On campaign trail, RFK Jr. pushes 'bonkers' theory about CIA's 'takeover of the American press'PI
Such conspiracy theories are "classic techniques of propaganda," an expert says. By Mike Levine June 20, 2024, 12:17 PM
Independent presidential candidate Robert Kennedy Jr. has received intense public scrutiny for promoting an array of unconventional theories, from claiming that vaccines are behind an "epidemic" of diseases in America to insisting that the CIA was directly involved in the assassination of his uncle, former President John F. Kennedy.
But one recurring conspiracy theory has garnered relatively little notice: his persistent assertion that major U.S. media outlets are being run by undercover CIA operatives or are controlled in some other way by the CIA, as part of a secret government plot to manipulate Americans' minds.
"The new head of NPR is a CIA agent," Kennedy declared at a New York campaign fundraiser in April, drawing gasps from some of his supporters.
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He was specifically referring to Katherine Maher, who nearly two months earlier became NPR's CEO and president after a long career in international development and digital advocacy. At the fundraiser, Kennedy said Maher's hiring at NPR was just the latest salvo in the CIA's "systematic takeover of the American press, particularly the liberal media."
Kennedy continues to amplify such claims at campaign events, in media interviews, and on social media, supporting them with what experts described to ABC News as "half-truths," "intimations," misinterpretations of law, and twisted historical anecdotes. He often cites widespread but utterly unsubstantiated allegations that a CIA program supposedly called "Operation Mockingbird" secretly recruited journalists decades ago to help brainwash Americans.
"Operation Mockingbird is alive and well today," Kennedy has said repeatedly in recent months.
Kennedy's questionable tactics are all "classic techniques of propaganda," according to Sarah Oates, a journalism professor at the University of Maryland who specializes in propaganda. And that's ironic, she said, when Kennedy is employing those techniques to claim that the CIA and its media proxies are the ones propagandizing Americans.
Kennedy has offered varying explanations of the CIA's supposed goal for the purported media takeover – from allegedly promoting the Democratic Party's agenda to protecting the "military industrial complex."
The theory Kennedy promotes is consistent with his long-running criticism of both the CIA, which he says "continues to be involved in the coverup" of his uncle's murder, and "the mainstream media," which he claims have "slandered and censored" him over the last decade.
But Oates said the CIA conspiracy theory also creates a "Catch-22 situation," where the CIA's secretive nature makes it virtually impossible to disprove what Kennedy is alleging – and media reports questioning it can be spun "as evidence that the conspiracy is true."
"And that's the challenge," Oates said.
In a statement to ABC News, a CIA representative said, "Any notion that CIA is controlling American media is absolutely false. CIA Is an organization focused on providing foreign intelligence information to policymakers and protecting the United States from a range of overseas threats."
'Compromised by the CIA'?
According to Kennedy, the CIA infiltration of media is wide and deep: The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, and several prominent online news sites, including the Daily Beast, are "under the control of Intelligence Agency operatives," as he put it in a late April post on X, formerly Twitter.
Penske Media Corporation, which owns Rolling Stone, Billboard, Variety and The Hollywood Reporter, is "a kind of front for the CIA," Kennedy said at the fundraiser in New York.
And "even journals like Smithsonian and National Geographic … appear to be compromised by the CIA," he said in an interview last year.
To support his claims, Kennedy last month cited writings from former CIA officer Kevin Shipp, a conspiracy theorist who openly supports the QAnon movement and claims "Pearl Harbor was a myth," as well as author David Talbot, whose 2015 book on the CIA was "animated by conspiracy theories" and "speculations" that "often run far ahead of the evidence," the San Francisco Chronicle said in its review of the book.
In addition, Kennedy has frequently cited a pair of articles from author Dick Russell.
Though Kennedy hasn't always mentioned it, those articles were published three years ago by the media arm of his own nonprofit organization, Children's Health Defense, which promotes vaccine skepticism and often alleges government corruption.
https://abcnews.go.com/US/campaign-trail-rfk-jr-pushes-bonkers-theory-cias/story?id=111274658