NBC Attack On Alec Baldwin, JFK Research Is Attack On Truth, Democracy

An NBC News column smearing actor and social critic Alec Baldwin as a “conspiracy theorist” this month because of his views on the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy constituted an attack, in effect, on NBC’s consumers, particularly those who care about truth and other democratic values.

That is because the July 19 column, From #Trump to Alec Baldwin, conspiracy theories, narcissism and celebrity culture go hand in hand, provided no evidence whatsoever that anything Baldwin, shown at right, had said was untrue or otherwise dubious.

NBC’s method was what we might call “The Big Lie and make it come true” via constant repetition.

The column by freelancer Lynn Parramore, Ph.D. continued a long-running campaign by the corporate media establishment — working cooperatively with government cover-up experts — to smear anyone of stature who disputes the facts that have been established about the killing by well-credentialed independent experts, brave witnesses and other surrogates for the public interest like Baldwin.

That pattern has occurred for decades, according to a statement on the problem drafted in reaction by WhoWhatWhy founding editor Russ Baker, the best-selling author of Family of Secrets about the Bush Family and a former Columbia Journalism Review staff writer.

Baker wrote this week:

The JFK assassination is one of the most widely investigated — yet paradoxically poorly understood — major events in American history. The reason for this is willful blindness, ignorance and self-interest in carrying the preferred narrative. Shocking fact: The corporate media’s claims on this consistently run counter to what an army of experts of all kinds have actually found. On almost every front, when the public is presented with established facts, from FBI interviews, documents, testimony, it concludes that Kennedy was the victim of an organized operation, not a “lone nut.” (Thus it was entirely consistent with long-standing, documented and well-known US policy of supporting the violent removal of world leaders who were seen as not in line with establishment views, goals and priorities).

However, members of the working press, like university professors and other so-called “experts,” have been for half a century under pressure to promote the “official story” that was put out by the government right from the start. There never was any intent to seriously investigate what happened.

A premium was placed on preserving order, keeping the public calm, and making sure the system churned on. This is not only true of the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Many major events, including the assassinations of other leading individuals, were also swept under the rug. That this happened, and is still covered up more than half a century later, reminds us that all is not well in America. Unless the truth is known about how we got where we are today, we cannot truly claim to be in control of our destiny.

We shall expand upon his powerful statement in a future segment of this series, which is broken into several parts for reader convenience.

The rest of this first segment addresses this question:

• Why Make A Fuss?

In the second segment, to be published later this week, we’ll examine more closely news economics, including the seldom-reported connections between some major news organizations and the intelligence / defense sectors.these connections help make understandable a reluctance to report on such sensitive matters as the JFK assassination.

We’ll also examine the specifics in Parramore’s column this month. We contacted her for comment via the Institute for New Economic Thinking in New York City, where she is a Senior Research Analyst. We have not yet received a reply. 

  Why Make A Fuss?

Some may describe Parramore’s essay as simply one person’s ill-informed view. It did not focus entirely on Baldwin or JFK because her smear grouped Baldwin into a collection of supposedly mentally disturbed proponents of other controversial research topics. Among them were the causes of the 9/11 attacks and the obvious hoax controversies, such as whether a U.S. moon landing really occurred.

The only factual point that NBC and its author invoked against Baldwin, one of NBC’s own stars via his performances on Saturday Night Live portraying President Trump (as shown below), was an article that this editor published in 2017 in the Europe based human rights webzine The Indicter.

That article, Assessing New JFK Records and Alec Baldwin’s Slam of NBC Coverage by this editor, recapped disclosures that fall under a 1992 law unanimously passed by Congress requiring that the federal government release by 2017 virtually all JFK assassination-related documents. Trump, under pressure from the CIA not to comply, unilaterally postponed release of many of the remaining documents until after his first term.

The article also reported Baldwin’s comment to the research group Citizens Against Political Assassination (CAPA) that he had hoped in 2013 to re-examine JFK assassination research on his then-MSNBC talk show on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the fatal shooting — but encountered network resistance and found that his show was cancelled without the segment.

History shows, as we documented in 2013, that NBC and its sister networks maintain their official positions supporting the 1964 Warren Report, which concluded that accused JFK slayer Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in killing JFK with three shots fired in six seconds from the rear.

Our Justice Integrity Project column on the topic was entitled,  Major Media Stick With Oswald ‘Lone Gunman’ JFK Theory and is so far part of 50-segment “Readers Guide to the JFK Assassination.”

NBC has been one of the most prominent news organizations since the 1960s in attacking independent research into the JFK assassination, as shown below.

NBC’s attacks in 1967 on New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison were so aggressive that the network was required under the then-federal Fairness Doctrine right of reply to provide Garrison, below right, the only government official ever to mount a criminal investigation into JFK’s death with 27 minutes for a nationwide broadcast rebuttal to NBC.

In Garrison’s reply, he told the public that his office had concluded that the Central Intelligence Agency and powerful private interests who opposed Kennedy’s foreign policies were implicated in the murder plot and cover-up. He told Americans that they should not believe media conglomerates lying to them to promote what Garrison called the false “fairy tale” Oswald had killed Kennedy, acting alone.

Since the 1964 Warren Report the CIA has covertly popularized the concept that only “conspiracy theorists” would doubt the Warren Report and that such “theorists” do not deserve jobs, most notably in journalism or academia.

A 50-page CIA memo, known as “CIA Dispatch 1035-960,” instructed agents to contact their media contacts and disparage those, like Garrison, criticizing the Warren Commission findings that Lee Harvey Oswald killed JFK and acted alone. The 1967 document is here in the original, and here in reformatted text of its summary.

The CIA’s covert campaign thwarts public understanding of the mountain of forensic evidence demonstrating that the Warren Report could not be regarding gunfire killing Kennedy and the vast complementary witness and other documentary evidence supporting the view that Oswald was the “patsy” that he claimed to be before he was murdered in Dallas police custody two days after JFK’s death..

That evidence is contained in some four million pages of declassified documents. Also, a lot of it is published in an estimated 3,500 books devoted in part or in total to the JFK assassination.

The evidence has resulted in large majorities of the American public disbelieving the Warren Report, according to decades of polling. That polling, typically showing that more than 60 percent of the public (and sometimes well over 70 percent), does not believe the blue-ribbon panel appointed by JFK’s successor Johnson and led by then Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren.

The polling thus shows a decided public preference for the Garrison / JFK Director Oliver Stone / Baldwin view of the evidence, not that of NBC and what Garrison called the “press-media” establishment of New York City and Washington, DC.

Thus, the most important reason for re-examining last week’s NBC column is that it represents not simply part of a pattern of assaulting JFK research but is also an attack on the essence of fact-finding, logic, history, citizen action and democracy.

Stay tuned as we provide further details in our next column in this series

Contact the author Andrew Kreig