Let’s make a list of obvious spooks in the US media
I’ll start:
Richard Engel
Andrea Mitchell
Christian Amanpour
Also it’s wild that they always just have like a “former CIA Director” or other open ‘former’ spooks on as commentators as if that is totally just a normal thing to do.
John Oliver is clearly a spook for the British establishment. Either that or the US is holding his passport hostage unless he expresses neo-lib views on his show.
I think it is overwhelmingly less useful to try to litigate about individual people inside an apparatus rather than the apparatus itself.
Litigating on individual people is only really worthwhile if they are in a pro-social apparatus or are highly independent.
Every single person who has made repeat appearances as a talking head on CNN/MSNBC/FOX/etc (not necessarily interview subjects) is at least a Useful Idiot to a tremendous degree being strung along by corporate masters and literal feds. No one in these apparati are less an establishment tool than that, they are all bourgeois running dogs. What Rachel Maddow believes in her heart about journalistic integrity is entirely immaterial compared to that.
Ignatius's coverage of the CIA has been criticized as being defensive and overly positive. Melvin A. Goodman, a 42-year CIA veteran, Johns Hopkins professor, and senior fellow at the Center for International Policy, has called Ignatius "the mainstream media's apologist for the Central Intelligence Agency," citing as examples Ignatius's criticism of the Obama administration for investigating the CIA's role in the use of torture in interrogations during the Iraq War and his charitable defense of the agency's motivations for outsourcing such activities to private contractors.
double LOL
In addition to being a journalist, Ignatius has written eleven novels in the suspense/espionage fiction genre that draw on his experience and interest in foreign affairs and his knowledge of intelligence operations. His first novel, Agents of Innocence, was at one point described by the CIA on its website as "a novel but not fiction."