Udo Ulfkotte, a German journalist and former editor of Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, who exposed the CIA and US government’s control of the news media died of a heart attack.

On January 13, Udo Ulfkotte died, reportedly of a heart attack.  Ulfkotte, 56, was the author of Journalists for Hire: How the CIA Buys the News.  

Last year, he exposed how the CIA was involved in buying news, some of which we already knew for some time, especially in light of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Operation Mockingbird (for more on that, click here and here), which was their operation to control the mainstream media.

At that time, Dr. Udo Ulfkotte came out and declared that government is buying and even at times threatening journalists to write the stories they put out.

Russia Insider conducted an exclusive interview with Ulfkotte in October 2014.

We’re talking about puppets on a string, journalists who write or say whatever their masters tell them to say or write. If you see how the mainstream media is reporting about the Ukraine conflict and if you know what’s really going on, you get the picture. The masters in the background are pushing for war with Russia and western journalists are putting on their helmets.

I’m ashamed I was part of it. Unfortunately I cannot reverse this. Although my superiors at the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung approved of what I did, I’m still to blame. But yes, to my knowledge I am the first to accuse myself and to prove many others are to blame.

In a November 2014 interview with Oriental Review, he said:

I didn’t get money – I got gifts. Things like gold watches, diving equipment, and trips with accommodations in five-star hotels. I know many German journalists who at some point were able to take advantage of this to buy themselves a vacation home abroad. But much more important than the money and gifts is the fact that you’re offered support if you write pieces that are pro-American or pro-NATO. If you don’t do it, your career won’t go anywhere – you’ll find yourself assigned to sit in the office and sort through letters to the editor.

When you fly to the US again and again and never have to pay for anything there, and you’re invited to interview American politicians, you’re moving closer and closer to the circles of power. And you want to remain within this circle of the elite, so you write to please them. Everyone wants to be a celebrity journalist who gets exclusive access to famous politicians. But one wrong sentence and your career as a celebrity journalist is over. Everyone knows it. And everyone’s in on it.

Ulfkotte was not the only journalist to expose what is going on in the media.

In December 2015, I wrote about investigative journalist Sharyl Attkisson’s video that exposed how the media corrupts and manipulates the public.

“What if all isn’t as it seems?” Attkisson asked. “What if the reality you found was false, a carefully constructive narrative by unseen special interests designed to manipulate your opinion, a Truman Show-esque alternate reality all around you?”

“Complacency in the new media, combined with incredibly powerful propaganda and publicity forces means we sometimes get little of the truth,” she said. “Special interests have unlimited time and money to figure out new ways to spin us while cloaking their role. Surreptitious astroturf methods are now more important to these interests than traditional lobbying of Congress.”

According to Attkisson, some of the tale tell signs of the media engaging in these astroturf methods are:

1. Use of inflammatory language (ie. Crank, quack, nutty, lies, paranoid, pseudo, and conspiracy)
2. Claims to debunk myths that aren’t myths at all
3. Controversializing an issue by attacking the people, personalities and organizations surrounding it rather than addressing the facts
4. Reserving public skepticism for those exposing wrongdoing rather than the wrongdoers (instead of questioning authority, they question those who question authority)

Still, long before Attkisson spilled the beans on what the media does and how it does it, Emmy award winning journalist Amber Lyon came out and openly said that the DC government and foreign governments paid CNN to report what they wanted, and at times even distort the reports on particular events. That is why she left.