PBS's Historic Gannett Connection--Part 1

(The following (slightly updated) article originally appeared in the May 8, 1991 issue of the Lower East Side alternative newsweekly, Downtown).

“Public television’s programming has become subject to external interests, especially the interests of the corporations, foundations and government agencies that fund much of the national schedule…”

The Report of the Carnegie Commission on the Future of Public Broadcasting in 1979

“…On public television, Jim Lehrer and I have been trying an innovative approach to televised news. The partnership with Gannett will let us build on that experience.”

Former PBS NewsHour Anchor Robert MacNeil in September 1981

In September 1981, the Public Broadcasting Service’s evening news anchormen, Robert MacNeil and Jim Lehrer, formed a partnership with the Gannett Company to produce television news, specials, documentaries and cable programs.

Fifty percent of the partnership, MacNeil-Lehrer Productions, was to be owned by the Gannett Company, 25 percent by MacNeil and 25 percent by Lehrer. According to MacNeil, under his and Lehrer’s agreement with the Gannett Company, Gannett would “fund program ideas we three collectively agree should be produced.”

The Gannett Company’s chairman of the board and president in 1981, Al Neuharth, characterized Gannett’s decision to form a commercial partnership with the publicly-funded PBS news anchormen as “a marvelous opportunity to add a significant dimension to our development of electronic news and information capability,” according to the Sept. 12, 1981 issue of the New York Times. At the same time, MacNeil explained one of his reasons for then becoming a partner with one of the biggest commercial mass media conglomerates in the world: “Since we didn’t take a vow of poverty and chastity when we joined public television, it would be nice if we could also make some money.”

Yet in 1969, former PBS evening news anchor MacNeil had complained in a WRVR-FM radio discussion that “Television is in the hands of people who want to use it to sell things. It’s a market place.” And in his 1982 memoir, The Right Place At The Right Time, the Canadian-born and bred MacNeil would later claim that he and Lehrer “have turned down a number of attractive job offers in commercial television,” “the pleasure of working together on what we want to do outweighs the higher salaries we have been offered outside” and “freedom from frustration and tension is worth a lot of money.”

Although PBS’ Channel 13 often pleaded poverty in the early 1990s during its annual WBAI-imitation television marathons to help finance the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour, neither Gannett nor the MacNeil/Lehrer Newshour was then in special need of money. The Gannett Company’s gross annual income exceeded $3 billion and its net income per year approached $400 million in the early 1990s. And in its Aug. 4, 1988 issue, the New York Times noted that the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour also received a “financial commitment of $57 million through corporate support of AT&T, Pepsico and John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation” in the late 1980s.

(Downtown 5/8/91)

Next: PBS’s Historic Gannett Connection—Part 2

Shareholders Sue Columbia Trustee-Linked PMI For Securities Exchange Act Violations

Columbia University Trustee Ann Kaplan is also a Professor of Finance at Columbia’s School of Business and both a member of Smith College’s board of trustees and the chair of the Smith College board’s investment committee in Massachusetts. In addition, Columbia University Trustee Kaplan sits on the board of directors of the Financial Guaranty Insurance Company [FGIC] next to certain officers and directors of the PMI Group Inc. (PMI), which has owned 42 percent of the stock of FGIC in recent years.

After PMI announced on March 3, 2008 that its U.S. Mortgage Insurance Operations had reported a net loss of $236 million in the fourth quarter, the value of a share of PMI stock dropped to $6.43, although its value during the Nov. 2, 2006 and March 3, 2008 period had once been as high as $50.07. So on April 3, 2008, the law firm of Schriffin Barroway Topaz & Kessler, LLP announced that a class action lawsuit against PMI on behalf of its shareholders was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.

According to the April 3, 2008 statement of Schriffin, Barroway, Topaz & Kessler, the Complaint “charges PMI and certain of its officers and directors with violations of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934” and alleges that the defendants “failed to disclose material adverse facts about” PMI’s “financial well-being, business relationships and prospects.” The lawsuit’s complaint also accuses PMI CEO and Chairman L. Stephen Smith, PMI Executive Vice-President David Katkov and PMI Chief Financial Officer Executive Officer and Executive Vice-President Donald Lofe Jr. of engaging in profitable insider trading in which they made millions by selling their own PMI stock at the same time they “materially misled the investing public, thereby inflating the price of PMI securities, by publicly issued false and misleading statements” about PMI’s actual financial condition.

