What Has Vanity Fair’s Bess Levin Been Smoking?

Another Mainstream Media Reporter Fails to Understand Today’s Young Voters, Wise Beyond their Years

By Frances Scott, The Kennedy Beacon

I have good news. There’s reason for hope. America’s youngest voters understand what’s been going on and, in Robert F. Kennedy Jr., many of them see a way out of the present darkness. 

The majority of young voters recently surveyed in battleground swing states told pollsters they want Kennedy to be our next president. A Vanity Fair contributor calls this “batshit,” as if they must be crazy. She should look deeper.

Maybe it’s because I’m the mother of three Gen Z adults, but to me these poll results serve as proof that Gen Z and the Millennials are much wiser than many of us knew. I believe that young American voters’ media-savvy instincts and ability to see through the fog of corporately crafted content could even pull us out of our current tailspin. 

Young Love for RFK Jr. 

Understanding how Gen Z and Millennials have developed a unique type of wisdom requires a look at the kind of content the mass media’s been producing. Bess Levin’s November 7 piece in Vanity Fair, “A Batshit Number of Young Swing State Voters Think RFK Jr. Should Be President,” is exhibit A of what corporate media’s been spitting out since Gen Z and Millennials were born. Levin’s piece describes her reaction to the results of recent polls of potential November voters, one conducted by New York Times/Siena among battleground-state voters and one conducted by Quinnipiac University. 

For some of us old schoolers, giving serious consideration to Levin’s opinions is hard from the get-go, thanks to that expletive in her title. Full disclosure: I’m a 52-year-old woman raised in the South. That means, growing up, every adult within earshot told me it was bad to cuss. Though one might slip when you dropped something on your foot, these, I was told, were not words educated people used. I suppose her relatives were just more free-spirited than mine and perhaps didn’t tell her cussing would make people assume she had limited vocabulary or was desperate for attention.

I’m a hockey mom, though, and neither a prude nor a shrinking violet. I am not so distracted by one off-color word that I condemn Levin’s character; I just expect better from media professionals. I like to believe that people who’ve made it so far up the media ladder have more words at their disposal than the average beer-league defenseman.

Glance through Levin’s extensive body of work for Vanity Fair and you’ll see that F-bombs are part of her shtick. Numerous gems grace her titles, including these phrases: Absolutely F--ked, Out on His Ass, Bulls--t, Shut the Hell Up, “Go F--k” Themselves, Shat Herself, Trip Over Their Own Assholes, Total Clusterfuck, Shitshow Dumpster Fire, Wildly F--ked-Up, Throw S--t, Beyond F--ked , Scared Shitless, Never Stop Kissing Trump’s Ass.

I get it, I guess. Being a seasoned (translation: aging) writer myself, I’m often cognizant of how quickly time is passing. I imagine that suddenly one day, my thoughts and writing style will no longer be relevant, and I’ll slowly starve to death for lack of work. I, too, am tempted to call some of my stories “What the BLEEP Is Wrong with Everybody?” 

But we’re talking Vanity Fair here. I expected the snark to be subtle, or nuanced at the least.

Once you get beyond the ‘batshi’t and are deep into the first paragraph of her piece, you’re in for the next crude gimmick: Levin compares voters preferring Trump over Biden to people preferring “a rusty crowbar shoved up their ass” over “catch[ing] a movie after work.” 

I understand Levin’s learned to use gross images to shock and potentially hook us. Clearly she’s not suppressing her distaste for Donald Trump and sees a win for him in November as a “wildly disturbing prospect.” What’s wildly disturbing to me, though, is how representative her piece is of what typically gets published and broadcast these days: offensive imagery, nasty, one-dimensional character assassinations, weighted descriptions, and “news” stories obviously crafted to sway public opinion. These seem to be the go-to tactics now, even under mastheads once revered as bastions of exemplary literary style and journalistic integrity. 

Levin’s story on young voters wanting Kennedy for president typifies what’s churned out by most of the legacy media lately: hit pieces and ad hominem attacks – more shock than substance. The journalists and writers are more crass than craftsmen. They’re heavy on headline and editing, light on story and substance, rooted primarily in opinion. They’re main objectives appear to be getting us to click through, shocking us, making us angry and scared.

One side of any given debate is presented by Fox News, the other by MSNBC, CNN, and The New York Times. We’ve all seen the tightly scripted, 45-second hits of anchors interviewing reporters, then tossing to shorter follow-up discussions among people sitting on a set, using language and tone that make it sound like they’re arguing, but they’re clearly not – with each other. They’re arguing with the talking heads on that other channel. 

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. seems to be the only political candidate both sides love to hate. Perhaps that’s why young voters, who surf their news far away from the mainstream platforms, have bothered to get to know him and are growing to love him. 

