Copyright 2000, E-Files.  All Rights Reserved.  Web Design by LMi.net	THE E-FILES           NUMBER ELEVEN           JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2003 THE SUBJECT OF THIS E-FILE IS EDUCATION AND THE MEDIA. EDUCATION STORIES appear each day in the mainstream media. Many can be found daily at (www.educationnews.org)covering a myriad of topics-class size, teacher training, new standards, vouchers, charters, etc. One can easily become overwhelmed by details. Nevertheless, some of the biggest issues are not adequately discussed. This situation leaves readers with the impression they are well informed when they're not. FOR EXAMPLE: SCHOOL-TO-WORK. (See E-File Number One www.e-files.org) But for one article in Investors Business Daily several years ago, there has been little media coverage of STW as such. Hundreds of local news articles have raved about new career/vocational programs without mentioning that they are part of STW. For all the cable TV and radio channels available, few have presented programs about Goals 2000, the Workforce Investment Act, the No Child Left Behind Act, or many of the controversial curricula of the past 40 years. A few local radio talk show hosts interview authors such as Charlotte Iserbyt and Beverly Eakman. Their books, stuffed with STW, Goals 2000, etc., are often unavailable in stores except by special order. (Fortunately we have online ordering, but one has to know what to buy.) Authors like these often must self-publish or use small publishers because the establishment houses won't publish their books. SOME HISTORICAL BACKGROUND ABOUT CONTROL OF THE MEDIA THE NEW REPUBLIC magazine, according to Dr. Carroll Quigley in "Tragedy and Hope" was founded in 1914 in an "alliance of Wall Street and Left-wing." Young Walter Lippmann was recruited as "the authentic spokesman in American journalism for the Establishments on both sides of the Atlantic in international affairs. His biweekly columns, which appear in hundreds of American papers, are copyrighted by the New York Herald Tribune which is now owned by J.H. Whitney." (Quigley, page 939.) (The Whitneys were a Standard Oil family associated with the Rockefellers.) Lippman was a Fabian socialist and aide to Colonel Edward House and President Woodrow Wilson, according to Rose Martin in "Fabian Freeway." Lippmann was a prolific, long-lived, influential writer of many books as well as articles. In his 1922 book "Public Opinion," Lippmann said, "I argue that representative government, either in what is ordinarily called politics, or in industry, cannot be worked successfully...unless there is an independent, expert organization for making the unseen facts intelligible to those who have to make the decisions...My conclusion is that public opinions must be organized for the press if they are to be sound, not by the press as it is today. This organization I conceive to be in the first instance the task of a political science that has won its proper place as formulator, in advance of real decision, instead of apologist, critic or reporter after the decision has been made...the perplexities of government and industry are conspiring to give political science this enormous opportunity to enrich itself and to serve the public." THE CONGRESSIONAL RECORD OF FEBRUARY 9, 1917 recorded these remarks by Congressman Oscar Callaway: "In March 1915, the J.P. Morgan interests, the steel, shipbuilding, and powder interests, and their subsidiary organizations, got together 12 men high up in their newspaper world and employed them to select the most influential newspapers in the United States and sufficient number of them to control generally the policy of the daily press of the United States. These 12 men worked the problem out by selecting 179 newspapers, and then began, by an elimination process, to retain only those necessary for the purpose of controlling the general policy of the daily press throughout the country. They found it was only necessary to purchase the control of the 25 greatest papers. The 25 papers were agreed upon; emissaries were sent to purchase the policy, national and international, of these papers; an agreement was reached; the policy of the papers was bought, to be paid for by the month; an editor was furnished for each paper to properly supervise and edit information regarding the questions of preparedness, militarism, financial policies, and other things of national and international nature considered vital to the interests of the purchasers...This policy also included the suppression of everything in opposition to the wishes of the interests served." IN 1937, FERDINAND LUNDBERG WROTE "America's Sixty Families," about the wealthiest Americans, of whom he said, "These families are...functioning discreetly under a de jure democratic form of government behind which a de facto government...has gradually taken form since the