Coincidentally, sitting next to Columbia University Trustee Kaplan on the FGIC board of directors are the defendants in this civil lawsuit: PMI CEO and Chairman L. Stephen Smith and PMI Chief Executive Officer and Executive Vice-President Donald Lofe Jr.. In addition, PMI Senior Vice President Patrick Mathis, PMI Group President Bradley Shuster and PMI Executive Vice President Arthur Slepian also sit on the FGIC board next to Columbia University Trustee Kaplan.

Next: PBS’s Historic Gannett Connection—Part 1

Columbia University's Pulitzer Prize Board/`Washington Post' Connections

The Pulitzer Prize Board of Columbia University’s School of Journalism recently gave a Pulitzer Prize to the Washington Post newspaper. Coincidentally, Pulitzer Prize Board Member Donald Graham and Columbia University President Lee Bollinger both sit on the board of directors of the Washington Post Company/Newsweek media conglomerate parent company of the Washington Post newspaper which Columbia University decided to honor with a Pulitzer Prize. In addition, Pulitzer Prize Board Member and Washington Post Company CEO Donald Graham is also a trustee of the Philip L. Graham Fund that owned over $35.4 million worth of Washington Post Company/Newsweek stock (46,339 shares) in 2005.

Not surprisingly, between 2006 and 2008, the Columbia University School of Journalism was also given three grants, totaling $75,000, by the Philip L. Graham Fund on whose board Washington Post Company/Newsweek media conglomerate CEO and Pulitzer Prize Board Member Graham sits, prior to Columbia University’s Pulitzer Prize Board giving Graham’s Washington Post newspaper a Pulitzer Prize.

Next: Shareholders Sue Columbia Trustee-Linked PMI For Securities Exchange Act Violations

Columbia University's Historic Gannett Media Conglomerate Connection

For many years, 10 percent of the Gannet Company media conglomerate’s stock, worth about $547 million in 1989, was, historically, controlled by the Gannett Foundation [n/k/a Freedom Forum]. In the late 1980s, the former chairman of Gannett and founder of USA Today, Al Neuharth, was also the chairman of the board of trustees of the “nonprofit” Gannett Foundation [n/k/a Freedom Forum], which spent $33 million per year of its Gannett Company dividends in the early 1990s on grants to such “needy” recipients as Columbia University. In exchange for its grant from Neuharth’s Gannett Foundation, Columbia set up “the Gannet Center for Media Study” in its School of Journalism building to study the same mass communications industry that the Gannett Company and Neuharth historically attempted to dominate. A former president of the Public Broadcasting Service [PBS], Lawrence Grossman was a Senior Fellow at the Gannett Foundation-funded Gannett Center for Media Study in the early 1990s [a few years before Columbia University eventually severed its historic ties to the Gannett Foundation/n/k/a Freedom Forum in 1996).

But according to the associate director of the then-Columbia University-affiliated Gannett Center for Media Study in 1991, Shirley Gazsi, the center then had “no relation” to the Gannett Company and “the Gannett Foundation has no relation to the Gannett Company.”

“We are an operating academic institution,” Gazsi told Downtown in 1991.

Asked by Downtown in early 1991 if she could estimate how much funding the Gannett Foundation then granted to Columbia’s plushily-furnished Center for Media Study, its then-associate director stated that the Gannett Foundation then granted the center $3 million per year and indicated that the Gannett Foundation had by 1991 already made $30 million worth of grants to Columbia’s Center for Media Study over a 10-year period.

According to Gazsi, The Gannett Foundation was set up with Frank Gannett’s ‘private assets,” and “sponsors conferences, grants fellowships and promotes journalism education.” The Gannett Foundation also “makes local community grants,” according to Gazsi, in some cities in which Gannett newspapers operate.

The Gannet Center for Media Study associate director told Downtown in 1991 that neither the Gannett Foundation nor the Gannett Company exercised any control or influence over center activity. But she did indicate in 1991 that “We do get calls from Gannett newspapers and TV stations to respond to certain journalism issues.”

Asked by Downtown in 1991 whether newspaper chains like the Gannett chain are studied by her center, Gazsi replied: “We usually don’t study media chains.”

