Over the weekend, the New York Post dropped a big story: Robert F. Kennedy Jr., political scion and Democratic presidential candidate, said Covid-19 could be an “ethnically targeted” bioweapon.
Kennedy, during an on-camera dinner with reporters, alleged that Covid is “targeted to attack” Caucasians and Black people but spare Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people. After heavily implying that Covid could be an “ethnic bioweapon,” he conceded, humbly, that he did not know for certain whether the virus was “deliberately targeted” or not.
The “ethnic bioweapon” theory sparked something of a debacle. Kennedy denied making the comments in a furious Twitter thread, and also insisted the dinner where he made them was off the record. The reporter who broke the story, Jon Levine, released a video of the dinner showing Kennedy making the comments on tape. The Post denied that the dinner, which it had reported on earlier in the week, was off the record.
Still, many of Kennedy’s boosters maintain that he was taken out of context and that he didn’t say, despite the video evidence, that Covid might be an ethnically targeted bioweapon dodging Jewish and Chinese people in search of Caucasian and Black people.
There remains an odd wrinkle in this story, however, at least for media watchers. The big Post scoop was hardly given big scoop treatment by Rupert Murdoch’s media properties, including Fox News and even the Post itself.
In the Sunday edition of the Post, the Kennedy story was entombed on page 12, squeezed into a side column by a much more prominently featured story about Green Party presidential candidate Cornel West criticizing Biden. There was no mention of the scoop on the cover of the paper.
New York Post, Sunday July 16, Cover (L) and Page 12 (R)
Fox News, which has lavished Kennedy with coverage, barely covered the new remarks, even as they set off a media firestorm and drew condemnations from Jewish groups alleging they constituted a racist and anti-Semitic conspiracy theory.
The comments were mentioned briefly on two Fox News shows on Monday. The most extensive coverage came on the debut episode of Jesse Watters’s 8 p.m. show. The prime time host took a page out of his predecessor Tucker Carlson’s book and raised questions about Kennedy’s wacky claims, urging his viewers to doubt scientific consensus before concluding with a challenge to Kennedy: “If you have the proof, we want to see it.”
For years, Kennedy has spread conspiracy theories about public health and science. In 2005, he wrote an infamous report for Rolling Stone and Salon linking autism to vaccines. The baseless piece, riddled with errors, was corrected five times before being retracted. That did little to change his views about vaccines, which he continues to make false claims about, including his farcical allegations about the death toll from Covid vaccines. In 2019, Kennedy traveled to Samoa to promote anti-vaccine sentiment. Months later, a measles outbreak on the island nation killed 32 people, most of them children. The outbreak was blamed, in part, on vaccine hesitancy in Samoa.
The question for us here is: Why is Murdoch’s Fox News all but ignoring a major story from Murdoch’s New York Post — on a Democratic presidential candidate no less?
It might have something to do with the relentless promotion Kennedy has enjoyed from Fox since he entered the race earlier this year in a quixotic bid to boot Biden from the White House. The notorious conspiracy theorist stands little chance of achieving that goal (and in fact, most of his prominent boosters appear to be Trump supporters, not Biden defectors) but has enjoyed glowing coverage from Fox News hosts and other pro-Trump pundits who want to see Biden kneecapped before the general election.
Fox has a tendency to turn a blind eye when the outsider liberals it has promoted turn out to be charlatans (see: Tucker Carlson editing the craziest moments out of his interview with Kanye West in order to cast the troubled rapper as insightful.) Having put Kennedy on a pedestal in an effort to hurt Biden, Fox finds itself in the awkward position of having to ignore his conspiratorial beliefs — even when they’ve been exposed by the New York Post.