Opinion: Why Vanity Fair’s Hit Piece on Kennedy Backfires

The basic tenets of journalism aren’t complex: Seek the truth and report it. Give all sides a voice. Hold the powerful accountable. Don’t plagiarize. Quote people directly. Consider your sources carefully. Cite them. Put aside feelings and opinions, and just present the facts without bias. In sum: be a decent human, and treat people the way you want to be treated. 

Photo: Vanity Fair

The title and first few paragraphs of Joe Hagan’s September 27 article, “Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World,” immediately tip us to Vanity Fair’s agenda. They’re peddling just another hit piece, replete with the worst possible photograph they can find of Kennedy. His expression makes him look like he’s being set on fire.

Hagan begins his piece by calling the day he went to see Kennedy the “low point” of his summer. 

To be fair, I knew the story was an opinion piece, not even-handed journalism. I expected Hagan’s personal bias against Kennedy to be sprinkled throughout; I just didn’t expect it to make up the whole meal. But that’s apparently where we are now. In today’s ailing journalistic landscape, so desperate for scandalous content and page views, you don’t get ahead by treading gently.

Vanity Fair’s Joe Hagan

I told my husband the other day how sad I was about the vitriol being passed off these days as news, or even just fair for weekend reading. “Pick a side, and start swinging,” he said.

Hagan comes across as a bold and confident professional, which is why I found it a bit odd that he didn’t even try to couch the fact that he’s also a name dropper. A former mentor of Hagan’s had been Kennedy’s college roommate. Apparently, that connection assuaged Kennedy’s concerns and gave him hope that, even though Hagan worked for a legacy media company, he could be trusted to remember the basics of good journalism and write an unbiased story that wasn’t designed to put him in a bad light. Kennedy let down his guard and invited Hagan into his home. 

Photo: DM Lyons on Pinterest

The two had plans to meet at the Kennedy compound on Cape Cod. When the day arrived, Hagan was prompt. Kennedy was late. This must have miffed Hagan, because he mentioned it twice in his piece. Reading that caused me, a lifelong reporter who has spent a career waiting for the people I wanted to interview, to wonder whether anyone else had ever been late to one of his interviews, or if he didn’t realize politicians are usually late — usually for reasons beyond their control.

Another feature of the story I found troubling was Hagan’s claim that he wanted to do a story about Kennedy’s family, given what he ended up producing: a hit piece about Kennedy himself. 

Hagan’s feigned determination to spare the reader some of Kennedy’s debatable positions leads him to discuss Kennedy’s “many controversial ideas.” Hagan specifies these: “like his belief that the media has been infiltrated by the CIA, as he told the right-wing provocateur James O’Keefe in an interview this year; or his claim that pesticides in drinking water are causing ‘sexual dysphoria’ in boys as evidenced by a frog study.” Claiming you’re not going to do exactly what you’re about to do is a tactic employed by persuasive writers and con men alike. 

That would be like me claiming I’m not going to pick apart Hagan’s story, then immediately questioning everything about it, asking things like: Has Hagan never heard of Project Mockingbird? Has he done even a cursory search for news stories by people he’d consider credible – like The New York Times?

Did Hagan ever bother to read any of the numerous studies on atrazine and how it wreaked havoc on frogs’ reproductive systems? The one from UC Berkeley was published thirteen years ago and took me less than five seconds to find on PubMed. Does Hagan know about PubMed? Does he understand that typing ‘atrazine’ and ‘frogs’ into a search bar takes less than five seconds or that an abstract takes ten seconds to skim? He seems to have no problem skimming over Kennedy’s concerns that various media and tech companies violated his first amendment rights. Has he never looked up the Trusted News Initiative or read the lawsuit Kennedy filed against the consortium? Could someone as well-versed and ‘reputable’ as Hagan not know about Missouri v. Biden? 

Hagan outright dismisses Kennedy’s claims that most of the legacy media are corrupted by pharmaceutical companies. Has Hagan ever seen any of the eight bazillion prescription drug ads on television that run every day? Does he ever question why there are so many such commercials in US media — and the power of money to influence? 

Hagan complains that Kennedy told him about vaccine injuries, media censorship and that federal government is weaponized against its citizens. He whines that it’s impossible to fact-check what Kennedy is saying in real-time, but there’s nothing stopping him from doing so post-interview and pre-final draft. Which leaves me thinking Hagan never considered looking into Kennedy’s claims or reading the studies he mentioned after the interview was over. If he had, he’d have seen, just as I did years ago, that Kennedy is telling the truth. 

By the time I’d made it half-way through Hagan’s piece, I found myself arguing with most of what he’d written.

I had sincere questions about Hagan’s time with Kennedy and why he’d decided to spin the story the way he did. I sent Hagan a message, asking if we could talk. Later, I sent him another message, but Hagan never replied. I also reached out to the editor-in-chief of Vanity Fair, Radhika Jones, but she didn’t reply either. 

Radhika Jones, Editor-in-Chief, Vanity Fair

Hagan’s hatchet job on Kennedy provides yet another example of why so many of us have grown to distrust, if not despise, the media. We’ve just seen too many examples of slanted reporting — being passed off as fair — to continue falling for the ruse. 

I call what’s happened as a result of hit pieces like Hagan’s “The Kennedy Effect.” 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.

When we’re online and see Kennedy in a podcast or on a video thumbnail, suddenly we’re curious about him, we want to see it. What could he be saying that’s so harmful to the safety of everyone on the planet, like the media portrays? How bad could he actually be? We want to know why the media gods are relentlessly telling us he’s evil. It’s their attacks that have made us curious. 

Before the companies trying to monopolize information began deleting Kennedy from social media, before stories like Hagan’s began popping up, telling us Kennedy is a mad, dangerous man, a quack never to be taken seriously, we probably would have scrolled on. Instead, we listen to him, and then we understand Robert F. Kennedy Jr. makes more sense than the voices that have been dominant for so long. 

Even to the simplest of people, it’s obvious how drastically the news has changed. Everything feels like a hit piece now. That’s why most of us have jettisoned what used to be called news. It’s probably why CNN’s ratings are in the tank and why the people at media companies like Disney (the owner of ABC) and Conde Nast (the owner of Vanity Fair) have suffered rounds of layoffs. 

If Hagan had called me back to talk about the origins of his Kennedy bias, I would have explained to him why so many Americans can no longer stomach what he — and many like him, who chatter daily on mainstream media channels — are selling. 

We’re on to you now, I’d say. And we are sick of you trying to divide us. We’re sick of your misleading blather. That’s why we’re unsubscribing, clicking away, and turning off all the bloviating heads. We’re not dumb. We can read. We can listen to different perspectives and decide to think whatever we want, whether you like it or not. 

Your plan to chatter on and keep dividing us, until all anyone does is fight, has backfired. Now we’re sprinting toward the one candidate talking about uniting us.