Sharyl Attkisson - The Smear: How Shady Political Operatives and Fake News Control What You See, What You Think, and How You Vote

With much appreciation to those who shared their experiences; to Tab Turner, who continues to be a devoted warrior for truth and transparency; to Keith and Matt at Javelin; to Matt and the entire Harper team; and to Jim and Sarah and my whole supportive family.

Stonewalled

SHARYL ATTKISSON is the New York Times bestselling author of Stonewalled , a five-time Emmy Award winner, and the host of Sinclairs national investigative television program Full Measure with Sharyl Attkisson . As a working journalist for more than thirty years, she has covered controversies under the administrations of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama, emerging with a reputation, as the Washington Post put it, as a persistent voice of news-media skepticism about the governments story. She is a recipient of the Edward R. Murrow Award for investigative reporting and has reported nationally for CBS News, PBS, and CNN.

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Birth of the Modern Smear:
Spies, Bork, and the Clintons

As vicious as our modern politics are, they arent the beginning of the smear. To understand the tricks of the trade and how they figure into attempts to manipulate your opinion, it helps to examine how we got here. It turns out smears are a tradition in American politics dating back to our earliest days. In fact, our founding fathers knew very well the power of a sharp character assassination.

Hamilton and Jefferson were planting stuff on each others sex lives and writing anonymously for their partisan newspapers, says Professor Mark Feldstein, of Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland. Hes an avid student of historical scandal. Back in the 1790s, the efforts were relatively unsophisticated, he tells me.

In those days it was kind of obvious who was behind the smears, because the first Treasury secretary, Alexander Hamilton, had this sexual affair with a woman named Maria Reynolds and Thomas Jefferson published it. And Jefferson was banging Sally Hemings, and it was the Hamilton paper that surfaced it, says Feldstein.

While rumor and innuendo have long been the bedrock of political assaults, I think you could say the modern smear came into its own during World War II. And its only natural that the U.S. intel agency responsible for perfecting psychological warfare and propaganda techniques became accomplished in the art of the smear. Back then, they called it Morale Operations.

In 1943, the U.S. Morale Operations Branch opened under the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the CIA. The mission: misinformation and deception. The tools: white, black, and gray propaganda, all still widely used by todays players in the smear game. White propaganda openly reveals its source and relies on gentle persuasion and public relation techniques. Black propaganda is misinformation that claims to be coming from one side but is actually produced by the opposing side. Then theres gray propaganda, which the CIA considers the most mysterious of all because the source of the propaganda is never identified. (Relate that idea to todays political dark-money groups, which dont have to disclose who their donors are.)

The CIA also knows that when demoralization and demonization are the order of the day, nothing does the trick like a good old-fashioned rumor. To paraphrase an historic figure: A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth gets its pants on. During World War II, the Morale Operations Branch initiated about twenty rumors per week. They were typically short, memorable stories concerning famous people and events... meant to cause fear, confusion, and distrust. Success was measured by comebacksthe number of times the rumors surfaced in the press.

In addition to using word of mouth and the press to deploy rumors and other forms of propaganda against the Nazis, the governments secret operators had another first-rate device at their disposal: radio. The Morale Operations Branch used black propaganda radio stations to broadcast disinformation on behalf of the United States and its allies. In 1944, the gray propaganda radio station Soldatensender (Soldiers Radio) went live in England, denouncing the Nazis amid news, music, and entertainment. American movie stars took part in musical black ops on Soldatensender. According to the CIA, Bing Crosby, Dinah Shore, and Marlene Dietrich performed black propaganda lyrics written for German and American songs. One instance involved a tune called Lili Marleen. Its a nostalgic, pessimistic melody. Adolf Hitlers chief propagandist, Joseph Goebbels, considered it demoralizing and banned it in Germany.

Outside the barracks, by the corner light

Ill always stand and wait for you at night

Despite the ban, Dietrich recorded the song in German and English and it was played on Soldatensender, which German troops could hear. The idea was to make them homesick. It worked.

Meantime, Goebbels was busy perfecting textbook propaganda techniques of his own that also stand the test of time today. As head of Hitlers Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda from 1933 to 1945, Goebbels was obsessed with controlling virtually every form of message in German society whether from government, churches, films, reporters, or mass media. Obsessive control was necessary to lead the German people down the path of fanatical support for a dictator. It was the only way the masses could be convinced to stand byeven take partas their government was transformed into a fascist state.

It would not be impossible to prove with sufficient repetition and a psychological understanding of the people concerned that a square is in fact a circle, Goebbels observed. Repeat it until even the densest has got it. Were afforded a window into Goebbelss thinking by virtue of his diaries, which he wrote nearly every day beginning in 1923 at age twenty-six, and continuing until less than a month before his suicide in April of 1945. Prior to his death, Goebbels took steps to make sure his diaries were preserved, correctly predicting that they could be of great interest to future generations. Contained in the Goebbels diaries are the tactical secrets he deployed over a decade, and his observations about which proved to be the most successful. Propaganda works best when those who are being manipulated are confident they are acting on their own free will, he noted.