Asked by Downtown in 1991 if she could recall any Center for Media Study which studied Gannett’s activities, Gazsi replied in the negative. But she assured Downtown that the center would not be reluctant to study Gannett because “in actuality, we are nonpartisan.”

The Gannett Foundation also spent its Gannett Company dividends in the early 1990s on purchasing books. After the then-chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Gannett Foundation, Al Neuharth, had his book, Confessions Of An S.O.B., published, the nonprofit Gannett Foundation told The New York Times on Sept. 7, 1990 that foundation money was used to “buy some 2,000 copies” of Neuharth’s autobiography, but it denied charges that it had “tried to influence best-seller lists” with its foundation money.

(Downtown 5/8/91)

Next: Columbia University’s Pulitzer Prize Board/Washington Post Connections

Is Your Professor A CIA Asset?

In addition to having a special interest in U.S. presidential elections, the U.S. mass media and Indonesia’s domestic political situation, the CIA has also always had a special interest in the U.S. university world. According to a chapter titled “Cloaks and Gowns: The CIA In The Groves of Academe” by University of Georgia Professor Loch Johnson, which appeared in Intelligence And Intelligence Policy In A Democratic Society, in 1986 “the number of campus people working with the CIA…still figured in the hundreds at over 100 American colleges and affiliated research centers.” University of California at Berkeley Administration Vice-President Earl Bolton, for instance, “reportedly carried out covert contract work for the CIA (which consisted largely of advice on how to obtain services from the campuses more effectively without having the relationship revealed),” according to the same book.

Professor Johnson also recalled that in 1976 the U.S. Senate’s Church Committee reported that “academics (including administrators, faculty members, and students) researched and wrote books and articles for the CIA, spotted and assessed individuals for agency use, served as `access agents’ to make introductions between the CIA and potential agents or employees (foreign and American), provided information (with or without prior instructions), and performed an assortment of other intelligence-related activities.”

Professor Johnson provided more specific examples of the nature of relationships between U.S. university professors and the CIA’s National Collection Division (NCD) or other divisions of the CIA:

“…They can be as limited as asking a professor just returned from a trip abroad to drop by the local NCD office to share his impressions (a `debriefing’)…Or they may involve a formal, paid association in which the professor counts for the CIA the number of deep-water ships he sees in Luanda while doing research on African migratory butterflies. The work done by academics for the CIA, then, may be voluntary or paid, and may include occasional or systematic collection and recruitment tasks, or even covert action and counterintelligence.

“A professor may be asked by the agency through the NCD (or some other entity) to attend an international conference of scholars (say, physicists). At the conference and under CIA instructions, he will seek out a foreign scientist…and as subtly as possible weave into their conversation a set of questions (`By the way, just how well is the Becker jet-nozzle, uranium-enrichment process really working out, old chap?’). If the scientist were also a state minister or a well-placed government aide, the American professor could easily enter the realm of covert action or counterintelligence. He may pass a CIA propaganda theme along to the minister, thereby serving as an agent-of-influence (covert action). He may also be used…to plant the false notion that he himself might like to work secretly for the minister’s government to spy on the United States. He could thus become a double agent who, in this guise, might be able to glean modus operandi and other information about the foreign government—including what its own agents may be after (counterintelligence). These are only a few examples of the numerous ways in which the agency might wish to employ an academic overseas in covert action or Central Intelligence operations.”

Intelligence And Intelligence Policy In A Democratic Society also notes that “The CIA believes strongly in the importance of recruiting foreign students within the borders of the United States” and “to accomplish this task effectively the agency also believes it requires covert contacts to focus the recruitment effort.” The same book also describes how U.S. academics go about secretly helping the CIA recruit foreign students on U.S. campuses:

“In the course of these secret efforts to spot, assess, and recruit on behalf of the CIA, academics may involve themselves in a number of activities…Taking advantage of a student’s sense of trust toward faculty, for example, a professor may gather information for the CIA about his ideological views, his attitudes toward American foreign policy objectives in general and the intelligence mission in particular, his financial situation, and the like. Seminar discussions, office counseling, social gatherings, term-paper grading, and other contacts between faculty and their students provide several opportunities for agent spotting.”

