The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue 80 (Winter 2020)

[PDF file]: […] down the search results we find a copy of his newsletter from 1974 released by the CIA.7 This is a rather impressive if bizarre piece of right-wing propaganda on behalf of the colonial powers in Africa then beginning to experience serious local resistance. There is this paragraph, for example. The CIA’s Irving Brown as […]

The State of Secrecy: Spies and the Media in Britain by Richard Norton-Taylor

Lobster Issue 80 (Winter 2020)

[PDF file]: […] troubling pattern of behaviour. We already know that organisations like the Integrity Institute, and its notorious sort of predecessor the Information Research Department, have anonymously distributed state propaganda through networks of journalists and academics. The State of Secrecy adds to these examples. We learn about British spies writing under pseudonyms for mainstream news organisations, […]

lob86View from Bridge

Lobster Issue

[…] in office, President Barack Obama made the decision to set the country on a new course. On Dec. 23, 2016, he signed into law the Countering Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation Act, which used the language of defending the homeland to launch an open-ended, offensive information war. The message from the U.S. defense establishment was […]

Broken Vows: Tony Blair the Tragedy of Power by Tom Bower

Lobster Issue 71 (Summer 2016)

[PDF file]: […] sketch-writers who reported the moment saw it as typical of New Labour’s desire to “spin”. Ask Blairites a direct question, and they will start force-feeding you with propaganda about their glorious achievements in health, transport and good old education.’1 Wilson’s view is very much Bower’s. Broken Vows tells us that the man once called […]

View from the bridge

Lobster Issue

[…] a very striking account by an American journalist of an Israeli-funded press junket to Israel. Of course the American hacks got a ton of anti-Hamas and anti-Muslim propaganda. That was the point of the exercise. What is striking is the mind-boggling absurdity and crudity of the material offered by the Israelis. Evidently the Israelis […]

lob86View from Bridge

Lobster Issue

[…] in office, President Barack Obama made the decision to set the country on a new course. On Dec. 23, 2016, he signed into law the Countering Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation Act, which used the language of defending the homeland to launch an open-ended, offensive information war. The message from the U.S. defense establishment was […]

Blood Year: Islamic State and the Failures of the War on Terror by David Kilcullen

Lobster Issue 71 (Summer 2016)

[PDF file]: […] them to exercise their power more effectively. US imperial interests are best served by an unblinking engagement with the real nature of affairs, rather than with a propaganda version. But this honesty only stretches so far. There is no unblinking engagement, for example, with the problems that the Saudi regime has caused – and […]

The View from the Bridge

Lobster Issue 62 (Winter 2011)

[PDF file]: […] Brian Crozier’s speech to the 1982 meeting of Le Cercle in which, amidst the standard (to me, comic) line of the enormous threat poised by the Soviet propaganda machine, led by the World Peace Council, was this: ‘In the United Kingdom, the counter-subversion arm of the Foreign Office, the Information Research Department (IRD) was […]

View from the bridge

Lobster Issue

[…] a very striking account by an American journalist of an Israeli-funded press junket to Israel. Of course the American hacks got a ton of anti-Hamas and anti-Muslim propaganda. That was the point of the exercise. What is striking is the mind-boggling absurdity and crudity of the material offered by the Israelis. Evidently the Israelis […]

Accessibility Toolbar