On Thursday, the Democratic National Convention wrapped up in Chicago, and the echoes of 1968—so often invoked in media coverage ahead of time—had, we were told, fallen silent. Sure, there were dozens of arrests at street protests—including those of three journalists who were covering a demonstration at the Israeli consulate—but those were mostly peaceful, and the journalists’ arrests seemed to stir less media concern than annoying logistics (and annoying TikTokers) inside the venue. On Friday, a police official—who had earlier scolded the arrested journalists for being too close to protesters—said that, contrary to what everyone had been saying, Chicago had shown that “this is not 1968.”
The same day, another echo of 1968—the presidential candidacy of a Robert F. Kennedy—fell silent, too. Well, sort of. Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—whose father was famously assassinated during the 1968 Democratic primaries, and who had been running as a third-party candidate this year—insisted that he was not terminating his campaign and that he could still, theoretically, end up in the White House; a spokesperson, meanwhile, said that contrary to a court filing, Kennedy had not endorsed Donald Trump in the race. But Kennedy did say that he was suspending his campaign and would seek to remove his name from the ballot in a number of battleground states. And it soon became clear that he was endorsing Trump. Later on Friday, the pair appeared together at a rally in Arizona, where Kennedy walked onstage to a (literal) hero’s welcome and flaring pyrotechnics. Trump told Kennedy that his father and his uncle John F. Kennedy “are looking down right now and they are very, very proud.”
If the story of the younger Kennedy’s candidacy was an echo of the past, it was one distorted by the screeching, dystopian noise of the twenty-first century. Kennedy is known as a leading anti-vaxxer and conspiracy theorist; when he got into the race last year, he seemed motivated, in no small part, by using his status as a candidate to circumvent what he described as censorship of his views. (Indeed, Instagram, where Kennedy had been banned, soon reinstated his account, citing his active candidacy.) As his candidacy gathered steam in the polls—first in the Democratic primary, then as an independent—he became increasingly visible in both new media and its traditional counterpart: as I noted last year, he toured podcasts (a medium that he predicted would decide the 2024 election) and was profiled by seemingly every prestige magazine. Earlier this year, he enjoyed another sustained burst of coverage, fueled, one outlet speculated, by political reporters’ boredom with the ossified state of the race between Trump and Joe Biden—and, perhaps, by growing confusion as to which of the two main candidates Kennedy’s presence in the race stood to hurt more.
After I wrote about that burst of attention, in early April, Kennedy continued to cut through in the news cycle—though in many of these instances, he found himself (sorry in advance) dogged by weird stories about animals. In May, a journalist at the New York Times reported that Kennedy once testified that a worm ate part of his brain. (At least one expert sounded skeptical about the eating part.) In June, another journalist at the Times heard cawing during an interview with Kennedy, learned he kept pet ravens, and went to visit them. (They proved somewhat camera shy.) In July, a journalist for Vanity Fair published a photo showing Kennedy with the barbecued carcass of what he had reportedly suggested was a dog. (He said after the story came out that the animal was actually a goat.) Earlier this month, a journalist at The New Yorker recounted a story—though not before Kennedy recounted it himself, in a not-quite-prebuttal video that for some reason featured Roseanne Barr—about Kennedy dumping a dead bear cub in Central Park and making it look like it had been killed by a cyclist. (“Maybe that’s where I got my brain worm,” Kennedy said, of the bear.) This past weekend, an old article resurfaced online in which Kennedy’s daughter Kick recalled her father driving to New York with a whale’s head strapped to his vehicle. (“Every time we accelerated on the highway, whale juice would pour into the windows of the car,” Kick Kennedy said. “It was the rankest thing on the planet.”)
Fauna aside, however, the RFK news cycle seemed to slow down in this same period—particularly after Biden bombed in a debate for which Kennedy didn’t qualify and eventually ceded his place atop the Democratic ticket to Kamala Harris, un-ossifying the race and alleviating journalists’ boredom in the process. Kennedy’s poll numbers declined, as the narrative that he was the vigorous “change” candidate in the race—at a spry seventy with “a body even Rocky would admire,” as CNN memorably once put it—grew increasingly untenable. Even the whale-juice story resurfaced less as a consequence of anything Kennedy himself had just done than a Page Six gossip item pegged to the much bigger story of Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez splitting up. (Vulture: “Thank You, Bennifer Divorce, for Giving Us One More RFK Jr. Dead Animal Story.”) Over the weekend, coverage of Kennedy’s Trump endorsement had a valedictory quality. In a statement that was widely reported, various members of the Kennedy family described it as “a sad ending to a sad story.”
As Kennedy suspended his campaign on Friday, he bashed the press—in particular, what he described as the “DNC-aligned mainstream media networks”—for not interviewing him live. Observers on both the left and the right concurred that his message had been shut out.
Overall, of course, this latter claim was preposterous, as various journalists pointed out; the mainstream media may not have covered Kennedy’s campaign on terms that he would have liked, but he got loads of coverage, and had ample opportunities to disseminate his message. (Shortly before bashing the major networks on Friday, Kennedy himself noted that, unlike Harris, he has been doing as many as ten interviews a day.) And—even if this coverage did decelerate recently, before taking on a finalistic air—it will likely now continue, at least to some extent: Kennedy will purposely remain on the ballot in many states and seems unlikely to be able to extricate himself from some of the battlegrounds where he does plan to withdraw; whether Harris or Trump will benefit most from the suspension of his campaign remains to be seen, as does the nature of any deal he may have struck with Trump in exchange for his support. This sad story, in other words, may not yet be at its end.
