By Scotty Reid, 4/8/2012, news, opinion

From a Wall Street Journal piece on the passing of Mike Wallace,

"Wallace didn't just interview people. He interrogated them. He cross-examined them. Sometimes he eviscerated them. His weapons were many: thorough research, a cocked eyebrow, a skeptical "Come on" and a question so direct sometimes it took your breath away."

In fact some of his questions were too direct. So direct, they seemed to come straight from J. Edgar Hoover’s Counter Intelligence Program against every Negro organization in America.

The notion struck me while reviewing many of the YouTube videos of Malcolm X speeches and interviews. In one of the clips, Mike Wallace interviewed and interrogated Malcolm X on an issue that is still plaguing the Black community today, police brutality. Mike Wallace asked Minister Malcolm X about the kinds of “movements” happening in the Black community that he does not know about. He asked what kinds of actions these “movements” might take. Wallace then allows the subject, in this case Malcolm X, speak on for minutes while a FBI agent somewhere wrote down every word.

To doubt that the FBI’s CointelPro media operations would not recruit someone of Mike Wallace’s high profile and with one of the most watched news shows of the day is naive. Wallace interviewed a number of people in the Black power struggle, spent hours with them. He would be an ideal gatherer of information on Black “movements” for the FBI.

The FBI use of the media is nothing new; media propaganda has always been a part of war since the invention of the printing press and not just for the dissemination of propaganda.

If you think that news media organizations are incorruptible or above politics, one only need look to Fox News and any of the media holdings of right wing media mogul Rupert Murdoch.

Malcolm X was well aware of the manipulative powers of the “news media” and he said,

“The media's the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that's power. Because they control the minds of the masses.” 

Mike Wallace was a part of that media machine.

According to PublicEye.org,

“An analysis of CointelPro documents showed the FBI's use of news­papers, radio stations, and television stations was much greater than previously suspected. A separate CointelPro media program was in operation from at least 1956 to 1971; and documents reveal FBI offices in 16 cities were requested to compile lists of cooperative and reliable reporters for CointelPro use.”

As the corporate media laments the loss of one of their long time colleagues survived by his son and a current Fox News host Chris Wallace, I will be wondering if there is a list of CointelPro media collaborators with the name Mike Wallace on it.