#just added the addendum. anyway. if that's the reason journos havent been covering some of the conclusions ive come to im gonna b pissed

[winterbirb]

(I'm gonna leave this post as is but jsyk I did come to a realization in the tags that means you're probably more right than I am)

Oh I more meant handlers as in "taking orders re: forming a narrative" while what you just described clocks as the standard practice of making sure an article doesn't accidentally put someone - either an agent or officer - at risk of getting shot or something like that. Like, it probably isn't mandatory, but if the WaPo got a guy killed because they decided they were above running an article through the IC, the newspaper would probably be blacklisted.

Unfortunately, the difference between "active enforcement of a narrative" and "protecting sources" isn't something that's usually covered in theory, and this is in part where theory readers themselves can become quite conspiracy brained. Even more unfortunately, the ""cure"" so to speak usually involves just... consuming content from the "enemy" (in this case, the CIA) to get a read on the humans behind the decisions. But this itself self-perpetuates conspiratorial thinking among otherwise detached theory readers, because now it's a struggle between the theoretically pure and those who've been corrupted by the enemy's lies.

tldr they don't sound like handlers, that just sounds like standard Not-Getting-People-Killed publishing practice

one real genuine problem with being socialist but not reading theory is that accepting the conclusions re: hegemony and social control without understanding the premises is a one-way ticket to conspiracybrain. like if you start believing that capitalists control the media (which is true) without understanding the structural and organizational factors by which this control is both created and exerted, you start doing paranoid free-association where you believe that every liberal media personality has their own personal CIA handler and they all go to the big Consent Manufacturing Meeting every weekend where they decide what consent to manufacture