Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has blasted U.S. media outlets for abandoning their role in challenging power and becoming mouthpieces for the Democratic Party and suppressing political opposition.
Kennedy, a Democrat-turned-independent, commented on the current state of the media in America during a speech in Phoenix, Arizona on Friday. He eventually announced he was suspending his presidential campaign, but that wasn’t the end of it, instead urging residents in Democratic-leaning states to vote for him and expressing support for former President Donald Trump in battleground states.
“How could Democrats have picked a candidate who has never given an interview or debate this entire election cycle?” he said, referring to Vice President Kamala Harris’ continued practice of disappearing from the media.
“I know the answer: They did it by weaponizing the institutions of government. They did it by abandoning democracy. They did it by suing their opponents and disenfranchising American voters,” Kennedy continued. “What alarms me most is not how the Democratic Party handles its internal affairs or how it runs its candidates. What alarms me is their resort to censorship and media control and their weaponization of the institutions of the federal government.”
Kennedy added: “For the President of the United States to collude with media companies or force them to censor political speech is an attack on our most sacred right, freedom of expression, the very right upon which all our other constitutional rights are founded.”
He pointed out:
President Biden mocked Vladimir Putin’s landslide victory in Russia’s election with 88 percent of the vote, noting that Putin already controls Russia’s media and that he blocks viable opponents from appearing on the ballot.
But here in the US, the DNC has also blocked my opponent from appearing on the ballot, and TV networks have revealed themselves to be mouthpieces for the Democratic Party. Over the course of more than a year of election campaigning, even when my approval rating was in the high 20s, mainstream media outlets aligned with the DNC have almost completely banned me from being interviewed.
Kennedy noted that left-wing media outlets published smear campaign articles against him and worked with the DNC to keep him from participating in debates, yet he was only invited to do a few interviews with corporate media.
“Some of those news organizations are here in this room right now, and I want you to take a moment to reflect on the many ways in which your institutions have abdicated their really sacred responsibility, which is the imperative of a free press to defend democracy and to always challenge the party in power,” he said.
“Instead of maintaining a strong attitude of skepticism toward power, your institutions have turned theirselves into government mouthpieces and stenographers for the institutions of power. You did not alone cause the decline of American democracy, but you could have prevented it,” he said.
Kennedy later added that the mainstream media “was once the guardian of the First Amendment and our democratic principles” but has “become part of a coordinated attack on our democracy.”
“The media justifies censorship on the grounds that they are fighting misinformation,” he said, “but governments and oppressors don’t censor lies. They don’t fear lies. They fear the truth. And the truth is what they censor.”
WATCH: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. slams Democrats, the media and Kamala Harris
C-SPAN
