AMAC Exclusive
Last Thursday, Twitter permanently suspended the account of James O’Keefe, the founder of Project Veritas and a prominent conservative activist, just one day after Project Veritas released a series of damaging videos that show a CNN employee detailing how, among other manipulative tactics employed by CNN, the network used what he described as “propaganda” about President Trump to defeat him in 2020. While the bombshell revelations in the videos alone sparked renewed concerns about the integrity of mainstream media reporting, the move by Twitter to de-platform Mr. O’Keefe once again reveals how Big Tech and liberal media outlets work together to silence dissent and push a partisan political agenda.
In the series of videos that were recorded secretly by a Project Veritas staffer, CNN technical director Charlie Chester brags that the network was responsible for ousting former President Trump, saying, “look what we did, we [CNN] got Trump out. I am 100% going to say it, and I 100% believe that if it wasn’t for CNN, I don’t know that Trump would have got voted out…I came to CNN because I wanted to be a part of that.”
Chester goes on to talk about how the network sowed doubt about Mr. Trump’s health, bringing on “medical people to tell a story that was all speculation” and “creating a story there that we didn’t know anything about.” The network also apparently went out of its way to portray then-candidate Biden as “a young geriatric” in order to quell doubts about Mr. Biden’s mental and physical ability that plagued his campaign.
Chester also revealed that CNN purposely capitalized on the fear of COVID-19 in order to drive viewership, saying that the deadly virus is “gangbusters with ratings.” Chester claims that CNN President Jeff Zucker has a “red phone” that he uses to order producers to play up the COVID-19 death count on screen. As Chester put it, “fear is the thing that really keeps you tuned in.”
Mr. O’Keefe described the revelations in the tapes as “the most devastating material in Project Veritas history,” saying that “it showed the nucleus, the heart, and soul of what’s wrong with the media.”
Following the release of the videos, Twitter claimed that O’Keefe’s account was suspended “for violating the Twitter Rules on platform manipulation and spam.” However, critics have pointed to an accelerating trend of users being kicked off social media platforms for simply voicing conservative viewpoints or criticizing Democrat politicians and activists. For example, Twitter and Facebook recently censored stories critical of Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Khan-Cullors for going on a real-estate buying spree to the tune of $3.2 million that led to calls for investigations into how BLM spends its donation money. In the final weeks of the 2020 presidential campaign, Twitter and Facebook also blocked users from sharing the New York Post report detailing the contents of the now-infamous Hunter Biden laptop, which could have hurt then-candidate Joe Biden’s chances of unseating President Trump. Twitter also suspended the New York Post’s official account for two weeks following the release of the story, something Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey later called a “total mistake” and a “process error.”
Beyond simply censoring conservatives, CNN and other liberal media outlets have also come under fire for coordinating with one another and with social media websites to push false or poorly sourced narratives that favor Democrat politicians and liberal talking points, a theory Project Veritas’ investigation seems to support. According to Mr. Chester’s statements on the tapes, CNN has already selected climate change to replace COVID-19 as the next main issue driving coverage on the network: “It’s going to be our [CNN’s] focus. Like our focus was to get Trump out of office, right? Without saying it, that’s what it was, right? So our next thing is going to be climate change awareness.” Chester cites the “longevity” of the climate change issue as its main appeal, suggesting that “constantly showing videos of decline in ice” may have more lasting potential in inspiring fear in viewers than the pandemic.
Other news outlets already appear to be joining CNN in this coordinated shift in coverage. Time Magazine recently released a new cover showing a map of the world going up in flames, while many news outlets have announced they are ditching the phrase “climate change” in favor of “climate crisis” or “climate emergency” in an apparent effort to heighten fear about the issue.
Finally, Americans have hard evidence of what many have suspected for years: the media is intentionally engineering false and misleading narratives, all designed to advance the political objectives of the left. We have now heard it from the mouth of an insider. When you watch the news, beware: they are not trying to inform you–they are trying to manipulate you.