MRC Largely Stopped Promoting RFK Jr.’s Campaign After He Went Independent (And Became A Threat To Trump)

The Media Research Center spent much of this year being an enthusiastic booster of Robert Kennedy Jr.’s presidential campaign — not because it actually wanted him to win, but because he was running as a Democrat and, thus, might hurt President Biden’s re-election. But when Kennedy became an independent candidate — and Republicans started attacking him as it became even more clear that an independent Kennedy would pull more votes from Donald Trump than from Biden — the MRC stopped promoting him almost completely.

After Kennedy announced his switch to an independent campaign, the MRC was completely silent about him for three weeks. The first reference to him after that was an Oct. 31 post by Alex Christy about Nazi analogies in which specifically noted “Democratic-turned-independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on COVID-era mandates and vaccines” and tried to link him with the left: “Robert F. Kennedy’s history of anti-vaccine activism predates COVID, so his attacks were still considered to be from the left despite the media typically associating the issue with the right.” Christy didn’t disclose that thet MRC is also filled with anti-vaxxers who have defended Kennedy’s conspiracy theories, or that Kennedy’s anti-vaxxer conspiracy theories have never had a home on the left.

After that, references to Kennedy were limited to claims related to so-called “censorship” and gamed Google searches purporting to demonstrate bias:

• A Nov. 3 post by Catherine Salgado complained that Kennedy was among candidates who were “censored” by being fact-checked through Twitter/X’s Community Notes feature , which the MRC has long flip-flopped over.
• A Nov. 8 post by Gabriela Pariseau claimed that Kennedy didn’t show up on the first page of a Google search for “independent presidential campaign websites” — a narrative that’s part of an MRC campaign to smear Google searches as biased against conservatives.
• A Nov., 28 report by Pariseau and Heather Moon attacking “big tech” for allegedly “cdensoring” presidential candidates claimed that “Biden’s chief in-party rival Robert F. Kennedy Jr. received the brunt of the censorship on the Democratic side.” They then effectively conceded that Kennedy was “censored” for spreading falsehoods, conspiracy theories and misinformation: “YouTube has been particularly harsh to Kennedy Jr., as it deleted seven videos featuring interviews with the now-Independent candidate when he spoke on the COVID-19 pandemic, vaccines or the assassination of his father.” No evidence was offered that any of those things have anything to do with Kennedy’s candidacy.Nevertheless, MRC chief Brent Bozell insisted it was , as summarized in a Dec. 1 post by Luis Cornelio:: “If you dare dispute the Big Tech-Silicon Valley belief about climate change; or COVID; or the RFK assassination; or transgender mutilation, you are knocked off of Big Tech.”

Then there was a Nov. 22 column by Tim Graham in which he complained that Kennedy’s background was being investigated:

One of the ways that Democrat Party [sic] newspapers tell us they are Democrat Party [sic] newspapers is the timing of their investigative journalism. On the front page November 17, The New York Times ran a 4100-word hit piece on Robert F. Kennedy Jr. titled “In Public Causes, Kennedy Earns Acclaim, Criticism and a Fortune.”

Investigative reporter Susanne Craig summarized her thesis on her Twitter account. “The causes RFK Jr. has championed have made him A LOT of money,” she wrote. “His life has been a long, private hustle of paid speeches, advisory gigs and so on. Wealthy friends were behind the purchase of his home on the Kennedy compound.”

[…]

The Times didn’t publish this attack while Kennedy was still within the Democratic Party fold, when there might have been a remote possibility of withdrawal and a Biden endorsement before any primaries took place. Instead, RFK announcing an independent campaign for president wreaks havoc on Biden’s re-election chances, so it’s time for the “objective” media outlets to discover the “hypocrite with the long private hustle” narrative.

Graham didn’t mention that most polling shows an independent Kennedy pulling more votes from Trump than from Biden — contrary to his assertion that it “wreaks havoc on Biden’s re-election chances.” Nor did he explain why his MRC largely stopped promoting Kennedy after he became an independent in recognition of that fact and that it apparently got marching orders from Republican bigwigs to stop. And he did not disclose that the idea of a Kennedy candidacy might “wreak havoc on Biden’s re-election chances” was the only reason why it was promoting the campaign.

The MRC’s Kennedy boosterism has always been a cynical political calculation — much more than anything Graham is accusing the Times of doing. Graham, however, refuses to admit that fact.