Double Trouble: How Big Tech and Big Media Target RFK Jr. and Independent Media

By Tom Valovic, Special to The Kennedy Beacon

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been the target of a barrage of negative treatments in the corporate media since his campaign began. These often transparent attacks have been both bolstered and supported by Big Tech, arguably the most powerful set of corporate interests in the US in terms of both technological reach and sheer financial firepower. In their endeavor to control the overarching political narratives that the American public is exposed to, Big Media and Big Tech are joined at the hip. The division of labor is as follows: they reinforce the content of each other’s narratives while Big Tech’s overt control over social media (Facebook/Meta), search engines (Google/Microsoft), and the internet (Big Telecom) is leveraged to exclude independent voices that challenge their predictable and self-serving narratives. 

One part of this is ideological alignment. But the other aspect is purely organizational. The gradual takeover of diverse media sources has been stunning. Big Tech either has alliances with traditional media outlets or outright owns them. Several examples spring to mind. The classic poster child for Big Tech and Big Media alignment is, of course, The Washington Post, owned by Jeff Bezos. A January 2023 article by Edward Helmore in The Guardian offered this summary: 

Over the past decade, the influx of tech money into the news media was as dramatic as it was surprising. Bezos bought the Post from the Graham family in 2013 for $250m; eBay founder Pierre Omidyar pumped the same sum into First Look Media; Laurene Powell Jobs bought a controlling stake in the Atlantic for a reported $160m; Biotech billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong paid $500m for the Los Angeles Times; and Salesforce founder Marc Benioff bought the rights to the trademark “Time” for $190m. 

Surprise, surprise: The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and Time magazine have all run hit pieces on Kennedy and regularly skew their coverage in that direction. One particular article in Time is worth calling out: “Inside the Very Online Campaign of RFK Jr.” This treatment is peppered with casual and offhand remarks such as “Weird is one word for Kennedy’s bid.” The article also calls his worldview “dark and suspicious” when, in fact, his core political message is clear, positive, and based on the now widely acknowledged need for deep renewal and transformation in American politics and government. 

In these corporate publications, coverage of Kennedy’s policies, thoughts, ideas, and proposals for genuine political change are routinely side-stepped in favor of subtle innuendo, major or minor character assassination, and various other tactics designed to undermine his message and his proposals for revitalizing the moribund state of our political system. Rarely is the sad, sorry state of American politics even referenced. The reason for this is simple: corporate media’s Job 1 is to convince us that everything is hunky-dory and that, if you’re unhappy about the state of the nation, it must be a personal failing on your part. 

Shutting Down Independent Media

The targets of Big Tech/Big Media efforts are any narratives or facts that might challenge the current fusion of corporate and government power. In addition to stigmatizing Kennedy’s wide array of policies and transformative ideas, the Big Tech/Big Media juggernaut has also targeted much of independent media. 

This race to the bottom actually began many decades ago with the erosion of long-standing journalistic norms, such as the Federal Communications Commission’s Fairness Doctrine in broadcasting, and the deregulation of media ownership. Then came the onset of the digital world we are deeply immersed in now. As the first journalist to report the unveiling of the public internet in the early 1990s, I watched this unfold from a front-row seat. As an editor for the trade magazine Telecommunications, I faxed our scoop of the decade to John Markoff, technology editor at The New York Times. Three months later the Times “broke” the story with (of course) no attribution to my magazine. Throughout the ’90s, as editor-in-chief of Telecommunications, I watched as the internet developed marvelous – even thrilling – capabilities while at the same time wreaking havoc on many important cultural norms. For many years since, I have noted how it shapes and distorts the flow of information in our democracy. 

At first, the newfound capabilities offered to internet users promoted what one observer called “The Great Conversation” – a rich and diverse dialogue nurtured by ordinary citizens who now had a voice and used it to express themselves openly and publicly in a unique way (at the time dubbed many-to-many communications). But later, as the internet “matured,” Big Tech’s involvement became more pronounced and intrusive.

Unfortunately, these powerful companies simply couldn’t resist using their stranglehold on the “means of information” to start controlling its flow and deciding who gets to see what. This manipulation was subtle at first, but over time it became a matter of direct control, as the dream of a decentralized internet turned slowly into the nightmare of the internet as an entity with invisible puppeteers. Now we see corporations with their unchecked, unregulated power seeking to control our politics by steering us toward particular outcomes. In this questionable new modality that Yanis Varoufakis has dubbed “techno-feudalism,” corporate media’s reflexive exclusion of the rich diversity of media options has become the new normal. 

Kennedy is not the only target of these entities, but he remains high on their list. Any person or organization that dares to “color outside the lines” can be targeted. Big Tech, in particular Google, has long been engaged in a sustained attack on what used to be called alternative media and is now generally referred to as independent media. Many respectable publications on both the left and the right of the political spectrum have been singled out, including progressive publications such as Common Dreams, AlterNet, and CounterPunch.

Google Becomes Evil

In an October 2019 article for The Technoskeptic, titled “Google Becomes Evil,” I noted that “Google has been targeting alternative publications by negatively altering their search results…. In September 2017, a well-respected alternative publication, AlterNet, posted a disturbing editorial on their web site stating that Google had been tampering with its search results and therefore its lifeblood – Web traffic. AlterNet’s publisher at the time, Don Hazen, the former publisher of Mother Jones magazine, explained that, in June 2017, Google announced major changes to its core algorithm that were designed to combat fake news by blocking access to ‘offensive’ sites, and to favor more ‘authoritative content.’”

Since that time, Google’s crusade to shape the information commons in its own image and likeness has been relentless. The tech giant continues to target independent media publications – even those that don’t sustain themselves financially via advertising. Google’s “partner in crime” in this endeavor is Meta, formerly Facebook. In addition to influencing media content, they use algorithmic omission as in the example from 2017 – not at all obvious to readers of those publications, and the hardest kind of deplatforming to trace. 

Given these unpleasant realities, it’s important that we see the negative coverage of Kennedy and his campaign for what it is: part of the larger Big Tech/Big Media strategy to control what we see, hear, feel, and think about in a difficult and challenging time in American history. The fact that these organizations are devoting so many resources to suppressing genuine alternative political thinking speaks volumes. But the good news is that their game is becoming exposed. Ultimately, these often ham-handed efforts to suppress and distort reveal more about the perpetrators than about those they target.

More and more of the American public is catching on to these attempts to curate a single version of the truth, understanding how they threaten the diversity of thought and opinion on which our democracy is founded. As part of this awakening, I predict, more and more Americans will come to appreciate the courage and integrity of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s lifelong fight to speak the truth that the American public now longs to hear.

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Tom Valovic is a journalist and the author of Digital Mythologies (Rutgers University Press). He has served as a consultant to the former Congressional Office of Technology Assessment and has written for The Boston Globe, San Francisco Examiner, Common Dreams, ScheerPost, AlterNet, CounterPunch, Columbia University’s Media Studies Journal, and many other publications.