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          "In Paranoia We Trust" -- Dr. They



       Paranoid Media Scrutinization 


  Paranoid Media Scrutinization Volume 1,  Number 2  April 1992


     We live in a world that requires us to become numb.  If we
were not numb we could never read a newspaper, watch TV, listen
to the radio or carry on with our daily lives.  Cognitive
dissonance sets in so that we hardly notice that the White House
Spokesman for Physical Fitness is a drug freak who has hyper-
extorted his body by using illegal steroids (Can't you just see
the People Magazine cover a few years from now with a sagging
Arnold Swartzenager and the headlines SUDDENLY announcing his
past steroid use).  The B.C.C.I. scandal arrives on our doorstep
and the world marches on as if our own Justice Department and the
Central Intelligence agency were not necessarily indited in this
mess.  As with Contragate the CIA cannot have it both ways. 
Either they knew about these illegal activities and did nothing,
or they were so inept at gathering intelligence they really had
no idea that this was occurring.  Not much of a choice is it? 
Well, that my friend, this is why we provide a public service of
Paranoid Media Scrutinization, to pick at this festering ooze
that passes as a free press.  We (Dr. They) have no choice, we
must do it for we are commanded by God.  Yes Dr. They is
disjointed and hard to follow, this is an inevitable side-effect
of his most recent surgery--a surgery that has made his
revelations of truth more easily communicated to the teeming
masses.  Allow me to ramble onward...

               *         *         *         *

     Have you ever noticed that anytime the newsmedia reports on
ANYTHING that you are closely familiar with that they invariably
get some major aspect of the story completely wrong?  It can be
something as inane as mixing up the date of your Webelos weenie-
roast fundraiser, or misspelling your dogs name, or it can be as
universal as re-writing the laws of physics or political careers. 
It took Dr. They a few years to put it together that EVERY story
in the news contained some element of these errors, and it took a
mind as brilliant as Dr. They's a few more years to recognize
that the combined impact of these "little errors" exerts enough
inertia (if properly harnaced...) to move one of Neptune's lesser
moons outside of its current orbit!
     If nothing else, let these obvious episodes of the media
getting even the most basic of facts all wrong serve as a scale
with which to measure its general capacity to correctly relate
the facts of stories, both large and small.  Some of these errors
are simply the result of typical nym-rods taking on a job beyond
their reasoning powers (such as understanding global events)
while other misrepresentations have a more intentional and
sinister source of error.
     Two of the paranoid giants of our time Alexander Cockburn
and Noam Chomsky have long spoken of our country's media as
"manufacturing consent".  Chomsky's book by this title (co-
written with E.S. Herman 1988) thoroughly examines how the media
giants of this country shape and maintain public opinion by
constricting the "facts" made available to the public. One key
element of this involves the selection/creation of "experts":

     "The relation between power and souring extends beyond
     official and corporate provision of day-to day news to
     shaping the supply of experts.  The dominance of official
     sources is weakened by the existence of highly respectable
     unofficial sources that give dissident views with great
     authority.  This problem is alleviated by "co-opting the
     experts"--i.e., putting them on the payroll as consultants,
     funding their research, and organizing think tanks that will
     hire them directly and help disseminate their messages." (pp
     23).

Does that sound a little too (paranoidicly) good to be true?
Perhaps you've forgotten that "fifteen of ninety-five outside
directors of ten of the media giants are former governmental
officials.."(Chomsky pp13).

It would be a mistake to underestimate the power of (say..)
Readers Digest or T.V. Guide those robust features of American
society.  These two mind-mops are responsible for maintaining a
squeeze on the limits of our consciousness.  Its a big job, but
somebody's got to do it!


               *         *         *         *

Just glimpse at what passes by the eyes of the average American
without generating a hint of recognition, or a speck of outrage:


The Olympian 2/25/92 A3

     BUSH OK'D AID TO IRAQ, REPORT SAYS
       AP WASHINGTON-President Bush, overriding congressional
     objections and warnings from his own administration, signed
     an order allowing continued aid to Iraq less than eight
     months before it invaded Kuwait, according to documents
     presented Monday.
       The order is one of three cases revealed by the House
     Banking Committee chairman, Rep. Henry Gonzalez, D-Texas, in
     which Bush intervened to obtain continued U.S. government
     credit guarantees to Iraq despite its shaky credit rating.
       "The policy towards Iraq is by far the most tragic foreign
     policy episode of the Bush and Reagan administrations,"
     Gonzalez said.

This eternally recurrent pattern of "revelations" months, years,
and decades after decisions are made is enough to make Dr. They
puke, gentle reader.  Just centimeters from the above story on
how King George armed Hitler Hussein is a tiny-weeny story on the
current Algerian situation that says:

     "The fundamentalists..claimed that 30,000 people have been
     arrested and 150 killed during a six week military crackdown
     on their movement."

