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The U.S. Army has used local television stations in the U.S. as training posts for some of its psychological-operations personnel, according to Yahoo! News blog The Upshot. Since at least 2001, both WRAL, a CBS affiliate in Raleigh, N.C., and WTOC, a CBS affiliate in Savannah, Ga., have regularly hosted active-duty soldiers from the Army’s 4th Psychological Operations group as part of the Army’s Training With Industry program. Training with Industry is designed to offer career soldiers a chance to pick up skills through internships and fellowships with private businesses. The psyops soldiers use WRAL and WTOC to learn broadcasting and communications expertise that they could apply in their mission, as the Army describes it of quote “Influencing the emotions, motives, objective reasoning, and ultimately the behavior of foreign audiences”.

The relationship between psyops training with industry and news operations has stirred controversy in the past. In 2000, after a Dutch newspaper reported that pscy-ops troops had been placed at CNN’s news room under the program, CNN discontinued the internships and admitted that they had made a mistake. A spokesperson said at the time quote “It was inappropriate for PSYOPS personnel to be at CNN. They are not here now and they never again will be at CNN”.