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Speaker unverified: belief

6 Jul 2023 Lex Fridman Podcast #388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning

“I agree with you, but I actually think that the entire field of journalism has really shamed itself in recent years, because it’s become, the principle newspapers in this country and the television stations, the legacy media, have abandoned their tradition of… When I was a kid, listen, my house was filled with the greatest journalists alive at that time, people like Ben Bradley, like Anthony Lewis, Mary McGrory, Pete Hamil, Jack Newfield, Jimmy Breslin, and many, many others.”

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Speaker
Speaker unverified
Attribution
Not verified from this transcript
Claim type
belief
Recorded
6 Jul 2023
Publisher
Lex Fridman Podcast

Transcript context

…But I wonder why they would do it. From my perspective, it just seems like the job of a journalist is to have an integrity where your opinion cannot be influenced or bought. I agree with you, but I actually think that the entire field of journalism has really shamed itself in recent years, because it’s become, the principle newspapers in this country and the television stations, the legacy media, have abandoned their tradition of… When I was a kid, listen, my house was filled with the greatest journalists alive at that time, people like Ben Bradley, like Anthony Lewis, Mary McGrory, Pete Hamil, Jack Newfield, Jimmy Breslin, and many, many others. And after my father died, they started the RFK Journalism Awards to recognize integrity and courage, journalistic integrity and courage. And for that generation of journalism, they thought, they believed that the function of journalists, was to maintain this posture of fear-skepticism toward any aggregation of power, including government authority, that people in authority lie, and that they always have to be questioned, and that their job was to speak truth to power, and to be guardians of the First Amendment to free expression. But if you look what happened during the pandemic, was the inverse of that kind of journalism, where the major press organs in this country were, instead of speaking truth to power, they were doing the opposite. They were broadcasting propaganda. They became propaganda organs for the government agencies. And they were actually censoring the speech of dissent, anybody who dissent, of the powerless. And in fact, it was an organized conspiracy, and the name of it was the Trusted News Initiative. And some of the major press organs in our country signed onto it, and they agreed not to print stories or facts, that departed from government orthodoxy. So the Washington Post was the signature of the UPI, the AP, and then the four social media groups, Microsoft, Twitter, Facebook, and Google, all signed on to the Trusted News Initiative. It was started by the BBC, organized by them. And the purpose of it, was to make sure nobody could print anything about government that departed from governmental orthodox. And the way it worked is, the UPI, the AP, which are the news services that provide most of the news news around the country, and the Washington Post, would decide what news was permissible to print. And a lot of it was about COVID, but also Hunter Biden’s laptops, it was impermissible to suggest that those were real, or that they had stuff on there that was compromising. was permissible to print. And a lot of it was about COVID, but also Hunter Biden’s laptops, it was impermissible to suggest that those were real, or that they had stuff on there that was compromising. And by the way, what I’m telling you is all well documented, and I’m litigating on it right now, so I’m part of a lawsuit against the TNI, and so I know a lot about what happened, and I have all this documented and people can go to our website. There’s a letter on my sub-stack now, to Michael Scherer of the Washington Post that outlines all this, and gives all my sources, because Michael Scherer accused me of being a conspiracy theorist, when he was actually part of a conspiracy, a true conspiracy, to suppress anybody who is departing from government orthodoxies, by either censoring them completely, or labeling them conspiracy theorists.…

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