Mass media pieces like Levin’s are like the fast food of our times; they’re quick and seem like they’re the only sustenance around. You consume it because it’s flavorful, but after a while, you realize how sick it’s making you. Highly processed and wrapped in brightly colored packaging; for years this type of work has been marketed as news. 

Thankfully, America’s youngest voters see through the marketing gimmicks.

The Downward Slide of News

There’s plenty of debate over whether news is dying or already dead, and if so, when the slide toward obsolescence began. Some argue that industry leaders began losing their bearings in 1987, when the Federal Communications Commission scaled back how the Fairness Doctrine was enforced, arguing that the requirement to present contrasting viewpoints hurt the public interest by violating the network’s free speech. Some believe the fall began in 1996, when the Telecommunications Act became law, lifting a cap that had limited how many broadcast entities could be owned by the same family or company. Others blame 1997 and the allowance of direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical ads on television. 

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

Those who’ve seriously considered the question of when the news lost its compass wonder if the death knell first rang with the passage of the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012. Language in it supposedly “modernized” the Smith-Mundt Act, a law that had forbidden distribution of US propaganda on American soil for decades. From then on, that modernization language legalized US government-crafted narratives (often referred to as propaganda) to be disseminated to US citizens on American soil. 

Another punch struck months before the COVID pandemic, via the Trusted News Initiative, a partnership of news and nonprofit “fact-checking” organizations that purportedly fight “disinformation.”

Fortunately, those born between the mid-1990s and 2010 have developed, as a part of growing up, a sort of media savvy those of us born earlier struggle to match. They have a unique understanding of the hidden agendas that often drive what’s put forth as news. That’s why Millennials and Gen Z reject the legacy media. They get none of their news from TV, they don’t subscribe to newspapers, and they consume very little of what the corporate media produces. Their skepticism has led many in these generations to RFK Jr.’s doorstep. Once they listen to what he has to say, they want him as their next president. 

The New Way to Become Informed

A few weeks ago at a party, I sat across from five energetic twenty-somethings at a huge kitchen table. We chatted late into the night. They asked how I’d ended up in Austin, and what I did for a living. When I mentioned writing for American Values 2024, the super PAC supporting Kennedy’s run for president, they erupted. They told me they loved him. Based upon my interactions with some of the older adults in my day-to-day life, I was surprised such a young group knew who Kennedy was. Two of them told me they’d read all his books. 

A young couple listened to Kennedy’s two most recent books on Audible on road trips. I asked how they’d first learned about him. “Podcasts,” they said, practically in unison. One had seen him on This Past Weekend with Theo Von. Another had caught him on comedian Whitney Cummings’ podcast. Everyone had seen the Joe Rogan interview and the conversation in the barbershop on rapper Math Hoffa’s My Expert Opinion. 

They told me they liked how open he was about his struggles, especially with faith, addiction, and sobriety. They judged him as down to earth, something that had surprised them, considering he’d come from a family as privileged and as close to royalty as many in America consider the Kennedys to be. 

What these young voters told me they appreciate most about Kennedy is his willingness to call out the herd of elephants currently stampeding through America’s proverbial living room and to offer, in specific detail, plans for handling them once he gets into office.

To the Millennials and Gen Z, the other presidential candidates come across as oblivious to the problems that stand to ruin these young people’s chances for a stable, hopeful future. If you ask them which elephants worry them most, they’ll tell you it’s… 

• The economic war raging against the middle class. 

• The interest rates that keep rising and killing their hopes of home ownership. 

• The mentally ill and drug-addicted people, including retired veterans, living on the sidewalks.

• The expanding disparity between the nation’s wealthiest and everyone else.

• The weaponization of the justice system.

• The military operations that no longer get congressional approval to begin, and then never end.

• The cost of higher education.

• The expansions of the monetary supply.

• The inflation threatening to permanently enslave the middle and lower classes. 

• The censorship. 

• The mandates. 

• The marketing that masquerades as science.

• The government behaving as if it is “of the corporations, by the corporations, and for the corporations.”

The bottom line is that the young adults in this country have had it with a lot that’s related to policy and politicians. They’re demanding honesty, integrity, authenticity, transparency, and a bold willingness to address even the topics less obvious to consumers of mainstream media. Thankfully they’re finding what they want in Kennedy. 

America’s young voters have been forging paths of their own, peppered with their elders’ criticism, for long enough. It’s time we hand them the keys, scoot over to the passenger’s side, and have a little faith for a change in where the next generations are going to take us. They might be our last, best hope. 

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Frances Scott is an Emmy Award-winning broadcast journalist, a health freedom and medical device safety advocate, and co-host of The Kennedy Beacon podcast, found weekly on this platform.