Our State Controlled Media and the JFK Files

From my primary Substack "I Protest" (December 2022) at donaldjeffries.substack.com

This article I wrote over two years ago is especially relevant now, given the latest JFK assassination file releases. Even mainstream conservative outlets are now far more receptive to accepting that there was a conspiracy. Only the left-leaning mainstream, exemplified by The New York Times proclaiming “Oswald still did it,” clings to that thoroughly discredited and impossible scenario. I’ll accept for all of us when Candace Owens recently declared, “the conspiracy theorists were right.”

Last week, Tucker Carlson aired two astounding reports on the JFK assassination, on back to back nights. He literally said the CIA killed JFK. He called out every CIA director since the assassination. He cited the 1967 CIA memo, “Countering Critics of the Warren Report.” He even mentioned Louis Jolyon West.

You’d have to have been obsessed with the JFK assassination for as long as I have to understand just how shocking Carlson’s words were. I had the same reaction as Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who called it “The most courageous newscast in 60 years. The CIA’s murder of my uncle was a successful coup d’état from which our democracy has never recovered.” Walter Cronkite never said anything like it. Neither did Huntley and Brinkley. Peter Jennings. Dan Rather. Don Lemon. Chris Cuomo. Rachel Maddow. Joe Scarborough. Keith Olbermann. Sean Hannity. The list is endless. Carlson broke some kind of unofficial agreement to promote the Oswald-did-it mantra.

Walter Cronkite, the “most trusted” man in America, presided over multiple disinformation specials on CBS. Even when he was over ninety, he couldn’t stop lying for the corrupt state. And, for many years he was the voice of the giant owl, which our horrific leaders worship every summer at Bohemian Grove, during their occult ritual the Cremation of Care. A trustworthy guy. His colleague Dan Rather came to prominence by lying his ass off as a reporter for CBS’s Dallas affiliate. When he succeeded Cronkite at anchor of the nightly national news, he editorialized three times against Oliver Stone’s JFK, before it was even released.

If the subject was ever brought up on any television show, the lone assassin fairy tale had to be pushed. Every time. Remember that ridiculous episode of Quantum Leap? The hero goes back to November 22, 1963, and to his “surprise” finds not shadowy conspirators, but Lee Harvey Oswald up in that window, with his cheap, defective mail order rifle. Fortunately for Jackie Kennedy, he managed to save her life. As his mentor explained at the end, “the last time he got her, too.”

That’s what made Stone’s film so revolutionary. He managed to get huge older stars like Jack Lemmon, Walter Matthau, and Ed Asner to do cameo roles. All of them had been quiet about their doubts in the past. Before he “killed himself,” comedian Freddie Prinze had been trying to organize a telethon to raise awareness about the conspiracy to assassinate Kennedy. He wasn’t having any luck getting celebrities to appear. So where were Lemmon, Matthau, and Asner back then?

Stone’s film really raised awareness about the subject. Even Oprah talked about it, and seemed dubious of the official story. But another counter offensive by the state controlled media resulted in celebrities “speaking out” for the other side. Stephen King wrote 11/22/63, and to no one’s surprise depicted Oswald acting alone. He appeared on C-SPAN to smear both Oswald and his deceased mother, claiming she “checked him every night to see if he was developing into a man.” No source for this- they’ve never needed sources for their lies.

Actor James Franco wrote a widely published article defending the Warren Report. He had no evidence to back his stance- there is no defense for the Warren Report. It is completely and utter indefensible. Tom Hanks tried to put together a miniseries to air on HBO, based on Vincent Bugliosi’s magnus ridiculotos Reclaiming History. Most tragic of all, the actor who so convincingly portrayed Oswald, Gary Oldman, later declared that he had become convinced that Oswald actually did it. No one bothered to ask how he’d been convinced, or who had convinced him.

In recent years, all mainstream media reporting on the subject dropped the familiar caveat “alleged,” in front of Oswald’s name. They just declaratively stated that Oswald had done it. Period. Discussion over. Move along. Nothing to see here. The Sixth Floor Museum in Dallas did yeoman’s work in promoting the official story. One time critic Gary Mack became an apologist for the official version of events after being named curator of the Museum. He used to email me regularly to “correct” what I’d posted on a JFK forum. At least he was always polite.

My friend John Barbour documented the media’s malfeasance in all this in his great 2017 documentary The American Media & The 2nd Assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Despite being a show biz insider for decades, including as host and creator of the #1 rated television show Real People, Barbour was ignored not only by the media he once worked for, but by the dysfunctional JFK assassination “research” community as well. If you haven’t seen it, get it. Watch it more than once. It’s that important.

Ironically, one of the few mainstream reporters who ever did any worthwhile reporting on the assassination was Bill O’Reilly. When he was with Inside Edition, O’Reilly investigated aspects of the case, and seemed to doubt the official story. Later, he would join Fox News and make a whole lot of money. He not only started lying about his coverage of the death of Oswald’s “best friend” George de Mohrenschildt, who was very wealthy with connections to intelligence among other things, and had once dated Jackie Kennedy’s mother (more about that in the upcoming Hidden History 3), he wrote the laughable disinfo piece Killing Kennedy.

Geraldo Rivera had enough doubts about the official story to show the Zapruder film on his short-lived TV show Good Night America in 1975. It was the first time Americans had seen the home movie of the assassination. Media titan Life paid Abraham Zapruder a healthy sum of money for the film, then buried it for a dozen years. Quite a curious thing for an arm of our “free press” to do. But Geraldo, like O’Reilly, would reverse course and become a champion of the Oswald-did-it school.

