Category File
Media Control
2 documented theories filed under this subject.
- The Mighty WurlitzerThe Senate's Church Committee found that the CIA produced, subsidized or sponsored "well over a thousand books" before the end of 1967, and that until 1976 it kept covert relationships with about 50 American journalists. Both were part of what Frank Wisner, the first head of the CIA's Office of Policy Coordination, reportedly called his "mighty Wurlitzer": a network of front groups, publishers, student and labour organisations and journalists, built under the 1948 directive NSC 10/2. It was exposed in February 1967, when Ramparts revealed the agency's funding of the National Student Association.
- Censorship and the TruthThis theory claimed that postwar news in the United States and allied information systems was not merely influenced by military priorities but effectively scripted from above, with the Pentagon serving as the shorthand symbol for a wider defense and intelligence information apparatus. In its strongest form, the allegation held that newspapers, radio, newsreels, and later broadcasters transmitted an approved reality rather than reporting independent facts. The theory drew energy from several documented histories: wartime censorship under Byron Price’s Office of Censorship, immediate postwar disputes over whether censorship functions should survive into the occupation period, the growth of psychological warfare planning, and later revelations about covert state interest in shaping media environments. The “100 percent scripted” form is the conspiratorial absolute built on top of those real mechanisms.
- The Comic Book Code of 1948The Comic Book Code of 1948 theory holds that postwar anti-comics campaigns and the later formal Comics Code were never just about juvenile delinquency, horror, or crime. Instead, they are portrayed as a coordinated censorship effort meant to suppress stories, images, and ideas that hinted at hidden human potential, mutation, psychic ability, or real “super-human” lineages.