Every corporate media hit piece on RFK Jr. — which, by default, means every corporate media article or segment they ever produce because they are institutionally prohibited from providing fair coverage of his candidacy — leads with the predictable “anti-vax” smear as if that is the totality of his platform.
If you watch his nearly two-hour announcement speech, for instance, in its entirety, he only very briefly mentions vaccines in passing. The rest is devoted to a whole range of issues, including a fascinating synopsis of the political grievances that catalyzed the American Revolution. It was truly an impressive display of RFK Jr.’s historical and political savvy, if unsurprising given his family history.
Were you to make the mistake of relying on the corporate media to summarize his speech, though, you would come away with the distinct impression that he is a one-issue candidate.
“Anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. launches 2024 presidential bid,” read the CNN headline, along with virtually every other headline in the legacy press.
What gives?
They do this for at least four possible reasons:
- These networks rely heavily on big pharma ad dollars and therefore are obligated to construe any criticism of the industry with “conspiracy theory” outside of the realm of respectable debate.
- Legitimizing his brand of politics by giving it a fair hearing is an inherent threat to their stranglehold on political discourse within their sphere of influence. Confining public discourse to narrow parameters and calling it Democracy™ is basically their whole job.
- They are, consciously or not, casualties of groupthink.
- Related to the groupthink problem, they don’t actually know how to counter RFK Jr.’s accusations of corporate-state collusion because those arguments never get aired in the media that they consume.
The dirty little secret about the corporate media news actors is that, like their loyal viewers, they are strikingly ignorant about politics. They simply don’t know anything outside of the aforementioned narrow confines of acceptable mainstream discourse.
Exhibit A: fired CNN actor Chris Cillizza, quite possibly the dumbest man outside of Don Lemon to ever grace the network with his punditry, who claims that voters are increasingly flocking to RFK Jr. because they’re basically dumb animals who don’t know anything except RFK Jr.’s famous last name.
Cillizza is acting out a psychological phenomenon called “projection.” Cillizza is the dumb animal he accuses RFK Jr. supporters of being. He doesn’t understand anything about the candidate’s appeal both because he’s a naturally intellectually uncurious mid-wit who’s too educated for his own good and because, even if he were inclined to assess RFK Jr.’s appeal with an open mind, he instinctively understands, like a well-trained dog, based on his years in corporate media, that he can’t venture into that territory.
Were figures like Cilliza forced to ever truly contend with the over-arching political ethos of RFK Jr. — that we need to roll back the merger of corporate and state power — they would first be forced to acknowledge that the problem (or at least the perception of the problem by a large segment of the voting public) exists in the first place, which, being the corporate media, they are unable to do without implicating themselves. This is the same reason they won’t allow any RFK Jr.-Biden debates.
This strategy will prove, in the end, quite ineffective. Outside of a relatively tiny sliver of the electorate that worships Anthony Fauci as a Public Health™ demigod and still masks outdoors, the “anti-vax” stuff probably isn’t going to sway anyone one way or another.
