His Master’s Voice

That was the old advertising slogan of RCA, showing a dog listening attentively to his owner's voice on a gramophone. It's also the phrase that best describes the obedient way that staff journalists do their corporate owners' bidding. Even if they're not always aware of it -- even when they are convinced they are speaking their own minds -- reporters (some of the most timid conformists in the world, despite their hard-nosed reputations) tailor their articles to fit the prevailing "wisdom" of their editors and publishers.

I know this butt-licking, wolfpack behavior because I worked for years in newsrooms and magazine offices.

Journalists very seldom stick out their necks, because they're deathly afraid (for good reason) that they'll be lopped off. Look at the San Jose Mercury's Gary Webb. Look at the New York Times' Chris Hedges. Look at Julian Assange, whose courageous whistleblowing reports on U.S. war crimes were used by the Times and other leading media outlets.

Ben Bradlee, the legendary editor of the Washington Post, was President Kennedy's best friend in the Washington press corps. Bradlee and his wife Tony were frequent social guests at the Kennedy White House. The Bradlees visited the Kennedy family at Wexford, their Virginia horse country estate, on a weekend shortly before JFK was assassinated in Dallas. HBO made a documentary about the special friendship between Bradlee and Kennedy. Bradlee wrote a book about their relationship, Conversations with Kennedy.

If anyone could have solved the Kennedy assassination, the epic crime against U.S. democracy that still bedevils the nation, it was Ben Bradlee and his investigative team at the Washington Post.

Bradlee didn't devote these news resources to the Kennedy case. Instead, his newspaper belittled those brave citizens who tried.

In the 1970s, Bradlee and the Post could've followed up their Watergate enterprise by pursuing the revelations dug up by former journalist Gaeton Fonzi and other investigators for the House Select Committee on Assassinations -- which concluded there was indeed a conspiracy to kill Kennedy. Instead, the Post and the New York Times demeaned the Congressional committee's work and editorialized that the panel had spent too much of the public's time and money to solve a crime and cover-up that began the process of eroding the public's trust in authority.

I interviewed Bradlee for my 2007 book about John and Robert Kennedy, Brothers. At the time, he still occupied a small office at the Post, as a respected "emeritus" figure. I asked Bradlee directly why his newspaper failed to break the Kennedy case. He was honest with me, I'll grant him that. Because he had been close friends with Kennedy, the Post's investigative zeal would have been portrayed as personal bias, Bradlee told me. Investigating the JFK assassination would've damaged his career, he said. As I said, at least Ben Bradlee was honest.

(Don Hewitt, the founder of 60 Minutes, was equally frustrating during my interview with him. Like everyone who looked into the case, Hewitt -- who produced the famous TV debates between presidential candidates Kennedy and Nixon -- said he concluded the CIA and the Mafia were involved, but he claimed his reporters could never nail it down.)

President Biden, a captive of the national security state, just delayed (again!) the Congressionally-mandated release of the JFK documents still kept secret by the CIA and other federal agencies.

The American people are STILL being treated like children by the federal government. This is our history, and we have a right to it.

But that's not why I'm bringing up this dark crime yet again.

In the past few days, my friend Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been targeted by ex-Salon staffers Joan Walsh, Rebecca Traister and Michelle Goldberg. I won't repeat the smears and distortions directed at Kennedy, because he's the daily target of a corporate media pile-on, and you've heard it before. I know that some of you share these opinions.

But for a moment put aside RFK Jr.’s comments about Big Pharma, vaccine policy, the over-medicating of America, and our poor public health. I have my opinions about these issues, but like most of you I'm not a medical expert.

But I do know a lot about the country's political agonies and the dangerous rise of the national security state. And I support RFK Jr.'s run for president because he alone is making a major issue of the corporate stranglehold on our country (including our regulatory agencies) and the disastrous U.S. addiction to "forever wars" which are destroying our democracy and benefit only the military-industrial complex.

Yes, writers Traister and Goldberg now work for the corporate media -- which we at Salon once tilted against. (Traister's New York magazine employer -- along with the rest of Vox Media -- was bought earlier this year by the Penske Media Corporation, whose vacuuming up of media properties like Rolling Stone was financed by investments from the Saudi royalty and hedge fund billionaire Dan Loeb, who has used former CIA agents to train his staff. Penske Media properties are especially vehement opponents of the RFK Jr. campaign.)

But there is still a Salon gene at work in these two journalists. I disagree strongly with their views about Bobby Kennedy Jr. -- and with those of their current employers -- but they both conducted thoughtful interviews with me and quoted me accurately.

Ever since the assassination of President Kennedy on November 22, 1963, the New York Times has lied and evaded the truth. For over six decades, the "newspaper of record" has embraced the increasingly threadbare conclusion that accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. That strategic disinformation has metastasized over the years, and led to the age of "fake news" that haunts us today. But the Times and the rest of the media elite refuse to acknowledge this and other disturbing truths about the country.

No, the RFK Jr. campaign is not my "spiritual" cause, as Goldberg suggests. The effort to speak truth to power is a noble political struggle. It can, at long last, put our country on the right track.

Goldberg did this -- perhaps haltingly, perhaps grudgingly -- when she quoted me accurately. Finally, these words appeared in the New York Times:

"For Talbot, a friend of Kennedy and the author of Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years, that truth is that the American government killed JFK and RFK, along with Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. Talbot compared JFK's assassination to the body in Edgar Allan Poe's 'The Tell-Tale Heart.' 'It's the tragic event underneath the floorboards, a corpse that's stinking up our house of democracy.' Being honest about it, he believes, 'would be the beginning of a truth and reconciliation process that I think this country desperately needs. Any public figure who's willing to say what should be said, to wipe the slate clean and get at this kind of truth about who really runs this country, about who benefits, is to be applauded, not to be smeared.'"

Ben Bradlee (far left), with his wife Tony and JFK at the Kennedy family estate in Virginia