Using JFK and 9/11 Research To Decode Fake News

Researchers into the causes of President Kennedy’s assassination and 9/11 attacks hold an advantage over most others in deciphering news about national security intrigues that rely on dubious evidence.

Students of those crimes have by now detected so much media self-censorship or exaggeration in reports about those attacks that it’s relatively easy for them to discern similar patterns in treatments of other high-stakes issues.

One is the current alarm by U.S. officials and mass media over “fake news,” particularly as applied to propaganda involving 2016 election results. The term “fake news” is being applied primarily to independent websites — some of which are indeed outright frauds. National Public Radio’s Laura Sydell reported one example last fall in We Tracked Down A Fake-News Creator In The Suburbs. Here’s What We Learned.

But other outlets being smeared as “fake” are better regarded as alternative media of varying credibility. They sometimes stumble and sometimes play brave role in analyzing official reports and other conventional wisdom regarding historically important events. These include the 9/11 attacks and assassinations of President Kennedy.

We focus below on several recent stories that expose credibility problems with Newsweek, its former owner the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, CBS News, and the New York Times. These examples — including a remarkable screw-up by Newsweek in distributing a magazine showing Hillary Clinton as elected “Madam President” — help illustrate the credibility gap that mainstream outlets are inflicting on themselves, whether they admit it or not in their crusades against alternative outlets.

The analysis below comes in the midst of the mainstream media’s harsh, sudden, and seemingly relentless campaign currently against “fake news.” Today’s column is provided as balance because many of the attacks resemble such previous and now-discredited campaigns as the CIA-driven Operation Mockingbird, whereby the nation’s 40 major news organizations combined to suppress inconvenient news during the 1950s and 1960s. The CIA’s Frank Wisner of the CIA and Washington Post Publisher Philip Graham jointly operated the program, which was exposed in the 1978 book Katharine the Great by Deborah Davis.

The current allegations against Russia, including of hacking U.S. election-related sites and blackmailing GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump, are beyond the scope of today’s column. This editor attended a hard-hitting lecture on that topic Jan. 17 by U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power, who delivered one of her last major speeches at the Atlantic Council’s headquarters overlooking the Russian Ambassador’s residence in Washington, DC.

Power’s claims that a conspiracy exists to promote fake news and hacking is a topic for another day, particularly because the complexities are intertwined with the role of U.S. government propaganda and disinformation. That inevitably points to important but complex and secretive machinations, including those suggested by her husband Cass Sunstein, a top Obama White House regulator in the Office of Management and Budget during the first term. (Sunstein, center, is shown with Power in a White House photo during her 2013 swearing in officiated by Vice President Joe Biden.)

Sunstein suggested as a Harvard Law professor in 2008 and then in his 2014 book Conspiracy Theories and Other Dangerous Ideas that the government hire professors and journalists as secret government operatives. Those operatives, he said, could use such professional disguise to disrupt research into such “dangerous ideas” as research that questions the government’s account of 9/11 attacks. That is itself a dangerous idea, as Glenn Greenwald has noted in Obama confidant’s spine-chilling proposal.

Also a topic for another day is background on the latest developments in studies related to Kennedy’s assassination and 9/11 research. We have published an ongoing Readers Guide To JFK Assassination,r and separately reported a comprehensive overview of 9/11 research in Experts Reject Planes, Fire As Cause For 9/11 WTC Collapses. The latter covered the historic Justice in Focus conference organized by Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth in New York City on the occasion of the 15th anniversary last September of the attacks.

Today’s analysis instead on exploring shocking shortcomings in basic research recently by several of our most prestigious news outlets coupled with a disturbing reluctance on their part to concede the scope of their credibility problems.