Civil War. This de facto government is actually the government of the United States-informal, invisible, shadowy." He wrote, "Journalism, which shapes, modifies, or subtly suggests public attitudes and states of mind, morbidly attracts the owners of the great fortunes, for whose protection against popular disapproval and action there must be a constantly running defense...American popular journalism exists in three broad layers of which sharp account must be taken. The bottom layer consists of the directly controlled and financed political party press; immediately above this lies the layer of "independent" newspaper entrepreneurs, many of whom have been cemented by pecuniary success or political affiliation to the inner circle of great wealth...and above this layer are the organs, directly owned, of the wealthy families themselves. These latter are...the biggest metropolitan newspapers and the great national magazines...It is one of the hallmarks of the richest families that they virtually all own, or secretly control, one or more newspapers or magazines." LUNDBERG said this of the Rockefellers as of 1937: "So far as can be learned, the Rockefellers have given up their old policy of owning newspapers and magazines outright, relying now upon the publications of all camps to serve their best interests in return for the vast volume of petroleum and allied advertising under Rockefeller control. After the J.P. Morgan bloc, the Rockefellers have the most national advertising of any group to dispose of. And when advertising alone is not sufficient to insure the fealty of a newspaper, the Rockefeller companies have been known to make direct payments in return for a friendly editorial attitude...When John D. Rockefeller was faced in the nineteenth century with a press barrage of denunciation he started acquiring newspapers and magazines right and left through hired agents." THE PROTECTION FROM JOURNALISTIC SCRUTINY perhaps explains why John D. Rockefeller, Jr. felt secure enough to have his agent Frederick Gates set up the General Education Board in 1913, which Iserbyt said caused the deliberate dumbing down of America to become set in motion (www.deliberatedumbingdown.com). John Flynn reported that in the period up to 1928 the elder John D. Rockefeller donated $129,197, 900 to the General Education Board, while JDR, Jr.'s gifts totaled $65,234,606. REGULATION OF THE AIRWAVES BEGAN with the Wireless Ship Act of 1910 and the Radio Act of 1912. The sinking of the Titanic prompted the latter. It required a person, company or corporation using radio communication for business in the United States to obtain a license from the Secretary of Commerce and Labor. The Radio Act of 1927 created the Federal Radio Commission to oversee broadcasting. "The most important provision of the 1927 Act was the formation of a Federal Radio Commission "composed of five commissioners appointed by the President, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, and one of whom the President shall designate as chairman," ("Broadcast Law and Regulation", John R. Bittner, Prentice-Hall, 1982.) With the Federal Radio Commission's 3 divisions and 14 sections, still under Commerce, a regulatory bureaucracy was born. In 1934, President Franklin Roosevelt sent to Congress a proposal to create a separate agency, the Federal Communications Commission. This was passed in the Communications Act of 1934. Lundberg wrote, "The New Republic of March 17, 1937...pointed out that "nearly two hundred radio stations-one third of the total number and more than a third in terms of power, listening area and size of audience-are owned or controlled by newspapers." In short, they are largely owned by the very elements that own the newspapers." Writer J. Kattermann recently commented, "The Federal Communications Commission (is) an organization that magically determines who shall own and build the fortresses known as Television and Radio Stations..." Writer Don Fife noted in his article "When Socialism Comes to Your Neighborhood" that "all new FCC broadcast licenses issued by President Roosevelt in the 1930s and 1940s went to leftist Democrats like Lyndon Johnson," (a Roosevelt protégé.) 