Does NPR Have a Double Standard?

More from the front of lines of Kennedy’s censorship battles

Last month, National Public Radio (NPR) ran a story, or a really a hit piece, entitled, “RFK Jr. is building a presidential campaign around conspiracy theories.”  In this piece, NPR went out of its way to dismiss Kennedy as a conspiratorial crackpot, and, in the process, to try to dismiss, out of hand, his campaign for president. 

The piece, which is quite typical of much of the mainstream press’s efforts to kill Kennedy’s campaign in its infancy, deserves to be analyzed and debunked. And, in debunking the article, one must also discuss the nature of NPR itself as a defender of the status quo and military-industrial complex in the guise of some woke, crunchy and objective news source.

One of the most galling assertions in the piece—contained in a section of the article entitled, “A podcast-centric presidential campaign”—is that RFK has chosen the “ecosystem” of “right-leaning” podcasts as the chief medium for his campaign messaging.  However, that’s far from the truth. Kennedy would certainly be happy to have access to mainstream media outlets, such as NPR itself, to get out his message, but these outlets have sadly been denied to him. In other words, NPR, which denies Kennedy space on its airwaves to discuss his campaign, then criticizes him for not appearing on mainstream outlets such as NPR.

As explained by Dick Russell in his recent book, The Real RFK, Jr.: Trials of a Truth Warrior (Skyhorse Publishing, 2023), which I will review in an upcoming column, RFK once had access to mainstream outlets such as The New York Times, but that has dried up. Russell writes that Kennedy’s storied career as an environmental lawyer, among other things, “has been obfuscated in recent years by the mass media’s labeling of him an ‘anti-vaxxer’ and “peddler of disinformation.’”  Continues Russell, “[N]o longer does his name appear on op-eds, nor are his views ever aired on the nightly news programs.” Indeed, as the book notes, the last time a Kennedy op-ed appeared in a mainstream source was with a piece he wrote for The Huffington Post in 2011. But this has not been for lack of trying, as NPR suggests.

NPR scoffs at the idea that RFK is being censored. They claim this assertion is Kennedy’s “conspiracy theory” that there is “collusion between government agencies and corporations that he believes is the root of the United States’ problems.”  But NPR refuses to acknowledge any collusion to censor, which has  been proven. We know, for example, with certainty, that the FBI colluded with Facebook and Twitter in censoring various points of view in order to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story, which could have changed the outcome of the 2020 Presidential election. What’s stopping other censorship?

NPR itself has done a great job of burying the Hunter Biden story while for years promoting the “Russiagate” conspiracy theory—a claim that Trump colluded with Russia to win the 2016 Presidential election. Such a claim has been thoroughly debunked by President Biden’s own Department of Justice in the Durham Report.  

Meanwhile, the collusion to censor, which NPR dismisses out of hand, goes beyond the Hunter Biden laptop story.  NPR has also suppressed alternative views on how to handle the Covid-19 pandemic, to the detriment of public health and to the economy.  As a recent op-ed in the Wall Street Journal entitled, “Covid Censorship Proved to be Deadly,” explains, the U.S. District Court Judge in the Missouri v. Biden case “blocked numerous federal agencies and the White House from collaborating with social-media companies and third-party groups to censor speech” after discovery in that case exposed the existence of such collusion.  

The op-ed continues:

Elon Musk’s release of some of Twitter’s internal files revealed that up to 80 Federal Bureau of Investigation agents were embedded with social-media companies. The agents mostly weren’t fighting terrorism but flagging wrongthink by American citizens, including eminent scientists who suggested different paths on Covid policy.

The results of these relationships? Twitter blacklisted Stanford physician and economist Jay Bhattacharya for showing Covid almost exclusively threatened the elderly, severely reducing the visibility of his tweets. When Stanford health policy scholar Scott Atlas began advising the White House, YouTube erased his most prominent video opposing lockdowns. Twitter banned Robert Malone, a pioneer of mRNA vaccine technology, for calling attention to the vaccines’ dangers. YouTube demonetized evolutionary biologist Bret Weinstein, who suggested the virus might be engineered and predicted vaccine-evading variants. And those are only a few examples.

In other words, voices just like Kennedy’s were censored by the very type of collusion which NPR—an outlet which promoted a skewed view of the Covid crisis—tries to dismiss as conspiracy theory. 

The result of this collusion, as the Wall Street Journal explains, was “unprecedented bad health outcomes for young and middle-aged people” in developed countries and devastations of economies (and cities too), which have yet to recover. But according to NPR, it is Kennedy who took the alternative points of view that could have saved us from this fate. Instead, he was ignored and labeled a crackpot.

The other allegation NPR makes against RFK is that he has “extremely isolationist positions on immigration and foreign policy [which] sound more like a candidate in the Republican primary.” First of all, the fact that RFK’s policies may resonate more with Republicans makes him a good general election candidate. Moreover, describing him as “extremely isolationist” is simply not fair or accurate. It’s another attempt to write off RFK.   

NPR also calls Kennedy’s position on the war in Ukraine “extremely isolationist.” With one dismissive statement, the network claims Kennedy “blames the U.S. for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, saying Moscow acted in ‘good faith.’”  

More accurately, Kennedy acknowledged, and I think quite correctly, that the U.S. provoked Russia’s intervention in Ukraine—something that must be acknowledged if there is any chance for the U.S. to help find a peaceful solution. And that is exactly what Kennedy wants to do as president: find a peaceful solution to the Ukraine conflict and other conflicts the U.S. is involved with around the world.  

Sadly, for outlets like NPR—a news organization that has never seen a U.S. war it has not given full-throated support to—peace has become a dirty, right-wing word. NPR has failed the U.S. public by not questioning the U.S’s overseas conflicts. Instead, it has peddled misinformation that justifies these wars.  

In fact, NPR has been one of the biggest pushers of conspiracy theories in support of war.  Examples abound, including the lie that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction and was even preparing to use them against U.S. forces; the now-discredited hoax about “Havana Syndrome,” which NPR suggested at one point may have been caused by Russian surveillance of Cuban embassy personnel; the racist and untrue claim that Qaddafi was using “Black mercenaries” against his own people; the false claim that Venezuela’s Maduro government destroyed a shipment of humanitarian aid that the U.S. was trying to send across the Colombia-Venezuela border; the claims that Russia has been shelling itself at the Zaplorizhya nuclear power plant even as Russia controlled the plant with its own troops; the claims, now debunked, that Russia was engaged in mass rapes in Ukraine; and, yes, the claim that Russia’s intervention in Ukraine was “unprovoked.”  

I agree with journalist Caitlin Johnstone that this latter claim of the “unprovoked” intervention by Russia is “[a]rguably the single most egregious display of war propaganda in the 21st century . . . .” As I set out in detail in a prior Kennedy Beacon article, this claim  ignores the eight years of war between the Ukrainian government and its own people in the Donbass, and the great escalation of Ukraine’s attacks against this region just before Russia’s intervention on February 24, 2022.  And this false claim has accomplished exactly what it intended to do—it has manufactured consent for the Biden administration’s shoveling billions of dollars to Ukraine’s corrupt government at a time when that money could be better used to satisfy needs at home.  

Nonetheless, Kennedy, NPR claims, is veering right and advocating verboten “isolationist” ideas by questioning  gross expenditures on war.

Kennedy’s willingness to question the military-industrial complex makes him all the more vital to the presidential race. He stands as a lone voice calling for us to consider alternatives to war. NPR gave up considering such alternatives years ago. In the process, it has manufactured consent for the U.S.’s endless and destructive wars.