Kiriakou’s morning reading list is John Kiriakou’s daily news diet, an ideologically deliberate spread that he reads before speaking on air, offered on Doug Bopst’s podcast in September 2026 as the specific answer to “what do you read in the morning?”
The full list
Kiriakou began the answer by saying he gets up “hours earlier than I probably need to just to read as much as I can possibly cram into my head every morning before I open my mouth to start talking because I want to know what’s going on.” He then read the list from his phone. In order:
American mainstream, “Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, LA Times, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette just to get the Steelers, Penguins, and Pirates news.”[1][2]
American general, “CNN, AP, Fox, Politico, The Hill, the New York Post.”[2]
Greek, “I read the Greek papers just because I’m interested.”[2]
British broadsheets, “the Times of London, The Telegraph, The Guardian, the London Evening Standard, BBC.”[2]
Middle East and Israel/Palestine, “drop site news, Al Jazeera, the Al Monitor, electronic intifada, Jerusalem Post.”[2][3]
Independent, “a level down in independent media, Consortium News, Axios, Covert Action Magazine, Drop Site News. You really have to read it all.”[3]
The analyst rule
The rule Kiriakou pins to the list is not that all outlets are equal but that the ones that match your priors are the ones that will fool you. “I’m a CIA trained analyst so you’re trained to question everything and so I automatically do question everything. You have to be very careful not to fall into the trap of automatically believing the outlets whose ideologies most align with yours.”[4][5]
The COVID example
He gave the concrete instance from his own analysis: he “absolutely positively wanted to believe” at the start of COVID that the outbreak had come from a Chinese wet market, “the Chinese have the wet market. The Chinese eat bats. The Chinese don’t wash their hands”, and only settled on a lab-leak conclusion because that was where the evidence pointed. “Now I think the conventional wisdom is that this was a lab leak. Now we have to investigate whether it was leaked on purpose or whether the lab was a biological weapons lab or whether it was a genuine accident. We just don’t know.”[5][6]