1940's: CHRISTOPHER SIMPSON WROTE IN "SCIENCE OF COERCION" that CBS president William Paley, Time/Life's C.D. Jackson, and Rand Corporation's W. Phillips Davison were important staff members in the U.S. Psychological Warfare Division during World War II. Another member of that group was Charles Dollard, who subsequently became president of the Carnegie Corporation (long-time controller of American education) and a trustee of Rand Corporation (See E-Files Number Ten www.e-files.org). The wartime Office of War Information (OWI) and the U.S. Army's Division of Morale, Research Branch were two other psychological warfare and propaganda centers. After the war, OWI alumni became executives and editors of the major magazines, TV networks, newspapers and book publishers, including Time, Look, Fortune, Saturday Review, Viking Press, Harper & Brothers, and CBS. A number of Army Division of Morale, Research Branch "graduates" became foundation executives at Russell Sage, Rockefeller, Ford, and Rockefeller's Population Council. OWI psychological warfare program director from 1950-1952 Edward Barrett became Dean of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. (Eakman's "Cloning of the American Mind", page 197.) THE ASPEN INSTITUTE FOR HUMANISTIC STUDIES was founded in 1948. Eakman wrote that the Carnegie organizations funneled "enormous sums" into Aspen over the years. She said, "Aspen Institute is today a wealthy liberal think tank. It wines, dines, and helps train journalists, government agency heads, and media moguls around the world...it is not entirely inaccurate to call Aspen Institute the premier Atheist Lobby." Aspen's website says it is "an international organization dedicated to dialogue and inquiry of global concern," (www.aspeninst.org). Aspen became involved in projects in both the media and in education. Its members and trustees included presidential education advisors. Dr. John Coleman wrote in "Conspirators' Hierarchy: The Story of the Committee of 300" that Aspen was founded behind the scenes by Lord Bullock of the British Royal Institute of International Affairs (RIIA--the British "cousin" of the Council on Foreign Relations). He said Robert Anderson, chairman of the board of Atlantic Richfield and of Aspen "fronted" for Lord Bullock,a trustee of Aspen. IN "FOUNDATIONS: THEIR POWER AND INFLUENCE", 1958, Rene Wormser wrote that The Reece Committee, established by Congress to investigate the activities of the tax-exempt foundations, discovered that the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace had created a "powerful propaganda machine." The Carnegie Endowment spent many millions of dollars in "The production of masses of material for distribution; the creation and support of large numbers of international policy clubs, and other local organizations at colleges and elsewhere; the underwriting and dissemination of many books on various subjects, through the "International Mind Alcoves" and the "International Relations Clubs and Centers" which it organized all over the country; the collaboration with agents of publicity, such as newspaper editors; the preparation of material to be used in school text books, and cooperation with publishers of text books to incorporate this material; the establishing of professorships at the colleges and the training and indoctrination of teachers; and the financing of lecturers and the importation of foreign lecturers and exchange professors; and the support of outside agencies touching the international field, such as the Institute of International Education, the Foreign Policy Association, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Council on Education, the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Historical Association, the American Association of International Conciliation, the Institute of Pacific Relations, the International Parliamentary Union and others, and acting as mid-wife at the birth of some of them." (page 171 of the Reece report.) POST-REECE, FOUNDATIONS, EDUCATION, AND THE MEDIA WORKED TOGETHER FOR DAMAGE CONTROL. Robert M. Hutchins was Chancellor of the University of Chicago (generously endowed by Rockefeller since 1893) and president of the Ford Foundation offshoot Fund of the Republic. Hutchins gave a speech in response to the Reece Committee report. Hutchins said: "It is ... one of the more absurd charges of the Reece Committee that the foundations were an intellectual cartel...The conduct of the Reece Committee was so scandalous that it outraged almost all of the press...Hence support of the New Deal could be subversion. Social engineering, planning, world government, the United Nations, Wiliam James, John Dewey, the American Friends Service Committee, Dr. Kinsey and reform are all subversive in the bright new lexicon of the Reece Committee...We may as well state it plainly: the Reece investigation in its inception and execution was a fraud. Nobody in his right mind could suppose that the great accumulations of wealth left by our richest men were being intentionally used by their trustees to overthrow the institutions of this country. The First Amendment suggests that tax exemption should not be denied or revoked because the particular views of religion, education, or science held or promoted by the foundations are unpopular....The Fund for the Republic is a sort of Fund for the American Dream. I do not think the Fund can make the American Dream come true; but perhaps it can help keep it alive and clear..." The speeches and essays by Robert Hutchins on behalf of The Fund for the Republic were published in the book "Freedom, Education, and the Fund," (1956). This book was assigned reading in many universities during the 1960s. (See Wormer's "Foundations", pages 270-81 on the Fund for the Republic's projects. Earl Browder, former president of Communist Party USA was hired for one of them.) ROBERT HUTCHINS was a founder and president of the Committee to Frame a World Constitution. His article, "World Government Now", appeared in a book called "Foundations for World Order", 1947, published by the Social Science Foundation. Dennis Cuddy, in "Chronology of Education", wrote that Hutchins, with Mortimer Adler (founder of Great Books) and others, authored "The Preliminary Draft of a World Constitution" that advocated regional federation on the way toward world federation or government. Also in 1947, Time, Inc. sponsored The Commission on Freedom of the Press, to conduct an inquiry into "the present state and future prospects of the freedom of the press." The chairman of the Commission: Robert M. Hutchins. The Commissioners expressed the fear that "news is twisted by the emphasis on 'firstness', on the novel and sensational; by the personal interests of the owners; and by pressure groups." Francis X. Gannon noted: "Fortunately, Hutchins and his Commission were not taken seriously especially after veteran Chicago Tribune reporter Frank Hughes wrote a 642 page book, "Prejudice and the Press," which exposed the Commission's work as an attempt to shackle the press in the name of freedom." Some of Hutchins' articles were later reprinted in university textbooks. In 1959, "Readings in World Politics", 1959, Oxford University Press contained "World Government Now." An essay from the Commission on Freedom of the Press was printed in "Freshman English Program", 1955, 1957, 1959, 1960, Scott, Foresman and Company. Hutchins was also a columnist for the Los Angeles Times. Hutchins was at the founding of Aspen Institute. RICHARD HARWOOD wrote an article that appeared in the Washington Post on 10/30/93 about the Council on Foreign Relations. He noted, "What is distinctively modern about the council these days is the considerable involvement of journalists and other media figures, who account for more than 10 percent of the membership...It was not until the late '60s that journalists began showing up with some frequency on the council's board and in the membership lists." Harwood cited as CFR members columnists Charles Krauthammer, William Buckley, George Will, and Jim Hoagland; TV journalists Dan Rather, Tom Brokaw, and Jim Lehrer; then Washington Post editor Katharine Graham; Hedley Donovan of Time Inc.; Elizabeth Drew of the New Yorker; Philip Geyelin of the Washington Post; Karen Elliott House of the Wall Street Journal; Strobe Talbott of Time magazine; and various personnel of the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal, weekly newsmagazines, and network television. Harwood concluded: "Is there something unethical in these new relationships, some great danger that conflicts of interest are bound to arise when journalists get cheek and howl with the establishment? Probably not. They are part of that establishment whether they like it or not, sharing most of its values and world views." MOST OF NETWORK AND CABLE TV, TV STATIONS, RADIO, BOOK PUBLISHING, MAGAZINE, MUSIC, HOME VIDEO, MOTION PICTURE, AND MULTIMEDIA are owned and controlled by a handful of corporations such as Time Warner, General Electric, Westinghouse, News Corporation, and Disney. Professor Ben Bagdikian, author of "The Media Monopoly", said of these: "Together, they exert a homogenizing power over ideas, culture and commerce that affects populations larger than any in history...media giants have two enormous advantages: They control the public image of national leaders who, as a result, fear and favor the media magnates' political agendas; and they control the information and entertainment that help establish the social, political and cultural attitudes of increasingly larger populations...." ROBERT W. McCHESNEY OF THE INSTITUTE OF COMMUNICATIONS RESEARCH, University of Illinois said, "The global media system is fundamentally noncompetitive in any meaningful economic sense of the term. Many of the largest media firms have some of the same major shareholders, own pieces of one another or have interlocking board of directors. When Variety compiled its list of the fifty largest global media firms for 1997, it observed that 'merger mania' and cross-ownership had 'resulted in a complex web of interrelationships' that 'will make you dizzy.'" BEN BAGDIKIAN wrote, "When 50 men and women, chiefs of their corporations, control more than half the information and ideas that reach 249 million Americans, it is time for Americans to examine the institutions from which they receive their daily picture of the world." HOW THE MEDIA MANIPULATES PUBLIC OPINION: ALLAN LEVITE'S ARTICLE "THE