Ironically, at the same time it secretly recruited foreign-born students on U.S. campuses to serve its special interests, the CIA illegally spied on native-born U.S. students between 1967 and 1973, as part of its "Project Reisistance" U.S. campus operation. According to Intelligence And Intelligence Policy In A Democratic Society:

"At the request of the director of Personnel, the CIA director approved a policy (Project RESISTANCE) in 1967 ordering the Office of Security to protect the well-being of CIA recruiters...The primary impetus for the stepped-up security was an episode at Columbia University, where a CIA recruiter was held hostage for several hours by student radicals...''

"Documents released by the CIA under a Freedom of Information Act request indicated that the Office of Security pursued this mission with zeal. From 1967 to 1973, files were developed on various universities and colleges; meetings of protestors were attended; new informants were recruited; advance visits were made to campuses `to determine attitude of dissidents'; black student activities were monitored and reported; and, a close working relationship was established between the CIA and the local police."

(Downtown 7/8/92)

Next: Columbia University’s Historic Gannett Media Conglomerate Connection

`Bobby Sands' Last Cry'

(chorus)

Belfast explodes, Derry erupts
Responding to the love contained in Bobby’s heart.

(verses)

If you fight for Ireland, you might be locked up
And jailed without a jury vote inside of the H-Block
Bobby Sands, he starved himself, and England let him die
“Prisoners of War we are!” was Bobby Sands’ last cry.

Elected to the Parliament with less than a month to live
Giving his life for the Blanketmen and for all of Ireland
Bobby Sands, he starved himself, and England let him die
“Prisoners of War we are!” was Bobby Sands’ last cry. (chorus)

Exposing to all of the world the heartless cruelty
Sixty-six days on hunger strike without a bite to eat
Bobby Sands, he starved himself, and England let him die
“Prisoners of War we are!” was Bobby Sands’ last cry.

Not yet even 30 years old, why did he have to die?
All the British rulers commit so many crimes
Bobby Sands, he starved himself, and England let him die
“Prisoners of War we are!” was Bobby Sands’ last cry. (chorus)

Backed by U.S. companies, using U.S. guns
British troops shoot at children, all in the name of “freedom”
Bobby Sands, he starved himself, and England let him die
“Prisoners of War we are!” was Bobby Sands’ last cry.

How many more must starve to death before Ireland can be free?
How many more years of pain before the British leave?
Bobby Sands, he starved himself, and England let him die
“Prisoners of War we are!” was Bobby Sands’ last cry.

The Bobby Sands’ Last Cry protest folk song was written in May 1981 during the 1981 Irish Hunger Strike, shortly after Irish freedom fighter Bobby Sands died on May 5, 1981. During the nine years he spent in prison because of his political activism in the North of Ireland, he also wrote the lyrics to folk songs like Back Home In Derry, poetry, essays, stories and a diary.

To hear the Bobby Sands' Last Cry protest folk song, you can click on either of the following links:

http://www.last.fm/music/Bob+A.+Feldman/Biographical+Folk+Songs/Bobby+Sands%27+Last+Cry or

http://www.mp3.com/artist/bobafeldman/songs/

To hear some other protest folk songs, you can check out the “Columbia Songs for a Democratic Society” site at the following link:

http://www.myspace.com/bobafeldman68music

Next: Is Your Professor A CIA Asset?

5,000 U.S. Professors on CIA Payroll in 1970s?

One reason your college professor may not be very eager to discuss in class the CIA’s role in the 1965 Indonesian coup (a few years before Barack Obama’s now-deceased mother began working at the U.S. Embassy in Indonesia) may be that your college professor is secretly working for the CIA. As CIA Off Campus: Building The Movement Against Agency Recruitment And Research by Ami Chen Mills noted:

"CIA spokesperson Sharon Foster said in 1988 that the CIA has enough professors under Agency contract `to staff a large university.’ Our universities are crawling with covert scholars-turned-agents and our independent academic foundations are being seriously undermined…”

The same book also observed:

“As of the late 1970s, approximately 5,000 professors were doing CIA work in some capacity, either `spotting’’ U.S. or foreign recruitment candidates, participating in research and grant work or carrying out more active programs like foreign police training. It is estimated that about 60 percent of these academics were aware of the nature of their employment, while another 40 percent did the CIA’s bidding in the dark—through front companies or foundations. In the 1990s, the number of academics on the CIA payroll has undoubtedly increased…”

(Downtown 4/27/94)

Next: Bobby Sands’ Last Cry lyrics