Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will appear in a Fox News town hall hosted by Sean Hannity in New York City on Tuesday. The event comes amid a weeks-long push by the network to promote the longtime anti-vaccine activist as a viable challenger to President Joe Biden.
The 69-year-old scion has received gobs of attention in right-wing media outlets such as Fox News, which has weaved an alternate reality where Kennedy is a strong and popular candidate who does not hold conspiratorial views.
Poll after poll shows Kennedy is not even close to wresting the nomination from Biden. But quite amusingly, rather than ignore the bad polling, Fox News hosts and guests have touted it in support of the challenger.
On Thursday, Laura Ingraham told viewers the “popular” Kennedy is “polling so well.” But as she spoke, a graphic appeared on screen with the results of the latest Quinnipiac poll showing him trailing Biden by a laughable 71% to 14%. Meanwhile, on Friday’s edition of The Five, hosts quibbled over whether Kennedy is polling at 14% or 17%, as if there is some practical difference between the two when Biden is a light-year ahead.
The Ingraham segment was also representative of how the network treats Kennedy’s conspiracy-mongering.
Fox News ignores it.
While slamming Democrats for condemning Kennedy’s “anti-Semitic” comments, at no point did Ingraham actually tell viewers what he said. In this case, the won’t-be Democratic nominee claimed the Covid-19 virus was “ethnically targeted” in a way to spare Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people from harm.
The comment itself doesn’t mean Kennedy is anti-Semitic, but it is a weird and baseless thing to say – especially for someone seeking the presidential nomination of a major political party.
Speaking of saying weird and baseless things, Kennedy has claimed: vaccines cause autism; Wifi allows toxins to go into people’s brains; the United States killed 350,000 children in Ukraine; chemicals in the water supply turn people transgender; and HIV may not cause AIDS.
Fox News also repeatedly aired a viral video of a shirtless and fit-looking Kennedy working out, no doubt in part to draw a contrast between Kennedy and Biden.
The narrative that he is a serious challenger to Biden is ludicrous, but made possible in part by the fact that Biden will turn 81 this November and looks every bit of 91. Sometimes it seems as though a moderately strong gust of wind just might knock him to the ground where he’ll be smashed to pieces like peanut brittle. Occasionally, he displays all the energy of Eeyore. In an ideal world, Biden would have stepped aside and opened the door for a nimbler and more energetic candidate not born in Silent Generation to obtain the nomination, but that ship is quickly leaving the harbor.
For more than three years, Fox News has portrayed Biden as a feeble old man. And while its hosts often grossly exaggerate the nature of his health issues, the fact is that he is indeed a feeble old man.
But Biden is also not a nutjob with a decades-long record of promoting batshit conspiracy theories – the same ones that Fox News so conveniently ignores to depict Kennedy as a sane alternative that must be destroyed by the Liberal Media™ that’s “covering” for the president.
If the aforementioned “credible Democratic alternative” came forward – say, a Gavin Newsom or a Gretchen Whitmer (sorry, not-sorry, Vice President Kamala Harris) – Biden would have a fight on his hands and that aforementioned Liberal Media™ would treat the challenge with all the seriousness of a main event because that’s what it would be. But the problem with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is that he’s not even worthy of being on the undercard.
This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.
