Post as key media organs of the power elite. The Times, with utterly unwarranted self-assurance, designates itself the arbiter of "All the News that's Fit to Print," while the Post is the voice of official Washington. Even in the cyber age, these two hoary papers (both of which are longtime CFR redoubts) set the tone for most news coverage, defining issues and setting the limits of "respectable" opinion. But the CFR's chokehold on media influence extends well beyond the Manhattan-Washington corridor.

In his October 30, 1993 "Ruling Class Journalists" essay, Washington Post ombudsman Richard Harwood candidly remarked about how the CFR dominates our news media. Harwood described the council as "the closest thing we have to a ruling Establishment in the United States.... [Its members are] the people who, for more than half a century, have managed our international affairs and our military-industrial complex." After listing the executive branch positions then occupied by CFR members, Harwood continued: "What is distinctively modern about the council these days is the considerable involvement of journalists and other media figures, who account for more than 10 percent of the membership."

"The editorial page editor, deputy editorial page editor, executive editor, managing editor, foreign editor, national affairs editor, business and financial editor and various writers as well as Katharine Graham, the paper's principal owner, represent the Washington Post in the council's membership," observed Harwood. He went on to describe CFR representation among the owners, management, and editorial personnel for the other media giants -- the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, NBC, CBS, ABC, and so on. These media heavyweights "do not merely analyze and interpret foreign policy for the United States; they help make it," he concluded.

Harwood's stunning expose confirms that the news media, rather than providing a check against the abuse of power by our ruling elite, are instead a key part of a political cartel. Rather than offering an independent perspective on our rulers' actions, the Establishment media act as the ruling elite's voice -- conditioning the public to accept, and even embrace, Insider designs that otherwise might not be politically attainable.

Somalia and Yugoslavia

Consider, for example, Somalia, cited by Harwood as "Exhibit A" to illustrate how the CFR ruling class journalists "help make" foreign policy.

In December 1992, American troops were deployed to Somalia under UN command as part of a supposedly humanitarian mission that morphed into a campaign to disarm the Somali people. The Somalia mission represented a significant milestone in the UN's evolution into a world government body. It was the first time the UN invaded a country for "humanitarian" reasons, and then used the military occupation to impose a new government. And this mission was carried out primarily by the U.S. military.

Outside of a tiny handful of campus-bound utopian leftists, there was no constituency among the American public for this use of our military. How, then, did this mission come about? "American troops are there [in Somalia] ... because of a decision by NBC to air BBC film of starving Somalian children," explained Harwood. "It set off a chain reaction in the press and humanitarian concern among the public, forcing the Bush administration to intervene."

The 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia by the UN's NATO affiliate occurred because of a similar media campaign, and it represented another significant step toward world government. For months before the bombing began in April of that year, the electronic and print media bathed the public in stories of acts of genocide purportedly committed by Serbs against ethnic Albanians in Kosovo.

During the 78-day NATO terror bombing, the public was fed a steady stream of lurid atrocity stories: Tens of thousands of Albanian men and boys were supposedly being slaughtered; Serb forces in Kosovo were supposedly engaging in systematic rape; bodies of civilian victims were purportedly being fed to Nazi-style crematoria. It was only after the bombing ended that the public was told that the atrocity accounts and casualty figures were (in the words of a July 2, 1999 USA Today front-page story) "greatly exaggerated.... Instead of 100,000 ethnic Albanian men feared murdered by rampaging Serbs, officials now estimate that about 10,000 were killed."

That figure would continue to decline as forensic investigators gained access to Kosovo: By November 1999, the UN reported that the official death toll was 2,108, a figure including both Albanian and Serb victims of the lengthy and brutal civil war. But by this time, the UN had delivered Kosovo into the hands of the so-called Kosovo Liberation Army, a drug-peddling terrorist group armed and trained with the assistance of Osama bin Laden.

The examples of Somalia and Kosovo illustrate the efficiency with which the opinion cartel can mobilize the public on behalf of foreign military crusades that advance the cause of world government -- without even explicitly stating that world government is the goal. Prior to the media's "humanitarian" propaganda campaigns, neither Somalia nor Kosovo figured prominently among the typical American's concerns. But the media's diligent, relentless efforts to indoctrinate the public made those military campaigns possible. The resulting carnage claimed the lives of thousands of innocent people, solidified the UN's hold on our nation's military, set precedents for UN military intervention to enforce its decrees, and engendered hatred of the United States abroad.

Cheerleaders for Globalism 

Of course, media cheerleading for Insider objectives is not confined to foreign policy. For example, the media elitists focus on crimes committed with guns while ignoring crimes prevented by law-abiding gun owners to condition the public for stricter gun control laws leading to confiscation. They point to "hard case" examples of Americans without health insurance to create support for socialized medicine. They fan the flames of fear regarding supposed environmental crises to "justify" regulating all human activity that supposedly harms the environment.

In a sense, the "news" media generally tell one story: The saga of Government as Savior. On nearly every conceivable issue, domestic or foreign, news stories are designed to encourage readers and viewers to look to government intervention as a solution.

In brief, the mass media are guilty of something more serious than mere sloppiness in reporting facts, or chronic liberal bias. The Establishment media are conscious, willing accomplices in the power elite's drive for global control.

To control the world, the power elite must conquer the public mind. Americans can avoid that fate if they learn to recognize the strategy and tactics used by the media to advance the drive for global control -- and then unite with like-minded people in an organized effort to educate and mobilize the public.