Time Magazine, History Channel Ramp Up Oswald-JFK Fake News

Many independent experts on the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy dispute the key claims in a new Time Magazine feature story published on April 25 in coordination with History channel’s launch that evening of a six-part series “JFK Declassified: Tracking Oswald.”

In advance of renewed public attention for JFK’s 100th birthday on May 29, the factual disputes underlying the first series segment, entitled Former CIA Operative Argues Lee Harvey Oswald’s Cuba Connections Went Deep, illustrate the credibility gap for the series, Time Magazine, and their in-house experts.

The featured expert is the reality show’s host Robert Baer, a former CIA officer who purports to act as an independent expert. But his conclusions parroting the 1964 Warren Commission report serves to obscure questions about the agency’s multiple roles in the JFK death and investigation.

In contrast to “reality” hosts like Baer who earn big bucks with scripted fantasy, scholarly and eye-witness dissenters to official accounts are virtually ignored by the media unless they sound like wackos whose words confuse the public. There exist some people still living who knew Oswald as a friend, fellow U.S. Marine or other companion — and who doubt his intention or ability to kill Kennedy. 

However, the wild mix news and public relations techniques applied to Oswald (shown in a 1964 Time cover) and the Kennedy death are nothing new, except perhaps to unsophisticated readers and viewers. Even so, public opinion polls for decades have shown that large majorities of the American public do not believe the central finding of the Warren Commission, led by Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren: that Oswald killed Kennedy while acting alone.

The new History channel series launched April 25 appears to adopt that and other heavily disputed Warren Report findings, however. The show features as narrator former CIA operative Robert Baer, age 64, now a CNN commentator and host on History channel’s reality shows. Baer is shown in a file photo below.

Why is this important? Distorted and outright fake news examined below regarding the Kennedy assassination provides a Rosetta Stone to understanding media coverage of more recent sensitive events involving intelligence and law enforcement agencies.

Fake Reality Becomes ‘History’

History channel, a basic cable network, is owned by the Arts & Entertainment Network as a joint venture between Hearst and the Disney Corp. The owners have transformed it into a “reality show” network from its roots in documentaries and history. In other words, it provides fake reality on important topics, thereby enabling fake news from such outlets as Time Magazine and its spinmeister specialist, aka staff writer Olivia B. Waxman, author of the above-cited article.

Waxman fails to address the basic issue with her thesis and History channel’s premise: That a career spy like Baer trained to fool people would suddenly start spilling the beans about the CIA’s secrets regarding the crime of the century, even though the evidence is clear that apologists for the Warren Commission tend to make far more money and obtain far much news coverage than whistleblowers.

Among the disputed assumptions and opinions in the Time article (and apparently in the film series, as reported by Waxman) are the claims parroting the Warren Report’s conclusion that Oswald “acted alone” in killing Kennedy, as Waxman wrote. Some experts dispute whether Oswald, who was seen on the Texas School Book Depository’s second floor about 90 seconds after the shooting, ever shot at JFK from the building’s sixth floor or at the policeman Tippit later in a residential section of Dallas, as authorities claimed.

Such disputes, important though they are, are ultimately less significant than the clear-cut evidence that Time Magazine (and such Time Warner affiliates as Life Magazine and CNN) are among the government-influenced media that have long suppressed vital witness and documentary evidence. This article and series are yet another example of how these outlets apparently do not report for the most part even that major controversies exist, much less that compelling evidence supports what they like to smear as “conspiracy theory.”

Solid evidence exists, for example, that Oswald, a former U.S. Marine who held high-level security clearance while working on the U-2 spy plane project, was a U.S.-government asset. He pretended to be a pro-Communist defector to the Soviet Union and he similarly advocated for Fidel Castro upon return to the United States in 1962 only as an assignment. They have long been reported to have included the late New Orleans private detective Guy Banister (shown at left), a committed anti-Communist and former high-ranking FBI executive spotted with Oswald in friendly conversation.

Separately, Antonio Veciana, the former commander of the anti-Castro assassination squad Alpha 66, published a memoir Trained To Kill last week confirming his veiled assertion that his friend and former CIA case officer, the late David Atlee Phillips once introduced him to Oswald in a Dallas office building lobby six weeks before Kennedy was fatally shot in the city on Nov. 22, 1963.