Over the last year or so, many writers and commentators have noted the media’s habit of “sanewashing” Donald Trump. For example, the practice of quoting just a few key words from an-otherwise incoherent rant, and then paraphrasing the rest in a way that makes him sound far less unhinged. A spot-on observation to be sure, but selective portrayal is also applied to another Trump administration character: Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
The sanewashing of Kennedy tends to be more subtle than the treatment given his boss, because RFK Jr. is less prone to off-topic rambling and complete incoherence. But, as I documented in January and again in March, much of what Kennedy says he believes isn’t just wrong, it’s batshit crazy. His history of advocacy on health issues is full of misinterpreting data, cherry-picking out-of-context snippets, moving the goalposts when his assertions are refuted, or simply ignoring research that contradicts his preconceived notions.
You wouldn’t know that from most mass media coverage of Kennedy’s tenure at HHS. While outlets regularly acknowledge the criticism made of his views, often out of step with mainstream science, they too often portray any dissent as proof of reasonable disagreement between relative equals. That is not what is going on here.
For example, Kennedy is regularly and matter-of-factly referred to in the media as a “vaccine skeptic.” Putting aside the fact that this is nearly as bizarre as being, say, a “round-earth skeptic” or a “gravity skeptic,” such willful negation of vaccines is simply wrong. And it’s not like journalists haven’t been warned. Dr. Paul A. Offit, a pediatrician at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and a member of the Food and Drug Administration Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee, spelled out the case in a scathing New York Times op-ed in January:
The news media labels Robert F. Kennedy Jr. a “vaccine skeptic.” He’s not. I’m an actual vaccine skeptic. In fact, everyone who serves with me on the Food and Drug Administration’s vaccine advisory committee is a vaccine skeptic. Pharmaceutical companies must prove to us that a vaccine is safe, that it’s effective. Then and only then will we recommend that it be authorized or licensed for use by Americans.
Mr. Kennedy, on the other hand, is a vaccine cynic, failing to accept studies that refute his beliefs. He claims that the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine causes autism despite more than a dozen studies performed in seven countries on three continents involving thousands of children showing that it doesn’t.
He has claimed that “there is no vaccine that is safe and effective.” (Childhood vaccines have prevented more than one million deaths and 32 million hospitalizations over the past three decades). He has encouraged people not to vaccinate their babies: “I see somebody on a hiking trail carrying a little baby, I say to him, ‘Better not get him vaccinated.’”
Real skepticism is marked by a willingness to doubt and relentlessly question everything on any side of an argument. Kennedy only doubts information that challenges his prejudices. But the media, including the New York Times, keep repeating the error. The Times, for example, called RFK Jr. “one of the nation’s most vocal vaccine skeptics” in a May 14 story about him testifying before Congress.
Media stories about Kennedy routinely lack critical context. An April 13 CBS News story summarizing a “Face the Nation” interview with Dr. Peter Marks, then newly ousted as the top FDA vaccine official, focuses on Marks’ criticisms of RFK Jr. and reports them accurately, and yet subtly presents the dispute between Marks and Kennedy as if it were an argument among equals. The piece never mentions that while Marks is an MD who also has a PhD in molecular and cell biology, Kennedy has no scientific training whatsoever. While rightly noting that “Kennedy has been criticized for years for claiming that vaccines cause autism, among a range of unfounded claims he has espoused about the danger posed by immunizations,” it fails to remind readers that the critics are actual scientists who’ve studied the effects of vaccines on people, something Kennedy wouldn’t know how to do even if he had the inclination.
That’s like reporting that I disagree with a neurosurgeon about how to perform brain surgery without noting that the last science class I took was high school biology.
In another technically accurate but context-free story—this time about Kennedy’s mid-May testimony before the U.S. Senate—NPR focused on his clashes with Democratic senators. Fair enough, but when he was asked whether he recommends that people take the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine, Kennedy answered, “Senator, if I advise you to swim in a lake that I knew there to be alligators in, wouldn’t you want me to tell you there were alligators in it?” When the man running the nation’s health agencies says something that loony about a vaccine that has been used safely and effectively for decades by many millions of people, shouldn’t listeners and readers be reminded that the man has zero qualifications to make such a statement?
Some of the problem stems from deeply ingrained media habits. News outlets tend to focus on the new and to avoid repeating information that they think their audience already knows, and there’s some logic to that. But the repetition over time that RFK Jr. is “the nation’s top health official,” accompanied by faux-reasonable terminology like “vaccine skeptic,” leaves the impression that he has some knowledge or expertise, which he doesn’t.
