'Dangerous denials of reality': ex-NYT editor regrets taking RFK Jr. call

18 July 2023

In an op-ed published by The Guardian Tuesday, July 18, former New York Times public editor Margaret Sullivan reflects on a phone call she took from conspiracy theorist and Democratic 2024 hopeful Robert F. Kennedy Jr. ten years ago.

Originally spooked by the fact RFK Jr. was on the other end of the line, Sullivan writes she "quickly realized, of course, that the caller was the former New York senator's son, an environmental attorney then in his late 50s.

The Guardian columnist continued, "Given his prominence, I took the call, only to endure an unpleasant screed from this anti-vaccine crusader. Once Kennedy had my ear, he spun out his pseudo-scientific theories, mostly about the causal relationship between childhood vaccines and autism. Though these notions had been debunked, he was relentless in wanting the New York Times to give them more credence."

The Guardian published Sullivan's op-ed the same day over 100 House Democrats urged House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) in a letter to rescind Kennedy's invitation to testify before Congress this week, days after New York Post published a video, "in which Mr. Kennedy asserted that COVID-19 was bioengineered to target certain races."

The letter emphasized, "Specifically, Mr. Kennedy floated the conspiracy theory that the coronavirus was purposely bioengineered in a lab to target Caucasians and Black people—but to spare Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people. These false claims echo centuries of Jews being scapegoated and held collectively responsible for illnesses like the Black Plague—often as a precursor for massacres and pogroms, and Chinese immigrants being blamed for plague outbreaks since the mid-1800s."

Sullivan writes that she now knows that "with his ugly theories and dangerous denials of reality, RFK Jr long ago sullied the family name." And a decade after taking Kennedy's phone call, the former editor says she would instead have her assistant request an email from Kennedy instead.

She further reflects:

I wonder now why I so readily took that call and gave him a half hour that rightfully belonged to the ordinary readers of the New York Times? Not every phone call got patched through to me, any more than I personally answered every one of the 500 or so emails that the public editor’s office received each week.

The columnist concluded the reason she picked up the phone in the first place was "because of his famous name," noting while "growing up in the 60s and 70s in the heavily Catholic steel city of Lackawanna, New York, any Kennedy was revered as something of a secular saint."

Now, one of the family's own constantly expresses "ideas – like [former President Donald] Trump's – that "are catnip for the media," Sullivan writes. "They make news and generate clicks. And social media amplifies him, too. Mark Jacob, a former Chicago Tribune editor, put it bluntly: 'The bots and trolls love RFK Jr. Because the bots and trolls hate a fact-based humanitarian society.'"

The former editor also points to The New York Times' recent reporting: "Mr Kennedy has made his political career on false conspiracy theories about not just Covid-19 and Covid vaccines but disproved links between common childhood vaccines and autism, mass surveillance and 5G cellular phone technology, ill health effects from wifi, and a ‘stolen’ election in 2004 that gave the presidency back to George W Bush."

Sullivan's full op-ed is available at this link (subscription required).

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