CIA media revolving door
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The CIA media revolving door is John Kiriakou's term for the flow of intelligence officials straight into paid media roles, and his proposed reform against it. Just as senior officials cannot become lobbyists without an 18-month cooling-off period, he argues, a CIA or intelligence director should not be able to "leave on a Friday" and appear on MSNBC or CNN "on Monday." Worse, he says, retirees who become cable pundits keep their security clearances and access to classified information, and the public is "supposed to just trust" they do not mix it into their punditry. As evidence, he points to retired CIA directors becoming paid national-security consultants for every major network, James Clapper on CNN, John Brennan on MSNBC, Michael Hayden on Fox, walking straight from running the agency into on-air commentary about it.

Which networks are the "cheerleaders"

Kiriakou argues the conventional wisdom about network bias is backwards: only under Donald Trump did Fox News turn against the CIA, while MSNBC and CNN remain the agency's real cheerleaders, airing what he calls pro-CIA interviews as a matter of course. He cites hosts squeezed out for opposing the agency's line: Phil Donahue and Jesse Ventura both lost their MSNBC shows over opposition to the Iraq War, and a former colleague, Brian Becker, a regular anti-war voice on MSNBC, was never invited back once he was deemed too anti-war after the Iraq invasion.

Kiriakou's own on-air treatment illustrates the door from the other side. Invited onto Ari Melber's MSNBC show alongside Daniel Ellsberg, he was introduced, against the wording he'd agreed with producers, as a "convicted felon and CIA leaker." He pulled his microphone off in protest; after being re-miked, he was cut to twenty seconds of a thirty-minute interview and never invited back. He says he boycotts The Rachel Maddow Show because she introduces him on-air as "John Kiriakou who styles himself a whistleblower," even though Fox News called him "whistleblower John Kiriakou" from the day of his arrest and MSNBC calls him a "CIA leaker."

See also

- CIA media revolving door
- Abolish the CIA
- CIA media relations
- Operation Mockingbird
