Sinclair's Hyman & The New Operation Mockingbird

The first time I saw Mark Hyman on Columbus’ Sinclair Television ABC affiliate, I told the listeners of my WVKO radio show that he looked like a Stepford CIA clone with a microchip buried in his ass.

Hyman is the Vice President for Corporate Relations for Sinclair Broadcasting, which owns and operates programs or provides sales services affiliated with the top six TV networks in the country: ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox, UPN and Warner Brothers.

Sinclair plans to air a CIA-agit-prop-style documentary called “Stolen Honor: Wounds that never heal,” highly critical of John Kerry’s anti-war activities, two weeks before the November 2 election. Sixty-three Sinclair affiliates including a dozen in the battleground states of Ohio, Florida, Iowa and Wisconsin plan to air the 42-minute long negative campaign ad for George W. Bush in the form of a documentary.

The airing of the documentary to nearly a quarter of all TV markets in the U.S. represents tens of millions of dollars in in-kind campaign donations to the Bush coffers. It is one of the most blatant and illegal uses of the people’s airwaves in U.S. history and another signal that smiley-faced fascism is just around the corner.

The Democratic National Committee and 18 U.S. Senators have already objected to this unprecedented broadcasting of a thinly- veiled Bush attack ad. What they also need to do is investigate the ties between Hyman and the CIA. We need a new Church Committee to uncover the practices of the CIA and their specific relationship with the Bush family.

Hyman came to fame last April when he became the point man for attacking Ted Koppel and the ABC national television network for deciding to honor the soldiers killed in Iraq by reading their names on his Nightline show. The so-called Patriot Defenders Network rushed to Hyman’s aid when he emerged as Sinclair’s attack dog and refused to air Koppel’s show.

It should come as no surprise that Hyman, according to sources at the Columbus ABC affiliate WSYX-TV, brags of his ongoing ties with the CIA. According to one highly-placed station executive, Sinclair Broadcasting touted Hyman’s connections to the CIA in promoting “The Point,” the Hyman-hosted daily commentaries that are so far to the Right they would embarrass Mussolini.

Hyman’s profile on the Sinclair Broadcasting website documents his ties to both the U.S. military and the CIA. Hyman has served in both the Army and the Navy where he graduated from the U.S. Navy Academy in 1981. When he left active duty in 1989 he “became employed as a civilian in the Office of Naval Intelligence.”

Hyman’s profile on the website brags that as “a Captain in the Naval Reserve, he has served in leadership positions in CIA’s National Warning Staff, the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office and he is currently a Commanding Officer in the Naval Reserve Space and Network Warfare Program.”

Hyman, not willing to hide his ties to the Company, notes that “the military organizations in which he has served have been awarded four CIA National Intelligence Meritorious Unit Commendations during his service.” Hyman’s current position puts him in a key position in promoting President Bush’s dream of Star Wars II embodied in one of the government’s most shocking documents, “Joint Vision for 2020” which commits our nation to “full spectrum dominance” of the Earth.

During the heyday of the Cold War, the CIA allegedly instituted the notorious Operation Mockingbird to make sure the American mass media sang patriotic hymns in unison. The Company bribed journalists, planted stories, and wholly controlled TV, radio stations, newspapers and publishing houses.

These are the real wounds that will never heal: the fact that a covert intelligence agency deliberately manipulated public opinion and compromised both the Fourth Estate and the First Amendment.

What appears to be happening here is that the former CIA director and 41st President George Herbert Walker Bush is desperately using his connections and old school tactics to save his blundering son. Think of Hyman in terms of retro 1950s blatant Voice of America propaganda. Just like the coup in Florida in the 2000 election, the CIA’s time-tested tactics throughout the world are now being overly practiced on the U.S. population.

That which they used to do secretly in Operation Mockingbird, they now do openly on Sinclair Broadcasting with Mark Hyman. That’s the real point.

Bob Fitrakis is the Editor of the Free Press ( freepress.org), a political science professor, attorney, and author of Spooks, Nukes, and Nazis (Columbus Alive, 2003), which includes his award-winning investigative reports covering CIA covert activities.

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