ABC Censors & Misrepresents RFK Jr.

Network cuts statements it deems heretical so that listeners won't hear them.

By JOHN LEAKE

On Thursday, April 27, ABC aired an interview—conducted by prime time news anchor Linsey Davis—with US presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. It seems to me that the interview is the most shocking and corrupt censorship of political speech since the US Constitution was ratified.

In the interview, anchor Linsey Davis assumed a role reminiscent of Cardinal Roberto Bellarmino during the trial of Galileo. Without citing any evidence to support her claims, Davis vehemently asserted that RFK Jr. had, in effect, committed heresy by expressing his concerns that there is a link between MMR vaccines and autism, and by questioning the safety and efficacy of COVID-19 gene transfer injections, which Davis erroneously called “vaccines.”

Instead of engaging in a debate with RFK Jr. about this public policy issue of vital importance, Ms. Davis and her network CUT the presidential candidate’s statements from the pre-recorded interview so that the audience wouldn’t be able to hear them.

Later, in a separate report about the interview, Ms. Davis explained the cuts to the interview as follows:

We should note that during our conversation, Kennedy made false claims about the COVID-19 vaccines. We’ve used our editorial judgment in not including portions of that exchange in our interview.

Data shows that the COVID-19 vaccine has prevented millions of hospitalizations and deaths from the disease. He also made misleading claims about the relationship between vaccination and autism. Research shows that vaccines and the ingredients used in the vaccines do not cause autism, including multiple studies involving more than a million children and major medical associations, like the American Academy of Pediatrics and the advocacy group Autism Speaks.

It seems to me that Ms. Davis’s statement is a frank confession that ABC News is no longer an agency for reporting events and interpretations of events, but a propaganda organ for certain state and corporate interests.

This was appalling enough, but then Ms. Davis’s interview took a repulsive turn, reminiscent of a Maoist tribunal, when she confronted RFK Jr. with statements of some of his sisters criticizing him for his heterodox views about vaccines. Davis did not suggest that his sisters possessed any particular understanding of vaccines. This part of the interview thus was a vulgar and snarky way of putting RFK Jr. on the spot about “his own sisters not voting for him.”

I suppose it’s possible that Ms. Davis and her bosses and producers have never studied civics and are therefore unfamiliar with the key concept (in a Constitutional Republic) of political speech, which Law Insider defines as follows:

Political speech means speech relating to the state, government, body politic, or public administration as it relates to governmental policy‑making, and the term includes speech by the government or candidates for office and any discussion of social issues.

With its repulsive censorship of RFK Jr., ABC news has clearly violated the First Amendment of the US Constitution and should be penalized to the maximum extent allowed by civil and criminal law.

At the risk of sounding intemperate, I would like to state my opinion that, with this act of censorship and misrepresentation, ABC has revealed itself to be a garbage network acting like Glavlit—the Soviet censorship office. Though I’m usually not one to quote Bolshevik criminals, I’m reminded of Trotsky’s famous exhortation to the Mensheviks at the 1917 Congress of Soviets

Go to the place where you belong from now on - the dustbin of history!

CORRECTION: When I wrote the original post, I was thinking about Cardinal Ballarmino’s primary role in summoning Galileo (in 1616) to inform him that the Copernican theory had been deemed heretical, and all books espousing it had been placed on the Index of Prohibited Books (Index Librorum Prohibitorum). I was also thinking about Ballarmino’s role in the trial of Giordano Bruno for heresy in 1599, and the sentencing of Bruno to burn at the stake in 1600. Since my original post, two readers have reminded me that Ballarmino died before Galileo’s actual trial, which took place 17 years after Ballarmino ordered him to abandon the doctrine. I will address these readers’ commentary in a separate post about the recurring conflict between the concepts of orthodoxy and heresy.