Opinion: The Badge of Honor of PolitiFACT Calling Kennedy Campaign the “Lie of the Year” in Broad-Brush Conspiracy Smear
Fact Checkers Fail to Directly Challenge a Single Scientific Claim from Campaign’s Heavily-Footnoted “Science Library”
As 2023 came to a close, one of the largest institutionalized fact checkers, PolitiFACT, declared Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s entire campaign the “Lie of the Year.” They slammed the operation as a “campaign of conspiracy theories” and claimed that the movement supporting the candidate “seeks to legitimize conspiracy theories.” In doing so, PolitiFACT challenges the whole fact-checking and science team of one of the most prodigious and successful trial lawyers in the history of environmental law, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
However, PolitiFACT failed to directly review or rebut even a single well-sourced claim in Mr. Kennedy’s library of self-authored books. Instead, PolitiFACT cites a hodge-podge of experts and purportedly ‘discredited’ Kennedy claims all without direct links to supporting scientific studies and expected methodical debunking.
PolitiFACT is run by The Poynter Institute, a non-profit “independent” fact-checking, “counter-disinformation” partner with Facebook. For context, Facebook banned over a billion accounts in just one three month period in 2021 and throttled or shadow-banned accounts with posts flagged as “false” by a team of 80 “independent” fact-checkers, as reported by Forbes.
The Poynter Institute, which operates PolitiFACT, is featured prominently in Matt Taibbi’s Racket News report on the Censorship-Industrial Complex as #8 of 50 organizational profiles.
First Amendment issues pertaining to government and social media censorship are now before the courts and well summarized by Vox.
The Poynter Institute’s smear of a major US presidential candidate would have come across a lot more credible if PolitiFACT’s staff writer Madison Czopek and editor-in-chief Katie Sanders had directly rebutted the well-sourced claims made by Mr. Kennedy’s in the books he’s authored.
Honest Journalism Goes to the Source; PolitiFACT Did Not
PolitiFACT mentions two of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s most prominent and well-sourced books, The Wuhan Cover-Up and the Terrifying Bioweapons Arms Race, and his bestseller, The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health. However, neither of the books is listed on PolitiFact’s own list of over 200 sources. Two other Kennedy books, Letter to Liberals: Censorship and Covid: An Attack on Science and American Ideals, and his most recent, Vax-Unvax: Let the Science Speak, are also not sourced by PolitiFACT.
These books, released by Skyhorse Publishing between November 2021 and December 2023, significantly inform the Kennedy campaign as they are written by the candidate himself. They collectively reference hundreds of peer-reviewed scientific studies, and yet Politifact did not directly refute a single claim in a single one of these books. Additionally, Politifact editors abandoned thirteen years of selecting a singular year-end “Lie of the Year” to instead brazenly smear a whole presidential campaign with a single conspiracy trope.
PolitiFACT failed to fact check the many actual scientific claims and arguments put forward by Mr. Kennedy in his whole library of books instantly available to anyone who wishes to read them. In doing so, they mislead their readers.
Vax-Unvax is a case in point. The 300-page book examines over one hundred peer-reviewed studies that contrast vaccinated populations with unvaccinated ones. This inquiry is of great national interest into subjects that have provoked a flurry of media attacks, and yet the book is completely overlooked by PolitiFACT. Though the subtitle of the book pleads “Let the Science Speak,” PolitiFact does not. In fact, out of over 200 sources cited by PolitiFACT in their article, they reference only five scientific studies to rebut the many claims from the Kennedy campaign highlighted in their “Lie of the Year” article.
PolitiFACT’s failure to dive deeper and more broadly into such original source material – an essential journalistic practice – calls into question the credibility of PolitiFACT’s entire traditional year-end declaration. It appears that the hundreds of experts, researchers, and fact-checkers who have worked for Robert Kennedy Jr. apply an altogether different standard than does PolitiFACT.
While PolitiFACT has been sued (including by Mr. Kennedy and Children’s Health Defense), Kennedy has not been sued for any of the many claims made in his multiple books, including those made against Dr. Fauci. It should also be noted that one of Kennedy’s top scientific advisors was, until his death, Luc Montagnier, who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2008 for discovering the HIV virus. Montagnier associated with Kennedy because of the high scientific quality and rigor of the research that the latter conducted and lawsuits he filed.
