Unvarnished Hypocrisy

The New York Times, a Pulitzer Winner, and the Ethics of Trafficking in Sealed Documents

Susanne Craig is a New York Times investigative reporter who has filed two lengthy pieces that ran six months apart and delved into the health and income of independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Both articles are riven with innuendo intended to leave the reader questioning Kennedy’s ethics and competency for the nation’s highest office.

To readers seeking the truth, Craig fails miserably at achieving her goal. In spite of herself, she manages to present two portraits of a principled, hard-working, and robustly healthy man.

Craig rose to prominence during the 2016 presidential campaign after an anonymous source sent her three pages of Donald Trump’s 1995 tax return. Two years later, she produced a lengthy investigative piece on Trump’s inheritance, alleging that he obtained some of it through fraudulent tax schemes. In 2019, she won a shared Pulitzer Prize for that coverage.

On May 8, Craig broke the story about Kennedy’s “dead brain worm” that then made the rounds of legacy media, suggesting that his contraction of a parasite while traveling through Asia years ago renders his demonstrative good health questionable. She tells her readers in the story’s second paragraph that she found the information in “a 2012 deposition reviewed by The New York Times.”

Not until the 15th paragraph does Craig disclose that the deposition sourcing her story was part of Kennedy’s divorce proceedings from his former late wife, Mary Richardson Kennedy, who died before the divorce became final. 

And nowhere does Craig explain that this deposition is filed under seal in the Westchester County (NY) clerk of court’s office – a critical piece of information that she left the Kennedy Beacon’s Louis Conte to break on May 14.

Conte explains that the person or parties who provided the deposition to the Times likely broke the law. Elaborating, he says, “It is understood from case law that the Times can publish articles based on source documents that came to them illegally. However, legal behavior is not necessarily ethical behavior.”

To Kennedy’s credit, his good humor prevailed as other outlets repeated the worm story, many of them failing to clarify Craig’s source and implying instead that Kennedy announced it out of the blue. While NPR used the story to inform listeners about the prevalence of parasitic worms throughout the developing world, most outlets wrote about it in the sneering voice once reserved for the tabloids.

The timing of Craig’s piece is suspect. It appeared six days before the Times released on May 14 its own commissioned poll under the headline, “RFK Jr is 2024’s X Factor.” The article describes Kennedy’s growing strength among Latino voters and those under 45 as “unnerving” to Democratic strategists.

Craig used the same sealed deposition to write her November 2023 piece on Kennedy’s “windfall” income earned over decades as a tireless and successful litigator of big polluters like Monsanto and, ironically, as a New York Times best-selling author. She chose the term “shadow career” to describe his private sector work for the common good. Elsewhere, she characterized it as a “relentless private hustle.”

Here again, Craig’s story appeared in proximity to a Times-commissioned poll that documented Kennedy’s growing popularity. Craig’s report ran on November 16, a week after Siena College released its findings that Kennedy drew 24% of the vote in a three-way match-up with Biden and Trump and beat them both among voters under 45.

Having first used the 2012 deposition for the November 2023 story about Kennedy’s income, Craig kept the “brain worm” revelation under wraps for at least six months. What else might she plan to release from that sealed deposition?

Rendering Craig’s subterfuge even more egregious is the self-flattery she has penned on her Times profile page: “I am committed to upholding the standards of integrity that are outlined in our Ethical Journalism Handbook. I strive to be accurate and fair.”

Using the hyperlink to the handbook that Craig provides, Honest Media found the following pledges by which all Times employees are held to account. We take the liberty of sharing the most pertinent, and emphasize the portions that best illustrate Craig’s hypocrisy and violation of her employer’s stated policies. 

The goal of the The New York Times is to cover the news as impartially as possible and to treat readers, news sources, advertisers, and others fairly and openly, and to be seen to be doing so.

In keeping with its solemn responsibilities, under the first Amendment, The Times strives to maintain the highest standards of journalistic ethics.

We tell our readers the unvarnished truth as best we can learn it. It is our policy to correct our errors, large and small, as soon as we become aware of them.

Joe Kahn, the Times’ executive editor, recently discussed with Semafor’s Ben Smith the accusations leveled against the paper of record by Biden’s team for an alleged failure to properly cover the president. Biden’s people have even gone so far as to charge the Times with endangering the survival of American democracy come November. In that interview, Kahn made a strong statement rebutting the Biden team’s arrogance and defending the role of a democratic press:

One of the absolute necessities of democracy is having a free and fair and open election where people can compete for votes, and the role of the news media in that environment is not to skew your coverage towards one candidate or the other, but just to provide very good, hard-hitting, well-rounded coverage of both candidates, and informing voters. If you believe in democracy, I don’t see how we get past the essential role of quality media in informing people about their choice in a presidential election.

Perhaps Kahn needs to have a sit-down with Craig. Together they might reflect on the Times’s seeming campaign to demean Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Semafor also reports that Kahn is now embroiled in a revolt among his younger reporters who took offense at other comments he made to Smith, specifically for characterizing the newsroom as not a “safe space” for the ultra-sensitive. His staff charges that Kahn is intolerant of dissent.

Will Kahn prevail? Does he have the backbone to discipline his roiling newsroom? Will he call Susanne Craig to task for violating the standards the New York Times professes to live by?