TEN TOOLS OF MEDIA BIAS" appeared in The Social Critic's Fall, 1998 issue. Briefly, these are the ten: 1) Buzzwords: the use of slanted labels; 2) Cassandra Talk: presenting news of impending disaster; 3) Discrediting: e.g., use of spokespeople to make one representative appear unbiased while another appearing biased, or use of smiling/unsmiling or flattering/unflattering photos; 4) The Pinsky Principle: the reporter or editor self-censors news he doesn't like; 5) The Halo Effect: failure of journalists to apply critical scrutiny to favored causes or people; 6) Headline-slanting: because many readers see only headlines, summarize stories in them that cause readers to have the impressions the reporter wishes; 7) Picking Flowers: using selectively arrayed "factoids" to editorialize a news article; 8) Positioning: placing news items near other news to add meaning to the facts, such as a budgets cuts near hungry homeless; 9) Ventriloquism: writer makes editorial statements by quoting people who agree with them and treating these statements as if they were facts instead of opinions; 10) White hats: the "good guys" are labeled in good terms like "moderate" while the "bad guys" are labeled in bad terms such as "extremists." PAUL H. WEAVER wrote "News and the Culture of Lying: How Journalism Really Works" (1994), "the way journalists and officials fabricate an alternative reality that is covered in the media, reacted to by the public, and dealt with by government as if it were the same as the reality we experience in everyday life at home or on the job." He described the process of how a story is put together: "The central fact about the interaction between news media and the people they cover is that the people being covered know the media are watching and behave accordingly...the actions ...aren't spontaneous events but self-conscious efforts to create favorable impressions. For their part, the news media are aware that newsmakers are performing, but they nonetheless treat newsmakers' fabrications as authentic actions... They rarely go beyond the performance to unmask the players and players or to describe events with reference to the self-conscious, self-serving effort at work backstage." This describes most education reporting to a "T." WEAVER also discovered that newspaper reporting was totally altered by Joseph Pulitzer in the 1890s. He explained, "Pulitzer's front page was a giant amplifier...It turned news into a structure of crises...it suggested that the newspaper has a special closeness to the people, one transcending the closeness of other institutions...The old journalism...reminded them they were citizens of a constitutional society...that enabled them to follow and participate in its formal affairs...and renew their commitment to, constitutional and political processes...Pulitzer's new journalism, with its heavy overlay of communitarian story values, stood the old journalism on its head. It addressed, not the citizen and constitutionalist and partisan, but the private, prepolitical human being...the new Pulitzerian journalism was inviting people to turn away from formal institutions and focus instead on the community evoked by the storytellers of the newsroom." In 1908, future president Woodrow Wilson argued that, in Weaver's words, "The disabilities created by the Constitution's dispersal of powers had been overcome by the recent evolution of the political parties and news media. With the support of the one and outreach of the other, a president could create, within the Founder's framework, the equivalent of a prime minister and parliamentary system. From his bully pulpit a president could mobilize the parties and public opinion, and through them the Congress, to take the actions a complex, fast-changing society required." EDUCATION IS "PRE-PROPAGANDA" ACCORDING TO Jacques Ellul, author of "Propaganda" (Alfred A. Knopf, 1969). Contrary to the common belief that education helps people see through attempts to propagandize them, education is the absolute prerequisite for propaganda. Konrad Kellen, who wrote the introduction to "Propaganda" summarized, "Education conditions the minds with vast amounts of incoherent information, already dispensed for ulterior purposes and posing as "facts" and as "education." Ellul follows through by designating intellectuals as virtually the most vulnerable of all to modern propaganda, for three reasons: 1) they absorb the largest amount of secondhand, unverifiable information; 2) they feel a compelling need to have an opinion on every important question of our time, and thus easily succumb to opinions offered to them by propaganda on all such indigestible pieces of information; and 3) they consider themselves capable of "judging for themselves." They literally need propaganda." THE MEDIA REPORTS THE "OFFICIAL VERSION" of events. It is repeated in all the forms of the media. In a