Strange that this gets so little coverage...must be because these
"people" don't believe in GEEEE-SUS (and don't have any oil
fields beneath the prisons that hold them).


               *    *    *    *    *    *    *

     Have any of you paranoid wacko's out there ever wondered
about why there aren't local branches of the C.I.A., N.S.A. or
F.B.I. in your home towns, or why these massive employers
(estimated employment of NSA/CIA/FBI nationwide is over 2.5
million people) don't advertise in your local newspapers?  First
off, don't be too sure that there isn't a local F.B.I. office
overtly located in your town.  Dr. They lives in the small town
of Olympia Washington (population 27,000), and we have our own
Federal Bureau of Investigation office (714 Capitol Way) and our
own Special Agent.  Now isn't that SPECIAL!  Dr. They is only
left to wonder where the covert office of the local C.I.A. and
N.S.A. goons are since (unlike the F.B.I.) they don't list their
offices in the phonebook.  

     As for advertising in the newspapers each of these covert
agencies often supply newspapers with filler stories that little
more than advertisements.  For example,   In The Olympian 2/24/92
pp D2 "Lifestyle" section tucked between the TV section and the
local movie listings under the subject heading of "CAREERS":


             "SPY AGENCY WANTS TO HIRE MATH EXPERTS"

       A.P.  Fort Meade, Md.  The unltrasecretive National
     Security Agency is lifting its veil a bit to recruit
     mathematics.
       In the last several years, the agency has invited math
     experts who are potential employees to its campus for secret
     meetings.
       But recently, recruiters went to a meeting of national
     math groups in Baltimore to look for candidates.  And the
     agency created a mathematics speakers bureau and supports
     high school education programs.
       Mathematical minds are prized because they are so
     versatile, said Richard J. Shaker, the NSA's chief of math
     research.
       The agency won't say why it appears to be pressed for
     brainpower at a time when international tensions have eased.
       But Cipher Deavours, a cryptographer who publishes the
     journal Cryptologia, said the agency probably wants
     mathematicians to work on satellite imaging systems.
       Before the Soviet Union disintegrated, the NSA's mission
     included monitoring the Eastern bloc, whose telephone, radio
     and television transmissions had to be laboriously
     unscrambled and translated, said Deavours, who teaches at
     Kean College in New Jersey.
       In the post-Soviet world, he said, spy satellites may be
     better suited to gathering intelligence from smaller
     nations, he said.
       Young mathematicians may hesitate to work for the NSA
     because they fear it will isolate them from their peers and
     prevent their work from making a broad contribution, said
     David W. Kueker, associate chairman of the University of
     Maryland at College Park.
       "Generally speaking, academics are great believers in
     extreme openness and sharing ideas and results," he said.


There are a number of duties and tasks that these recruited
employees of the NSA or FBI can do once they are hired.  For
example the below NY Times article provides us all with a clearer
picture of the kinder and gentler nation that President Bush and
his staff (infection) has in store for us, courtesy of the FBI
and NSA:


"AS TECHNOLOGY MAKES WIRETAPS MORE DIFFICULT, FBI SEEKS HELP"
               Anthony Ramirez, New York Times 3/8/92 PP. 12