If PolitiFACT had “Let the Science Speak” then they would have closely examined a host of conspiracy claims and sorted through thousands of footnotes across the whole of the well-stacked Kennedy campaign library. PolitiFact did not do so and as a result overlooked some of Mr. Kennedy’s claims, including some so-called “conspiracy theories” that have since been proven to be correct, such as:
Masks are ineffective and dangerous
Social distancing was not science-based
School closures were not science-based
Lockdowns were counterproductive
Vaccinating children for COVID causes more harm and death than it averts
Officials wrongly used PCR tests to justify the countermeasures
COVID-19 may have come from a Wuhan lab
Natural immunity is superior to vaccine immunity
To drive this point home, imagine that PolitiFACT is tasked with coming up with “The Lie of the Decade.” They would need to at least consider one from the above list, or the lie that government officials repeatedly told the public that the COVID-19 vaccines would prevent transmission, as exposed by Alex Gutenberg. They could also consider the lie that Ivermectin was a dangerous horse tranquilizer when it was proven to be a highly effective treatment, now confirmed by peer-reviewed study.
Kennedy’s message presented in his books and interviews is resonating well beyond the Censorship-Industrial Complex. The message is resonating outside the two-party establishment, which is running deeply flawed candidates, outside the medical establishment backtracking on Covid claims and policies, and of course outside the media establishment.
Here is a list of 15 alleged COVID “Conspiracy Theories” That Turned Out to Be True published by Vigilant News. Kennedy is not alone in doggedly searching for the truth, in challenging the status quo and in setting the record straight.
A recent Gallop poll found that 63% of the American electorate supports a third political party because, as most would agree, Americans are abandoning allegiance to a major party due in large part to the political and media establishment’s failure to speak and report the truth. As both an independent scholar and an independent candidate, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is offering a third way, one willing to stand up to propaganda and censorship, no matter how unrelenting the attacks and smears.
The Kennedy Effect
Frances Scott, an opinion writer for The Kennedy Beacon, describes the “The Kennedy Effect” – a phenomenon that explains the growing interest in the Kennedy campaign:
“The more we, the people, become aware of how against Kennedy the media seems to be, the more curious we become about him. Tech censorship and media bias — things meant to drive us away from Kennedy — are exactly what drive us toward him,” wrote Scott. “We want to know why the media gods are relentlessly telling us he’s evil. It’s their attacks that have made us curious.”
Voters are hungry for details and they are listening to countless probing interviews with Kennedy, especially via podcasts and one-on-one appearances primarily outside the major networks.
The same week PolitiFACT dropped their “Lie of the Year,” Julie Manchester, National Political Reporter for The Hill, said during its “2023 Year in Review:”
“It’s amazing to see how big [RFK Jr.’s] umbrella of support has grown.
You can go to a Robert F. Kennedy rally and talk to someone who voted for Clinton in 2016 and someone who voted for Trump in 2016. He has this plethora of support.
“I think [he] has done a good job of speaking to the collective moment we live in, whether it comes to the two-party system or Covid restrictions, he’s tapping into a frustration that voters from both sides of the aisle and the middle feel about the political process and Washington itself.”
All-in Podcast’s own year-end assessment declared Kennedy’s campaign the “Biggest Political Surprise of 2023.” Chamath Palihapitiya said, “In terms of favorability he is the leading 2024 candidate right now. It’s incredible. No one would have predicted it.”.
FiveThirtyEight polling averages show that out of twelve Presidential candidates tracked since May, only Robert F. Kennedy Jr. holds a net positive favorability rating. Every other candidate is viewed unfavorably and Presidents Biden and Trump are fifteen or more points back.
A Badge of Honor
The Kennedy campaign is looking ahead to Election Day, where results are likely to be determined by those informed by independent media and through alternative channels outside the major networks and beyond the reach of the six media companies that control the majority of news content in the country. These people are certainly not swayed by so-called fact checkers. These independent, first-time and younger voters are not likely to read PolitiFACT and, if they do, they’ll likely consider the media’s attack to be a “badge of honor” for the Kennedy campaign.
The expression “you know you are over the target when you start taking flak” comes to mind. But media hit pieces (see AP, Mother Jones, Politico or the like) and even PolitiFACT’s ‘conspiracy theory’ smear may not halt Kennedy’s growing support from across the whole of the political spectrum.
In other words, what deemed “conspiracy theory” by the editors of PolitiFact is truth telling to political independents and young voters who, in increasing numbers, see through the attacks and establishment censorship tools.
If Robert F. Kennedy’s campaign is one of theories and conspiracies then polls suggest that over 40 million Americans are interested in hearing the details through a process of full discovery and trial. This is because so many of Kennedy’s own claims, even the most controversial ones, have already turned out to be true and are causing ripples across the American electorate.
American voters in 2023 will be Kennedy’s biggest jury ever. History will ultimately judge PolitiFACT and Kennedy on the merits of their work products. Smearing Kennedy with a tired trope appears less a quality work product and more an act of desperation from Censorship Industrial Complex media minders tasked with policing voices that might threaten the very corrupt establishment juggernaut that fed us so many Covid and vaccine lies.