No Strings Attached? The U.S. government’s funding of foreign media has a long history!

The U.S. government’s funding of foreign media has a long history. During the mid-’70s, in the aftermath of Watergate, two congressional investigations — the Church and Pike committees, after Sen. Frank Church (D-Idaho) and Rep. Otis Pike (D-N.Y.) — delved into covert U.S. government activities in other countries. They confirmed that, apart from CIA-funded journalists (both foreign and American), the U.S. government also subsidized foreign print media, radio and television outlets — something the Soviets were also doing. For instance, Encounter, an anti-communist literary magazine published in England from 1953 to 1990, was revealed to be a CIA operation in 1967. And, as is the case today, benign-sounding organizations, such as the Congress for Cultural Freedom, have also been CIA fronts.