Mark Hyman: Stepford Spook And The New Operation Mockingbird
By Bob Fitrakis
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.
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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.