JFK, and especially RFK, had numerous friends who were high profile journalists. All of them supported the Warren Report, at least publicly. Some friends. But then so did all the Kennedys, except JFK, Jr., who would be assassinated himself. Until RFK, Jr., whose outspokenness on the subject, along with his stance on COVID and vaccines, has resulted in him being ostracized from most of his family. The refusal of professional “journalists” to investigate the assassination, along with their willingness to attack those who did, was a huge part of the now nearly six decades long cover-up.

The only two mainstream journalists early on who were honestly researching the case were Dallas Times Herald reporter Jim Koethe, and nationally syndicated columnist Dorothy Kilgallen, who was even more notable as a regular panelist on the popular TV series What’s my Line? Koethe would die in a most bizarre way, in September 1964, of what appeared to be a karate chop to the throat as he stepped out of the shower. Kilgallen died on November 8, 1965, of an alleged accidental overdose of alcohol and barbiturates. Her files for the JFK assassination book she was writing were never found. Kilgallen did great early work on the case.

Other than those two, who just coincidentally both died unnaturally within two years of the assassination, the only other mainstream journalists who did investigative work on the case were Dallas reporters Jim Marrs and Earl Golz. This left a huge void, which was filled by attorney Mark Lane, retired chicken farmer Harold Weisberg, housewife Shirley Martin, and WHO employee Sylvia Meagher, among other citizen investigators. Without them, people like me wouldn’t have known the extent of the controversy. When I first became awake on the subject as a teenager in the mid-1970s, it was their work that I read. There was no other work.

NBC News, one of the three national television networks at the time, agreed in writing shortly after the assassination, to report only information that adhered to the government’s account of events. Life magazine, the same media giant that paid a lot to obtain a historical home movie they had no intention of publishing, did publish some selected frames from the Zapruder film in their magazine. The problem is they “accidentally” put the frames in the wrong sequence, so that it left the impression that JFK’s head went forward violently after being shot, which would indicate a shot from behind (where they claimed Oswald was), instead of the actual backwards motion shown. This was stressed in JFK with Kevin Costner repeating, “Back and to the left.”

Even in recent years, actor Alec Baldwin, who despite otherwise pretty odious political views, is wide awake on the JFK assassination, had his MSNBC show cancelled when he wanted to talk about the subject. I have no doubt that John Barbour’s memoir being ignored by Hollywood and the mainstream media is largely due to his association with Jim Garrison, and his bluntly expressed views about the conspiracy to kill JFK. It’s no surprise that Oliver Stone stopped being a darling of the critics after JFK.

While researching my book On Borrowed Fame, I discovered that former Saturday Night Live star John Belushi was obsessed with the JFK assassination, like the similarly ill-fated Freddie Prinze. Dick Gregory claimed that Belushi called him the night before he died, and said he had some important information on the JFK assassination to discuss with Mark Lane. Sal Mineo was scheduled to play Sirhan Sirhan in Orson Welles’ never filmed movie on the RFK assassination. Mineo was stabbed to death in Hollywood. He’d also scoffed at the Warren Report publicly.

So it is with all this historical context in mind that I viewed Tucker Carlson’s reports on the subject last Thursday and Friday evenings. I checked out the JFK forums, and most of the posters reacted predictably there. Since it came from Carlson and Fox News, it couldn’t be good, or worthy of support. Now, I certainly question why Carlson, and why now, but his other reporting over the past few years indicated that his perspective was evolving, much like Pat Buchanan’s did. He is no longer the Republican loyalist with the bow tie. He now pretty much talks and reports like a populist. All the “critical” community needs is for Trump to openly declare there was a conspiracy, and they’ll all start saying that Oswald did it.

Many of those who read my work think I’m incredibly naive to trust anything a Tucker Carlson says. He must be co-opted, they insist. He’d never get away with saying the things he does if he wasn’t being protected by someone or something powerful, they claim. I don’t know, people have even asked me why I’m still alive. Why haven’t they gotten to me? Things are pretty bad if the only way to prove you’re legitimate is to die suspiciously. Kind of like dying early is the only way to “win” with a life insurance policy.

And for good measure, on Thursday Jesse Watters- not exactly in Carlson’s class on these topics- had Jim DiEugenio on as a guest. I had to rub my eyes. DiEugenio is at my level in the JFK assassination research community. So, if he can get on these platforms, maybe I can, too. If you want to see that happen, contact Watters and Carlson, and Laura Ingraham. She actually asked me to come on her show two years ago. Then two hours later, she cancelled, after I’d told the whole world. They haven’t asked me back. But it’s certainly possible.

Tucker, and Fox News, could easily have an agenda here. Are they going to suddenly treat the subject honestly, as they started doing with UFOS a few years back? Odds are, Tucker won’t keep pushing the subject. He may never talk about it again, for all I know. Or his producer might contact my publicist and ask me to talk about it on his show. There’s no reason to stop dreaming. But if that happened, would I instantly lose my credibility with my more extreme supporters? If I went on Fox News, would you all still love me? Would it mean that I must have sold out?

I would never have anticipated writing something like this a week ago. Nothing seemed more ironclad that the total commitment of all mainstream media to the Warren Report’s fairy tale. Tucker Carlson shattered that. I don’t know what it means- it could be a really big step forward. Tucker has the highest rated news program on the air. Millions of viewers watched his report. We should remain skeptical, but also hopeful. Maybe Tucker really has been educated on the subject, and if so perhaps, just perhaps, the rest of our putrid media will follow his lead.