The Ballad of Patrick Knowlton

Headline: Witness in [Vince] Foster death loses conspiracy appeal Washington Times, January 9, 2001, p. A7 Before he’d arrived at the end of the line A little publicity would have been fine, Shedding some light and putting some heat Upon all those justices’ honorable feet. Patrick Knowlton, The key to the Foster case. Patrick Knowlton, The man the press erased. But they wait till the court in their wisdom refuse To give him a hearing to bring us the news. It’s a story, alas, that is getting quite old; A citizen’s wronged; then he’s out in the cold, And once it’s too late, the public is told. Patrick Knowlton, The key to the Foster case. Patrick Knowlton, The man the…

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“John Lennon’s” Greatest Hit

There was some excitement in my friend’s voice.  He had just stumbled upon what he described as a really extraordinary piece of rock music.  Even more interesting, it had been up on YouTube since November of 2019 and it had had only a little more than 1,400 views, which probably means that fewer than 1,000 people had listened to it, because many of those views had to be by people coming back for more.  The song is called “Don’t Believe,” and it’s rather deeply buried away as the tenth of eleven songs on an album called “Listen to the Picture” produced in 2010 by a band called Abracadabra.[1] The songs are ostensibly taken from the soundtrack of an obscure little…

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The French Revolution ‘Conspiracy Theories’

Throughout the 1790s ‘conspiracy theories’ probing what forces were responsible for the French Revolution abounded in England, continental Europe, and the US. They were put forth by intelligent and reputable authors. What did these theories and historical insights have to say? Why were they so strongly suppressed by the mass media of the era? Why are they still important (perhaps more than ever) today?  

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JFK, Mass Media, and the Origins of ‘Conspiracy Theory’

By James F. Tracy (Originally posted at MemoryHoleBlog on November 22, 2018) Prefatory Note on Censorship in Academe This study was written in 2013-14 as part of my academic research as Associate Professor of Media Studies at Florida Atlantic University. I have had numerous papers addressing news coverage of historical events published in academic journals over the past two decades. However, this was the first attempt to offer a scholarly treatment of a research object related to a conspiracy–how the news media “framed” New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison’s JFK assassination inquiry. When I presented the paper at the Association For Education in Journalism and Mass Communication Montreal Conference in 2014 the panel respondent congratulated me on what he deemed…

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