And over the years, RFK Jr. has spouted a lot of nonsense. In his book, The Real Anthony Fauci, Kennedy spends page after page repeating disinformation put out over the years by AIDS denialists, neglecting to mention that one of those he quotes repeatedly, Christine Maggiore, died of AIDS. Despite a couple of coy disclaimers, he makes it clear that he’s sympathetic to these anti-science zealots. Even more bizarrely, he flirts with rejecting germ theory altogether, writing:
Germ theory aficionados, in contrast, blame disease on microscopic pathogens. Their approach to health is to identify the culpable germ and tailor a poison to kill it. Miasmists complain that those patented poisons may themselves further weaken the immune system, or simply open damaged terrain to a competitive germ or cause chronic disease…When a starving African child succumbs to measles, the miasmist attributes the death to malnutrition; germ theory proponents (a.k.a. virologists) blame the virus.
Dr. Offit covered this in more depth in an interview with Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting. Overall, Kennedy leaves little doubt he has significant sympathy for the miasmist view, and there are almost no words to describe how crazy this is. Of course, environmental factors affect our susceptibility to disease, but yes, the measles virus does cause measles, and lots of people who aren’t malnourished get very ill from it. U.S. health policy is under the control of a man whose understanding of disease is firmly rooted in the 18th century, yet media reports on Kennedy almost never mention this essential fact.
That’s a fairly extreme example of Kennedy’s reality distortion field, but it operates on a more subtle level as well, and the media typically just go along for the ride. For example, a Fox News story about the recent MAHA Report noted that Kennedy mentioned an important public health concept, known as “social determinants of health”:
The report “represents an invitation to the American people and the American press to have a complex conversation about a nuanced subject, including that environmental policy, good economic policy and good public health policy are ultimately 100% aligned,” Kennedy said on the press call.
“The reason for that, particularly regarding public health, is that a strong economy is a social determinant of public health,” he continued. “Weak economies kill people. They make people sicker. Large public deaths make people sicker. These are all social determinants. And we learned during COVID that you can’t isolate the economy from the public health policy.”
[Note: I suspect there’s a mistranscription by Fox News of one word above. Given the context, Kennedy likely said, “large public debts,” not “public deaths”]
Fox, unsurprisingly, reported these remarks unquestioningly, but I’ve been unable to locate any mainstream media coverage noting that Kennedy badly distorted a legitimate public health concept to serve the Trump administration’s agenda.
“Social determinants of health” simply means that your life circumstances have a huge impact on your ability to stay healthy. Do you have a home, and is that home free of mold, lead, and disease-carrying pests? Can it be kept safely warm in winter and safely cool in summer? Do you have access to healthy food? Exercise? All of these things are closely linked to wealth and poverty, which in turn correlate strongly with factors like race and gender—the very factors that RFK Jr. and Trump now forbid federal scientists from studying as they purge the government of so-called “DEI.” It’s not just about having a good economy, it’s about whether or not that economy works for people in different circumstances.
As University of Arizona epidemiologist Elizabeth Jacobs (for the record, also one of my colleagues in Defend Public Health) puts it:
The economy of a country can be a social determinant of health, but if that economy is inequitable, a country’s economy is meaningless to wide swathes of the public that don’t have access to healthcare, education, jobs, etc. If a country with a good economy chooses to decimate public health as the Trump administration presently is, the fact of a ‘good economy’ is meaningless.
But that’s not what Trump wants to talk about, so RFK Jr. went along with the party line—and no one in the press seems to have called him on it. And relatively little of the MAHA Report coverage, outside of that of left-leaning outlets, has noted that Kennedy’s criticisms of ultra-processed, additive-laden foods are being undercut daily by brutal Trump administration cuts to programs that help people access healthy food.
Kennedy’s recent announcement that he’s thinking of barring National Institutes of Health scientists from publishing in major medical journals, and instead create in-house publications to house their work produced multiple examples of how news outlets tone down the crazy. The story in the Washington Post, for example, made no mention of one obvious and likely intentional result of such a plan: Complete political control by the administration in power over what NIH researchers can publish.
The Post noted that Kennedy made his comments on a podcast called “Ultimate Human,” but failed to mention that podcast host and “biohacker” Gary Brecka appears to make his living off of people’s insecurities about health, selling an array of pricey supplements and other products through a network of websites. These include something called “Metal-Free and Chemical Cleanse,” at $79.95 for a bottle that lasts 60 days. It all looks pretty sketchy, but Post readers never learned that this is the guy RFK Jr. chose over the vast array of reputable health publications, shows, and other podcasts to help him announce that long-established scientific journals like the New England Journal of Medicine are too “corrupt” for his freshly purified NIH.
All of this leaves Americans without the information they need to understand how genuinely bonkers the direction of current U.S. public health policy has become under Kennedy. But I don’t think any of this is malicious. It’s yet another example of what media critic Jay Rosen has called “the view from nowhere”—the mainstream media’s obsessive tendency to want to appear “impartial” at all costs. And in this case, that impartiality may well get people killed.