       "The Department of Justice says that advanced telephone
     equipment in wide use around the nation is making it
     difficult for law-enforcement agencies to wiretap the phone
     calls of suspected criminals.
       The Government proposed legislation on Friday requiring
     the nation's telephone companies to give law-enforcement
     agencies technical help with their eavesdropping.  Privacy
     advocates criticized the proposal as unclear and open to
     abuse.
       In the past, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and other
     agencies could simply attach alligator clips and a wiretap
     device to the line hanging from a telephone pole.  Law-
     enforcement agents could clearly hear the conversations. 
     That is still true of telephone lines carrying analog
     transmissions, the electronic signals used by the first
     telephones in which sounds correspond proportionally to
     voltage.
       But such telephone lines are being steadily replaced by
     high-speed, high capacity lines using digital signals.  On a
     digital line, FBI agents would hear only computer code or
     perhaps nothing at all because some digital transmissions
     are over fiber-optic lines that convert the signals to
     pulses of light.
       In addition, court-authorized wire-taps are narrowly
     written.  They restrict the surveillance to particular
     parties and particular topics of conversation over a limited
     time on a specific telephone or a group of telephones.  That
     was relatively easy with analog signals.  The FBI either
     intercepted the call or had the phone company re-route it to
     an FBI location, said William A. Bayse, the assistant
     director in the technical services division of the FBI.
       But tapping a high-capacity line could allow access to
     thousands of conversations.  Finding the conversation of
     suspected criminals, for example, in a complex "bit stream"
     would be impossible without the aid of phone company
     technicians.
       There are at least 140 million telephone lines in the
     country and more than half are served in some way by digital
     equipment, according to the United States Telephone
     Association, a trade group.  The major arteries and blood
     vessels of the telecommunications network are already
     digital.  And the greatest part of the system, the
     capillaries of the network linking central telephone offices
     to residences and businesses, will be digital by the mid-
     1990's.
       The FBI said there were 1,083 court-authorized wiretaps--
     both new and continuing--by Federal, state and local law-
     enforcement authorities in 1990, the latest year for which
     data are available.
       Janlori Goldman, director of the privacy and technology
     project for the American Civil Liberties Union, said she had
     been studying the proposal for several months.
       "We are not saying that this is not a problem that
     shouldn't be fixed,: she said, "but we are concerned that
     the proposal may be overboard and runs the risk of more
     information than is legally authorized will flow to the
     FBI."
       In a news conference in Washington on Friday, the FBI said
     it was seeking only to "preserve the status quo" with its
     proposal so that it could maintain the surveillance power
     authorized by a 1968 Federal law, the Omnibus Crime Control
     and Safe Streets Act.  The proposal, which is lacking in
     many details, is also designed to benefit state and local
     authorities.
       Under the proposed law, the Federal Communications
     Commission would issue regulations to telephone companies
     like the GTE Corporation and the regional Bell telephone
     companies requiring the "modification" of phone systems "if
     those systems impede the Government's ability to conduct
     lawful electronic surveillance."
       In particular, the proposal mentions "providers of
     electronic communication services and private branch
     exchange operators," potentially meaning all residences and
     all businesses with telephone equipment.
       Frocene Adams [yea, all us OLY old timers remember
     Frocene!], a security official with US West in Denver, is
     the chairman of Telecommunications Security Association,
     which served as the liaison between the industry and the FBI
     "We don't know the extent of the changes required under the
     proposal," she said, but emphasized that no telephone
     company would do the actual wiretapping or other
     surveillance.
       Computer software and some hardware might have to be
     changed, Ms Adams said, but this could apply to new
     equipment and mean relatively few changes for old
     equipment."


Anyone out there who doubts that one of the primary purposes of
the current phone system is to allow for governmental monitoring
of citizens' private conversations should re-read the sentence
that so matter-of-factly stated: 
 
     "the Federal Communications Commission would issue
     regulations to telephone companies like the GTE Corporation
     and the regional Bell telephone companies requiring the
     "modification" of phone systems "if those systems impede the
     Government's ability to conduct lawful electronic
     surveillance."

In other words.  If the small PBX in Bumble-Fug Wyoming is broke
and come up with the bucks for the latest warez, the Feds will
force them to buy it just so that the FBI can listen in when ever
it wants to!  (Its all kinda like telling your neighbor how great
HBO and Showtime is so he'll subscribe and you can pirate his
cable).

     An un-named employee of USWEST told Dr. They that the clear
purpose of this legislation would be for the FBI and other
intelligence agencies to "get their foot in the digital-door so
they could have a complete run of the system".  

     There are a number of things that this New York Times
article doesn't bother going into.  Like, the fact that Attorney
General Barr (you remember him, don't chad?  He was the CIA's
head lawyer for over a decade!) has made this one of his pet
projects and that he himself has been talking to Congress to try
and tack this onto some DEA related bill.  That's right, we can
all expect our Big Brothers (and Sisters) in Washington DC to
start using their hysterical dribble about the DRUG WAR to
further invade our privacy.

     Dr. They will use his Washington D.C. sources to keep
readers up to date on the progress of this proposal as it sneaks
around the back corridors of our capital.


               *         *         *         *         *


     Dr. They recently found himself sitting on the john looking
through the day's mail.  Not being thrilled with the prospect of
confronting the phone bill he perused the pages of an alumni
magazine he had just received.  Tucked away in yet another boring
issue of the University of Chicago Magazine were the seeds of
more paranoid diversions.  As per usual, the elements of the
article in question that ignited Dr. They's paranoia had little
to do with the thrust of the piece.  Here are the two paragraphs
that caught Dr. They's eyes, the overall story concerns the
boring (not to mention BALD-HEADED) neutrino-tracking physicist
Dr. Anthony Turkevich of the Fermi Institute: 

       "Inside a plastic bag in the sealed box was a sample of
     pure uranium salt, stored away at the University since 1956. 
     (Turkevich bought it with some leftover grant money,
     thinking it might come in handy in a future experiment.) 
       Three decades later, Turkevich did find a use for the
     sample, with help from colleagues Thanasis Economou, a
     senior research associate  at the Fermi Institute, and
     George Cowan, senior fellow emeritus at Los Alamos National
     Laboratory.  The wanted to see if they could detect whether
     any of the uranium 238 had decayed into plutonium 238.  That
     would be a milestone: the first evidence for plutonium 238
     occurring in nature.  That's why the purity of Turkevich's
     sample was so vital.  Because the uranium sample was stored
     prior to the introduction of man-made plutonium 238 into the
     atmosphere by nuclear-powered spacecraft, Turkevich knew
     that any plutonium he detected in the sample had been
     produced naturally, and wasn't simply the result of
     contamination". [University of Chicago Magazine/ February
     1992 page 35]

