The DNC Smear Machine Against Kennedy Goes Into Overdrive

Uncritically, The New York Times Laps Up the Narrative.

By The Kennedy Beacon

If you’ve been reading The New York Times lately, you might have noticed that it’s looking more and more like a mouthpiece of the Democratic National Committee, its array of quick-fire articles suggestive of slick PR flacks pulling the strings. 

The coordination is both outside the press and within it. Feeling that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will take votes from Biden? Send in a cluster of Kennedys who support the president. On April 18, that’s exactly what happened: Members of the Kennedy family took their Bobby-bashing one step further, endorsing President Biden. The Times’ “news analysis” subtitle reads, “The rollout of endorsements from the Kennedys signaled the urgency the Biden campaign feels toward Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s independent bid, and its desire to discredit him.” 

Sounds promising enough as a piece of analysis, but the article quickly collapses, pandering to democrats’ fear that Kennedy will help Trump and doom the country. And the piece fails to spell out how many of the Kennedy family have endorsed Biden (roughly a dozen, one learns elsewhere) or which members work for the Biden administration. Both omissions of convenience. 

In a second article published by the Times on the same day, in the news section, the story headline does all the work for the reader, telegraphing the intended take-away: “Kennedy Clan Endorse Biden, in a Show of Force Against R.F.K Jr: Well-known members of the storied political family endorsed the president in Philadelphia, rejecting one of their own as he worries Democrats with an independent bid.” 

In truth, as The Kennedy Beacon has reminded readers continuously, Kennedy has over 100 relatives and a solid cluster of relatives who do support his presidential run. Leave it to the news agency, CBC, of Canada, to more accurately write about the endorsement, “Several notable members of the family were not endorsing, including U.S.ambassador to Australia Caroline Kennedy and non-profit leader Maria Shriver.” 

On X, Kennedy graciously took the high road. “I hear some of my family will be endorsing President Biden today,” he wrote. “I am pleased they are politically active — it’s a family tradition. We are divided in our opinions but united in our love for each other.”

As if all this was not enough for the DNC’s hired hacks to feed a hungry press in one news cycle, they appear to have coordinated two additional well-crafted pieces of spin that also, conveniently, landed in the Times, both on April 19. 

The first, titled, “The Ex-Bernie Sanders Pollster Raising Alarms About R.F.K. Jr.’s Appeal Among Latinos and Young Voters,” is essentially a profile of a man who is sounding the alarm about the possibility that Kennedy, like Bernie Sanders, will take voters from two traditional democratic constituencies - Latinos and young people - away from Biden. Where is the profile of someone who thinks that could be a good thing for our country? 

The second article is titled, “R.F.K. Jr.’s Environmental Colleagues Urge Him to Drop Presidential Bid: Nearly 50 Leaders and activists who worked with Mr. Kennedy at an environmental nonprofit group will run ads calling on him to ‘Honor our planet, drop out.’” 

What’s significant about this final piece in the two-day blitzkrieg against Kennedy is 1) that it comes the day after the Kennedy family action and on the same day as the Latinos/ youth piece; and 2) how it's focused on push-back by members of one environmental organization among the many for which Kennedy has worked: The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). Not a single voice quoted in the article comes from the Riverkeeper Alliance, for which Kennedy worked longest and arguably most impactfully.

While written as a ‘news’ story, the ‘tell’ in this coverage comes toward the bottom of the article. The reporter, Lisa Friedman, correctly cites some of Kennedy’s criticism of Biden’s environmental track record: “He accused Mr. Biden of turning his back on the environment by approving the Willow project, an $8 billion oil drilling project in Alaska; for overseeing record oil and gas production; and for signing the Inflation Reduction Act, which ensures continued offshore oil drilling.” 

Friedman does not weigh in on whether these criticisms are valid (a journalistic lapse), and yet she freely cuts-and-pastes the Biden administrations’ environmental “achievements” talking points as though they were facts: 

“Mr. Biden has enacted the most aggressive climate agenda of any president,” she writes. “In addition to the Inflation Reduction Act, which is providing more than $370 billion for clean energy over the next decade, he is limiting emissions from automobiles, is poised to cut carbon pollution from power plants and has reined in future oil and gas drilling by limiting the available tracts of land and water that companies can lease.”

And what about the Willow drilling project in Alaska, Ms. Friedman?

At the end of her article, the Times reporter almost reluctantly acknowledges some of Kennedy’s accolades in the environmental space, in which he has been a successful attorney and advocate for 35 years. Predictably, she fails to interview or quote a single supporter of Kennedy’s environmental record.

And so, in the course of two days, readers of the Times are presented with a matrix of propaganda against Kennedy targeted at democrats and progressives. These articles are laser-focused on sounding the alarm about the independent candidate who, the well-honed narrative goes, is hell-bent on destroying our democracy by handing over the country to Trump and spoiling it for an all-deserving Biden.