Still, this does in many ways feel like an appropriate moment to take stock of how we covered Kennedy’s campaign. Assessing its early stages a year or so ago, I argued that it was, on the whole, getting far too much coverage; fast-forward to now, and that conclusion still broadly applies. Last year, I suggested that allowing early polls to dictate coverage was a bad idea—and that Kennedy’s numbers, in any case, looked soft; by the time he suspended his campaign, he was registering in the mid–single digits. To the extent that Kennedy attracted so much coverage as an avatar of our anxious, conspiratorial age, our instincts were also askew; as I wrote last year, this zeitgeist might be overcovered, and even if it isn’t, Kennedy was never the key to unlocking it. To the extent that Kennedy attracted so much coverage because he is a Kennedy, we can indict a media culture that is unhealthily obsessed with celebrity. Maybe the RFK and Bennifer news cycles aren’t so separate after all.
As I also wrote last year, none of this is to say that we haven’t seen some sharp coverage of Kennedy’s candidacy, grounded in solid reasoning; there was back then, and there has been since. As a candidate for president, it’s appropriate that reporters would interrogate Kennedy’s views and character, and many did. (The same Vanity Fair article that pictured Kennedy and the dog/goat included an allegation that he sexually assaulted a nanny. Kennedy trashed the story but reportedly apologized to the woman; when asked whether more such stories might come out, he replied, “We’ll see what happens.”) Even sharp coverage of Kennedy, though, has made me feel uncomfortable: if paying attention to presidential candidates is often democratically desirable, otherwise irrelevant rich people know that they can win attention by running for president. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that Kennedy effectively hijacked the public discourse via his campaign, buttressed by his name and the fact he is a compelling character—which may, ultimately, have juiced his coverage most of all.
Coverage of Kennedy’s environmentalism—he has long championed various such causes, while presenting himself as something of an outdoorsman—might be a case in point. Some of it has interrogated his positions in this area, or even used it as a gateway to talk about climate change as a campaign story (during a cycle in which it has often been underplayed); after Kennedy suspended his campaign, a couple of stories in major outlets centered the apparent absurdity of a self-professed environmentalist endorsing a candidate who has embraced fossil fuels and called climate change a hoax. But other stories—of the worm, dog, or bear variety—have gotten more attention, precisely because of their absurdity.
The New Yorker’s Clare Malone broke the bear story deep into a thorough recent profile of Kennedy. Higher up in her article, she included a different story related to Kennedy’s work with Riverkeeper, a clean-water group in New York State, and co-authorship of a similarly named book. According to Malone, the Times described the book, in a review, as “tedious” in its recounting of Kennedy’s engagement with the mainstream media. “No doubt gaining press coverage is an important tactic,” the review continued, “but it is treated almost as an achievement in itself.” Some echoes of the past are not so silent today.
Other notable stories:
- The dust continues to settle from last week’s DNC, and the news media’s experience of covering it. Late last week, Politico’s Calder McHugh went deep on the social media influencers who scored credentials for the event and the bad blood between them and traditional journalists. (“Journalists care about fact-checking,” one journalist said. The media’s “obsolete asses are being replaced and they hate it,” an influencer countered.) On the same theme, Semafor’s Max Tani spoke with the moderators of Pop Base, a viral news aggregator account on X that dispatched an editor to cover the DNC in person—the first time it has ever done as much. And The Atlantic’s Mark Leibovich (briefly) interviewed Pete Buttigieg, a fixture of media coverage who did thirty interview hits from the DNC across TV, radio, and TikTok.
- For Columbia’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism, Pete Brown reports on Star Spangled Media, a company with a “quasi-local news site” that “sought a news media exception to dodge campaign finance regulators” but “has emerged as a vehicle to promote down-ballot Democratic candidates in districts targeted by a liberal dark-money group.” “The weaponization of local news by political influence operations is a practice more commonly associated with conservative groups,” Brown writes. “But this tactic has gained popularity across the political spectrum, polluting local information environments with untrustworthy, sensational, and/or polarizing propaganda that risks undermining faith in legitimate local journalism.”
- In other local-news news, Semafor’s Tani reports on the launch of the Barbed Wire, a new for-profit digital-news site in Texas; the site has close ties to a Democratic-aligned super-PAC but also to experienced journalists, and it says that it will be nonpartisan. After the Minneapolis Star Tribune announced that it is expanding (and changing its name to the Minnesota Star Tribune), Poynter’s Kristen Hare notes that some other local outlets are expanding, too, despite the gloomy local-news landscape. And a federal judge dismissed a class action lawsuit alleging that Gannett discriminated against white staffers, though the suit could be amended.
- CNN’s Liam Reilly looked at how the Las Vegas Review-Journal is covering the trial of Robert Telles, a local official who stands accused of murdering Jeff German, a Review-Journal reporter. “While most newsrooms face their own discrete challenges, offering objective coverage of a colleague’s murder in a publication’s own backyard is a tall order, even for the most seasoned professionals,” Reilly writes. “Yet for the Review-Journal, this tightrope walk has become the norm over the last two years.” (Last year, Pesha Magid went deep on the case in an article for CJR.)
- And Selena Coppock—who, in 2015, created a viral social-media account that parodies articles from the Vows section of the New York Times—made the section herself after getting married. “I could just hear the voice of this section in my head, and it cracked me up…the constant name-drops of Ivy League schools, elite country clubs, and Mayflower descendants,” she said. But her parodies “always came from a place of reverence and fascination.” Coppock “never thought I would make the cut.”
ICYMI: Third Party in the USA
Jon Allsop is a freelance journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic, among other outlets. He writes CJR’s newsletter The Media Today. Find him on Twitter @Jon_Allsop.