Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on media: what the evidence says · JRE #1999
SUBJECT: MEDIA
Not a true/false call. Every claim is logged with its sources; read the exhibits below.
oh, Kennedy, it was loaded with mistakes. And six years later, Salon, under pressure from the pharmaceutical industry, takes it down and says, we found mistakes in it. But they never showed any mistakes.
What the evidence says 01 / RECORD
Salon and Rolling Stone simultaneously published Kennedy's "Deadly Immunity" article in July 2005, and both outlets ran corrections in the following weeks (Kennedy himself describes "four or five corrections" in this same interview) before Salon later retracted the piece entirely. Documented issues included a misstated infant mercury exposure figure (corrected from "187 times" to "40 percent" greater than the EPA daily limit), a false claim that a scientist held a patent on the measles vaccine, and quotations from the 2000 Simpsonwood transcript, including remarks by developmental biologist Robert Brent and CDC official Robert Chen, that were spliced or edited in ways that reversed their original meaning. Journalist Seth Mnookin documented these specific manipulations in a Scientific American account, and Kennedy continued repeating already-corrected figures (the mercury exposure claim) in television interviews just days after the correction ran. The assertion that no mistakes were ever identified is contradicted by this public record of itemized corrections and documented quote manipulations. The specific framing that the retraction was driven by pharmaceutical industry pressure, and its exact timing, are not independently confirmed by the sources reviewed and remain disputed by Kennedy and his allies.