The Press TV website seizure is the episode Kiriakou reaches for when distinguishing between platforms suppressing material and the state simply taking it. Where TeleSUR, RT and Sputnik were banned from the large social platforms, Press TV’s case went further: the FBI confiscated their website and everything on it — “they stole their website” — and then, he says, put up a comment mocking them: we stole your website.[1]
What it cost him as a reader
Kiriakou’s account of why this mattered is about how he actually used social media. He did not have hours to visit every alternative outlet, so he followed the people whose judgement he respected most — Ralph Nader, environmental activists, whistleblowers — and read what they posted from places he would never have thought to check on his own: ProPublica, the Brennan Center, and similar institutions. The seizures and bans closed that pipe. He had gone to Twitter and Facebook to read TeleSUR, RT, Sputnik and the rest, and they were simply gone.[2][3][1]
The attraction he later described in Panquake was the mirror image of this: one place where he could see what the people he respected were saying without toggling around the internet hoping he had not missed something, and without worrying that a corporate giant or a government body had decided he did not need to see it.[4]
Named among the losses
Kiriakou has used Press TV as the first item on a list of outlets that became unreachable from the United States. “I can”t go any more to Press TV to get the Iranian side of a story, or to teleSUR, or to RT America. I can”t even go to Al Jazeera America — it doesn”t even exist any more.” The point he attaches to the list is about the reader rather than the outlet: in a democracy, “we, as adults, would be able to choose the sources of news that we want to consume.”[5][6]