Dr. They's mind being the steel-trap for paranoid delusions that
it is, it was hard to shake off the sentence: "Because the
uranium sample was stored prior to the introduction of man-made
plutonium 238 into the atmosphere by nuclear-powered
spacecraft"....  Does that imply that those of us 20th century
lifeforms whose time on this mortal coil over-lapps the era of
nuclear-powered spacecraft have been seasoned with enough
plutonium that were we uranium rather than HUMANium we'd all have
decayed to plutonium?  Nobody ever asked me if this was what I
wanted!  Get paranoid, and get there fast!


          *         *         *         *
     
     Newspapers are able to present themselves as even-handed,
open-minded and open to criticism by the existence of the
"Editorial Page" and (that scheme of schemes...) the "Letters to
the Editor" section.  The existence of an editorial page
strengthens the notion of an "objective" (that is: editorial-
free) reporting base, which is of course the furthest thing from
the truth.  
     Editorials allow newspapers to simply drop their guard and
state plainly the noxious message they have been preaching inside
the types of stories they choose to print, and the angles they
use to pursue stories.  It is the page where Editors and
columnists can come right out with it and tell us that its O.K.
(even good for us!) to strap black men into metal chairs and fill
their bodies with electricity, they don't have to beat around the
(President) bush and quote some White House front man from the
Brookings Institute, they can just say it in plain old English.
     The "letters to the editor" section largely serves the
purpose of falsely demonstrating to a newspapers readership that
they COULD (if they wanted to, or were capable of spelling their
own name correctly...) write and object to anything they read in
the paper.  And indeed, a reading of a week's worth of letters in
any American newspapers would find a variety or readers writing
to complain about aspects of newspaper coverage.  But what about
all the letters we never see?
     This last year Dr. They attended a public meeting called by
a local newspaper for readers to critique newscoverage.  Almost
everyone who bothered to show up complained that they had written
letters to the editor that the newspaper had not bothered to
publish.  Andy-the-Editor (with his ever so casual well trimmed
beard) smiled (like an evil robot) and said that there were only
four reasons that the newspaper would not run a letter: (1)
Unsigned letters, or those without returned addresses, (2)
Letters containing obscenities (3) Obvious form-letters, signed
but not written by local individuals, or (4) Letters with points
of view already covered by previous letter writers.
     Dr. They has no problem with three out of four of these
reasons because Dr. They is a SCIENTIST.  As a SCIENTIST, Dr.
They likes objective, definable variables, and he dislikes wishy-
washy definitions that can be abused by the forces of evil.  Yes,
you guessed it, it is variable number four (4) that Dr. They
objects to (and for that matter so did the rest of the angry mob
at the above mentioned local meeting--though this may have also
been due to a bad batch of Geritol).  The common newspaper
practice of "presenting both sides of every issue" is closely
related to Dr. They's objection with practice number four. 
     If a newspaper writes a story advocating the sexual
molestation gophers, an increase in the powers of the police
state, or the election of George Bush to the Presidency, they are
happy to publish letters from individuals on both sides of this
issue.  But, they are most likely to do so on (what the consider)
an "even-handed" basis.  And just what does that mean dear
readers?  It means that they will publish (approximately) one
pro-gopher-molestation letter for every anti-gopher-molestation
letter they print, REGARDLESS OF THE TOTAL NUMBER OF LETTERS
RECEIVED ON ANY SIDE OF AN ISSUE.
     Because newspapers usually only print about a maximum of
four letters on any given topic, you the reader would never know
if 6,528 letters had been written condemning gopher molestation
and only 2 were ever written in support of the topic from reading
the four letters published in their paper.  Again, the SCIENTIST
in Dr. They cringes at this abomination of justice, and egregious
offence to standards of statistical sampling and decency!


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Do you have a favorite news item that you would like to see
covered in future P-M-S issues?  You can reach Dr. They at the
Acid Bath BBS (206) 456-2725, where the allwise Sysop Techno Punk
lets us rest our name.  We (that is, THEY) appreciate any re-
typed or scanned news story complete with a citation telling
where the story is from.  If you are too lazy to do that, then
send us the reference and our research staff will hunt it down. 
If you send a news contribution and want a copy of the issue it
appears in, then include you name/nym and a BBS where we can
leave you a copy.  If we pissed you off then call and flame us.
                              -------Dr. They
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