LONDON: A former video editor and field producer at Infowars has described his work for Alex Jones’s outlet as full of “lies” and “nonsense,” calling it a conspiracy theory machine with little regard for the truth.
Josh Owens — who said he stayed in the job for four years because of Jones’s magnetic presence and the money — made the remarks in an NPR interview broadcast on Tuesday, timed to promote his new memoir about his time at the right-wing media outlet.
“In Jones’s world, it was all about making things look cinematic,” Owens said. “We would go out there, we would shoot videos and almost like Vice News — like, we were in the weeds, we were showing what was really going on ... But it was nonsense, it was lies.”
Owens recalled being sent to El Paso, Texas, after a conservative website alleged that Daesh had established a training base just across the Mexican border.
Finding no evidence of any such camp, he said the Infowars team dressed a reporter to look like a Daesh operative and filmed him crossing “a little stream that looked like it could be the Rio Grande” — the river that forms the border with Mexico — while holding a prop severed head.
The video gathered millions of views, but the underlying claim was swiftly dismissed by the Mexican government, the Texas Department of Public Safety and border security academics who called it “really silly.”
NPR said it did not receive a response to a request for comment from Infowars.
Owens said he was troubled by the work throughout, but described a turning point eventually arriving on a flight home from a reporting trip, when he found himself sitting next to a Muslim woman and her young daughter.
“I remember sitting there watching her, and it sounds so cheesy, but it was just this moment of like ... these people didn’t do anything. There’s no reason for suspicion; it’s just racism,” he said.
Jones founded Infowars with his then-wife Kelly as a mail-order outlet selling conspiracy-oriented videos, including content questioning the 1969 moon landing and the Sept. 11 attacks.
By 2016, the site had grown exponentially, attracting about 10 million visits and rivalling the reach of mainstream news websites.
The outlet drew sustained criticism for providing a platform for white nationalists, conspiracy theorists and xenophobic voices, and for its erratic commentary on US foreign policy, including Jones’s opposition to US President Donald Trump’s 2018 airstrikes in Syria.
Jones’s most consequential controversy centred on his years-long claim that the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre — in which 20 children and six adults were killed in Newtown, Connecticut — was a hoax staged by actors to justify gun control.
Families of victims sued him for defamation and won judgments totalling more than $1 billion.
In October 2025, the US Supreme Court declined to hear his appeal against a $1.4 billion damages judgment, leaving it intact.
