John McCarterPosted 6 years ago under Bias, Conspiracies, Fake News
John W. McCarter (born March 2, 1938) is an American executive whose long career covers various leadership positions in government, business, and public purpose organizations. He earned his degree in Public and International Affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University. He then went on to attend the London School of Economics from 1960 to 1961 before going to Harvard University, where he obtained his Master’s Degree in Business Administration.
John McCarter and Booz Allen Hamilton Inc.
After graduating from Harvard University, McCarter joined the Booz Allen Hamilton Inc., a management consulting firm that works with various industries including, defense, health, energy, agriculture, and international development. He then became the company’s senior vice president until 1997.
During his time with the company, he worked with clients like Procter & Gamble, Monsanto, ConAgra, and The Chicago Board of Trade. In addition, Booz Allen Hamilton Inc. has worked with all five branches of the U.S. military, the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Joint Staff, and the National Security Agency (NSA) as part of their defense and intelligence market. The relationship between the U.S. government and Booz Allen Hamilton Inc. has been around for more than 75 years, with the firm working on many of the country’s most critical missions.
In the past, most Americans would not have been familiar with Booz Allen Hamilton Inc. However, it became the subject of controversy when some of its employees were charged with stealing classified material from the NSA. Because of this, many have deemed it a private intelligence agency that works on political power and money.
According to Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the 100-plus-year-old organization has been involved with many controversial federal surveillance programs. Moreover, he pointed out that the majority of Booz Allen Hamilton Inc.’s leadership and staff is composed of former military and intelligence officers.
It was also revealed by William Golden, a recruitment expert in the intelligence sector, that Booz Allen Hamilton Inc. routinely hires “collection managers” who decide what and how assets get used, providing thought, direction, and management. Meanwhile, higher ranking staff members of the firm are considered “spymasters.” Although it is unclear when Booz Allen Hamilton Inc. became a “spy organization,” their long history could indicate that this has been going on for a long time, even before it was revealed in 2013.
John McCarter’s stint at the DeKalb Corporation
McCarter also served as the President of the DeKalb Corporation, which was one of the biggest and most successful companies in the agribusiness industry, as well as its venture with Pfizer called Dekalb-Pfizer Genetics. The company is known for its research efforts in order to improve the growth and production of corn, sorghum, sunflower, soybeans, and alfalfa. The company was a major producer of hybrid corn seeds that are known for their high yield.
By 1998, DeKalb Corporation was acquired by Monsanto Company, which is considered the “World’s Most Evil Corporation.”
John McCarter’s involvement with the Atlantic Council
McCarter is also a member of the Atlantic Council’s International Advisory Board. This American think tank, which was established in 1961, aims to “shape policy choices and strategies to create a more secure and prosperous world” through their publications, ideas, and the communities that they build.
In 2018, Facebook gave the Atlantic Council the power over censorship on its website. The largest social media network in the world claims that this partnership is supposed to bring more “objectivity and neutrality” to the process of eliminating fake accounts that are potentially involved with nefarious foreign states. However, a look at the Atlantic Council’s donors list may raise questions regarding its intentions.
The organization’s donors include different government agencies in the U.S. and in other Middle Eastern countries, big corporations, other think tanks, university officials and professors, and law, consulting, and public relations firms. In addition, some members of their board of directors are known for being avid supporters of war and have even helped topple democracies. This includes the council’s longest serving board member Henry Kissinger, who toppled Chile’s democratic government, with the help of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), while he was serving as the secretary of state.
It is also difficult to accept the Atlantic Council’s power over media censorship knowing that the organization’s Vice Chair, Richard Edelman who is also the CEO of the public relations firm Edelman, has been caught creating fake grassroots campaigns in multiple instances. Moreover, Edelman did PR work for Rupert Murdoch, a fellow Atlantic Council board member and business mogul who owns hundreds of media outlets including FOX News, which has been shown to make people more misinformed the more they watched it.
To make things worse, this was not the first time that the Atlantic Council has been tasked with preventing the spread of fake news. The organization initially worked with the U.K. government to identify twitter accounts that spread disinformation.One of the accounts that they accused of being “a probable Russian disinformation account” belonged to a British retiree called Ian Shilling, who then went on Sky News to clear his name. What makes this issue especially troubling is that the account was identified due to its tweets that were critical of the British government. This isn’t far from happening given the power that they have now been given over Facebook censorship.
John McCarter’s investment on NewsGuard
In 2018, Steven Brill and Louis Gordon Crovitz, the duo that founded Journalism Online and Press+, established a news rating agency called NewsGuard. This was possible with the help of their investors, including McCarter, Thomas Glocer, the Publicis Groupe, Blue Haven Initiative, and the Knight Foundation, who helped the pair raise $6 million in funding.
NewsGuard claims that it would fight fake news with the help of old school journalism. To achieve this, the agency uses a team of journalists who would rate commonly used news and information websites based on nine journalistic criteria. These include publishing fake news, revealing conflicts of interests, disclosing sources of funding, and publicly correcting their errors. The websites are then given a green rating if they are considered credible or a red rating if they aren’t.
Since its foundation, NewsGuard has already faced criticism for some of its ratings. The agency has given websites like CNN and The Washington Post green ratings even if they have been proven to publish fake information in the past. Meanwhile, WikiLeaks was given a red rating even if NewsGuard itself has found that the information published on the whistleblower site has “never been shown to be fake” and was not “doctored” either. In addition, the U.S. state-funded outlet Voice of America was given a good rating even if it was reformed to “provide news that supports our [U.S.] national security objectives.” Meanwhile, RT was deemed untrustworthy because it raises doubts about the U.S. government and its allies through some of their reports.
The obvious bias that NewsGuard exhibits can be explained by its deep connections not just with the U.S. government but with neoconservatives and wealthy corporations as well. These connections lie in the people behind the company, including its founder Steven Brill who has been linked with the Yale Journalism Initiative, which is believed to be a CIA front. Co-founder Louis Gordon Crovitz is also known for his involvement with the neoconservative think tanks, the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and the Heritage foundation, which support the “War on Terror.” Moreover, Crovitz does not seem like a good fit for someone who would “restore trust and accountability” in journalism since he has been found, on numerous occasions, to publish wrong and misleading information.
The company’s board of advisers also raises doubts with regards to NewsGuard’s intentions since it supports the possibility that the agency was created to serve the interests of the American oligarchy. Some of its members include the first Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge and Retired General Michael Hayden, who is the former Director of the CIA and NSA, as well as the principal of the security consultation firm known as the Chertoff Group. Richard Stengel, former editor of Time magazine and “distinguished fellow” at the Atlantic Council, is also a NewsGuard advisor. This is a questionable choice for a news rating agency since Stengel has been quoted saying that he is “not against propaganda,” even going as far as describing his previous job as the Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy as being the “chief propagandist.”
In addition to this, having the Publicis Groupe as one of NewsGuard’s major investors can also affect the trustworthiness of the agency’s ratings. Powerful clients handled by the Publicis Groupe, including Eli Lilly, Merck, Pfizer, Starbucks, Procter & Gamble, McDonald’s, and the governments of Australia and Saudi Arabia, could cause a potential conflict of interest. This is because websites that accurately report on Publicis’ clients may be targeted if they generate bad publicity.
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