CLASSIC: Your News Agency or the CIA: The Story of Operation Mockingbird

Stuff They Don't Want You To Know

iHeartPodcasts

Society & Culture

4.3 • 10.7K Ratings

🗓️ 2 September 2025

⏱️ 55 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Propaganda has always been a powerful tool, and humanity's recent technological innovations have only amplified its reach. Long-standing laws in the US were meant to prevent US propaganda for foreign audiences from reaching the domestic population, but over time those laws have been eroded... and, as it turns out, Uncle Sam was secretly pushing propaganda on the people for years beforehand. Tune in to learn more about Operation Mockingbird.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Oh, fellow conspiracy realists, let's have a big round of applause for the mainstream media.
0:06.3	Woo!
0:07.3	Oh my God!
0:09.8	Or the CIA.
0:11.7	Huh?
0:12.6	What's the difference?
0:14.5	Well, there's a big difference.
0:16.0	One of those is an intelligence agency.
0:18.8	Okay, yes.
0:20.0	The other one reduces our intelligence, little by little. Okay. Yes. The other one reduces our intelligence little by little every time we turn it on.
0:26.4	Sorry, not really, not really journalists.
0:28.9	Kind of, though.
0:30.3	It's, who knew the journalism would become an endangered species in the United States,
0:36.6	other than pretty much every student of history.
0:40.5	So, okay, so back in 2020, we were looking into something that fascinated us,
0:48.6	but we had heard whispers in the wind.
0:51.7	We had heard elusive statements about how the United States is totally fine with marketing
1:00.7	propaganda for foreign audiences, but had a deal for a long time that doesn't exist anymore
1:08.1	about how it could not advertise propaganda to a domestic
1:13.1	population and about how they were super into, you know, this thing we called,
1:20.9	and I'm using the past tense, freedom of the press.
1:24.0	Yeah.
	...

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