“…The new publication was called U.S. News & World Report. Lawrence was editor until his death, publisher until 1958, and chairman of the board until 1973…He received the National Press Club of Washington’s Certificate of Appreciation in 1963 and a special award in 1964 from the Federal Bureau of Investigation in appreciation of his friendly and sympathetic assistance to the FBI.” (The National Cyclopedia of American Biography)
For most of the 20th Century, the U.S. White Corporate Male Power Structure’s Federal Bureau of Investigation [FBI] secret police operation was not too popular with U.S. political dissidents. But for most of the 20th Century the FBI was treated like a sacred cow by U.S. Establishment magazines like Mort Zuckerman’s U.S. News & World Report. And U.S. News & World Report apparently also acted covertly as a propaganda instrument of J.Edgar Hoover’s FBI between 1948 and 1972.
In a 1993 telephone interview, Downtown asked then-U.S. News & World Report senior vice-president for Communications, Sherrie Rollins, if U.S. News & World Report has ever acted as a public relations tool of the FBI since 1948?
“No. I’ve never heard anything like that. To my knowledge, U.S. News & World Report has never acted as a PR tool of the FBI,” replied the official spokesperson for U.S. News & World Report in 1993. She also said she was unaware of the existence of any past relationship between former FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and U.S. News & World Report founder David Lawrence.
Yet in 1973, the book Investigating The FBI revealed that “Over the years, Hoover maintained extremely close ties with several magazines—U.S. News & World Report and Reader’s Digest being perhaps the closest.”
(Downtown 4/14/93)
James and the Twenty-Seven Bicycles
14 years ago