short time, the official version is printed up in textbooks. The official version may remain seemingly "carved in stone", even after researchers dispute the facts of the "official version" with evidence that what was reported initially and what is being taught in classrooms are false. Pearl Harbor is an example. Charles Callan Tansil wrote "Back Door to War" and Admiral Theobald wrote "The Final Secret of Pearl Harbor" long before Robert Stinnett wrote "Day of Deceit: The Truth about FDR and Pearl Harbor" in 2000 with proof obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests that it was known by FDR and others that the Japanese were planning the attack. Yet, the media failed to report the truth and efforts were made to withdraw open records. Even worse, a lavish Hollywood movie was produced to mislead a new generation of theater goers about Pearl Harbor. GROWTH OF FEDERAL INVOLVEMENT in public TV and in public education came at about the same time and were ushered in by many of the same people. Laurence Jarvik, in "PBS Behind the Screen", wrote, "With the assassination of President Kennedy and the ascension of Lyndon Johnson, himself a former schoolteacher, the education establishment found itself firmly at the center of the new President's "Great Society." Under Johnson, the structures were put in place for a federally subsidized public television service. In 1964, Johnson's Office of Education sponsored a conference on long-range financing for educational television. The most significant result of that conference was the formation in November 1965 of the Carnegie Commission on Educational Television, which was assigned to examine public television financing issues." McGEORGE BUNDY BECAME PRESIDENT OF THE FORD FOUNDATION in 1966 and hired former CBS News president Fred Friendly, who "saw NET's [National Educational Television] potential for coverage of news and "public affairs" (which really meant politics) that was freed from the need for ratings." Jarvik noted, "The Ford Foundation was deeply involved in funding political activities to shore up liberal programs of the Great Society affecting race relations, the War on Poverty, and community action. Bundy had doubled the budget of the Foundation's Division of National Affairs to $40 million annually...and saw educational television as an outlet to promote "public discussion of issues which are controversial...At its peak, the Ford Foundation was pouring into educational television to the tune of $100 million a year, sponsoring NET and instructional projects around the country and influencing the development of flagship stations for the network." DOUGLASS CATER was President Johnson's special assistant for educational matters who called himself the "midwife" of public broadcasting. Cater had been Washington editor of "The Reporter" magazine and author of "The Fourth Branch of Government." Lou Cannon, a reporter of the Washington Post, said that Cater "influenced a generation of Washington reporters." Cater helped model the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) on the system of American private higher education and greatly influenced the drafting of the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967. Among the first board of directors of the CPB were Jack Valenti, John D. Rockefeller III, Oveta Culp Hobby, owner of the Houston Post, and James Killian, head of the Carnegie Commission. Frank Pace, then head of General Dynamics, was chairman of the board. IN 1971, CATER FOUNDED THE ASPEN INSTITUTE PROGRAM ON COMMUNCATIONS AND SOCIETY as a "long term project of the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies to consider issues relating to the communications media and to develop politics and actions dealing with those issues." The initial four areas of concentration were "1) public broadcasting; 2) government and the media; 3) television and social behavior; and 4) social uses of the new communication technologies." Aspen held "workshops, seminars and conferences in each of these areas" and published the results as The Aspen Series on Communications and Society. Some of the volumes produced included the bi-annual editions of the "Aspen Handbook on the Media" beginning with the 1973-74 volume; "Television as a Social Force" in 1975; and "The Future of Public Broadcasting" in 1976. Cater also suggested that Lou Cannon of the Washington Post take a leave from the newspaper and come to Aspen, Colorado to the Aspen Institute to write a book about reporting. His book, "Reporting: An Inside View", was published in 1977 by the California Journal Press of Sacramento. ASPEN INSTITUTE PRODUCED A COMPREHENSIVE BOOK called "The Mass Media: Aspen Institute Guide to Communication Industry Trends" in 1978. This 451-page volume contained 303 tables with seemingly every conceivable statistic about the media from 1900 onward: numbers, sizes and growth