Forgive me if you were already aware of this, but Operation Mockingbird is a CIA project, supposedly started in the 1950s, that embedded reporters in the media in order to influence news coverage. Anderson Cooper was a CIA intern, and maintains a presence on CNN despite having ratings that get beaten by Flintstone reruns.
Personally, I think a significant number of news people and celebrities are on payroll, and I also believe it started way before the 1950s, although under a different name. There's pretty credible circumstantial evidence that Harry Houdini, for example, was a government agent.
Note also that the claimed start of Operation Mockingbird was just a few years after Operation Paperclip, in which over 1600 Nazis were brought to the US by the OSS (forerunner of the CIA) and given new identities. Werner Von Braun is the most famous beneficiary of Operation Paperclip. Supposedly, Harry Truman ordered that no Nazis who committed atrocities be included in Operation Paperclip, but the OSS ignored him and just scrubbed records when necessary. A lot of the Paperclip recipients were scientists, but also note that during the fifties, the CIA established deep relationships with Harvard, Stanford, and Cal-Berkley, which happens to also be where the LSD experiments, and MKUltra (mind control experiments) took place.
Thanks for the reminder, Richard. When I got confused, I fear I was thinking of the bird rather than the scandal. I have a bird feeding platform right beside my window and am more attuned to birds than to politics. It took the second viewing of the image to put me in the right context. Your reminder is very kind and I’m grateful for it.