statistics of: selected populations; copyrights and patents; bookstores and book clubs; book, magazine, newspaper, radio station, television station, cable television, motion picture, and recording producers and distributors. Included were detailed statistics about the ownership and control of the media industries. The economics of each media industry area were broken down. Labor statistics were given. Libraries were included, too. The sizes and characteristics of the media audiences were there (income, sex, age, marital status, educational level). Praeger Publishers co-published the books with Aspen as part of The Praeger Special Studies program, which, according to the books, "through a selective worldwide distribution network, makes available to the academic, government, and business communities significant and timely research in U.S. and international economic, social, and political issues." IN 1978 WHEN THE ASPEN MEDIA GUIDE was produced, the directors of the Aspen Program On Communications and Society included among others Joseph E. Slater; Lord Bullock; Douglass Cater; Harlan Cleveland; Francis Keppel; Henry Kissinger; Daniel Yankelovich (who later founded the pollster firm Public Agenda); and John W. Gardner (Carnegie Corporation and Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare under President Johnson.) ASPEN WAS ALSO WORKING ON its "Education for a Changing Society Program" since its founding in 1948 to discuss "relationships among different phases of life-long education, from early learning to continuing education; the role of morals, ethical thought and social values in education; financial and structural reform of the educational system; relationship of education to the work experience; and education for citizenship in an interdependent world." (Freemen Digest, The Center for Global Studies, Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies issue, January, 1979.) ASPEN INSTITUTE was supported in the 1970s by at least 39 foundations (including 4 Rockefeller funds, Carnegie Corporation, Ford Foundation, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, German Marshall Fund, Russell Sage Foundation); grants from government agencies such as the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, the Department of State, and the United Nations Environment Program; and by corporate contributions from at least 38 companies (many of them in media) including ABC, AT&T, Chase Manhattan Bank, Coca-Cola, IBM, General Electric, Sony Corporation, Westinghouse Broadcasting Company, NBC, and CIBA. ASPEN INSTITUTE' DIRECTORS prepared a list of "Proposals for President Carter's Agenda" in which Aspen suggested that Carter create a Department of Education, develop parent training and parent information programs, include a national health insurance plan for all school pupils, and teach global perspectives in the curriculum. On October 17, 1979, the U.S. Department of Education was established. Shirley M. Hufstedler became its first Secretary. Hufstedler was a Trustee of the Aspen Institute at the time (with Kissinger, Robert McNamara, Vernon Jordan, Maurice Strong, and others.) RECENTLY THE CHAIRMAN/CEO OF CNN NEWS, a company of AOL Time Warner, left to become president of the Aspen Institute. Walter Isaacson has been managing editor of Time Magazine (overseeing Time for Kids, too). Even more recently, former education policy advisor to President Clinton and advisor to James Irvine Foundation, Robert Shireman joined Aspen's Program on Education in a Changing Society as a senior fellow. In the online announcement about Shireman, Aspen boasted that its education program has used workshops that have helped "those in leadership positions at the federal, state, and local levels identify sound and politically feasible responses to the pressing education issues of the day. The program has influenced the development of significant issues in the past decade including: the emerging shape of school reform; national education goals; and the implications for technology for education. Its current focus is on the strategies and policies necessary to transform the American high school." One of Mr. Shireman's colleagues at Aspen is Michael Cohen, former Assistant Secretary for Elementary and Secondary Education at the U.S. Department of Education, and the man responsible for overseeing the 1994 Title 1 federal standards and assessment requirements. THE INSTITUTE FOR EDUCATIONAL INQUIRY, founded by John Goodlad and funded by Carnegie Corporation, Annenberg Foundation, AT&T Foundation, Pew Charitable Trust, Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, W.K. Kellogg foundation, and others, offers fellowships and seminars to train local media about national education reforms. See story about this in Washington state at: http://depts.washington.edu/cedren/cer.htm.) THE TRUTH IS OUT THERE. The E-Files efiler@pacbell.net