May 02, 2005, 8:12 a.m.
RFK Jr. Unreality
Post-election denial lives on.

For months leading up to the 2004 election, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. lambasted the Bush administration for despoiling the environment and lying to the American people. Now Kennedy is at it again, but the Bush administration is not his only target. He has cast his net more broadly this time, indicting the media for aiding and abetting the Bush administration’s supposed misdeeds and fostering a “gap . . . between America’s values and those of its government.” Yet, as before, his critique is not particularly compelling.

Kennedy’s earlier salvos against the Bush administration focused on environmental policy. In a series of magazine articles and a popular book, Crimes Against Nature, Kennedy indicted the administration for waging war on the environment, undoing decades of environmental protections, and laying the groundwork for a corporate fascist state. The problem with Kennedy’s charges, however, is that they were largely untrue. As I documented for National Review Online and NRODT, Kennedy’s attack was based on distortions, exaggerations, and outright falsehoods. In his effort to document the Bush administration’s “crimes against nature,” Kennedy repeatedly committed his own crimes against fact.

Kennedy’s new fusillade also misses its mark. In a Vanity Fair article, “The Disinformation Society,” excerpted from the paperback edition of his book, Kennedy again exhibits his penchant for distortions and inaccuracy.

He continues to maintain that the Bush team “launched a jihad against the American environment and public health to enrich his corporate sponsors.” Bush’s policies are not a legitimate outcome of democratic process, but cynical efforts to repay the “president’s corporate paymasters” facilitated by subterfuge and misinformation.

As Kennedy sees it, people didn’t vote for President Bush because they were more concerned about national security and moral values than environmental protection. Nor did they support the president because they found environmental critiques like Kennedy’s unimportant or unpersuasive. (The latter is more likely — although it seems not to dawn on Kennedy that large portions of the American public have grown weary of environmentalists crying wolf about apocalyptic scares and Republican politicians.) Instead Kennedy maintains that President Bush was reelected only “due to an information deficit caused by a breakdown in our national media.”

America is misinformed, Kennedy maintains, because “right-wing” pundits and conservative media outlets “twist the news and deliberately deceive the public to advance their radical agenda,” while major media outlets sit silently complacent. No part of the mainstream media exposed “President Bush’s calamitous lies about Iraq, the budget, Medicare, education, and the environment,” he complains. The major networks failed to cover “real issues” during the campaign and — horror of horrors — Bob Schieffer asked no questions about the environment in the final debate.

Kennedy laments the "post-election decision to retire Dan Rather,” yet makes no mention of the overzealous anti-Bush “investigations” that led to Rather’s demise. Presumably Kennedy found Rather’s coverage of Bush’s National Guard Service a model of objectivity and balance.

Kennedy complains of a dearth of “strong progressive voices” on radio and TV, even though he’s a regular of the talk-show circuit. Kennedy repeatedly attacked the Bush administration during the 2004 campaign on everything from NPR to Fox News, often without challenge, let alone a contrasting view. Ironically he also calls for reviving the “Fairness Doctrine” in broadcast media, without considering that this would end his own free ride in major media outlets.

There is no liberal media bias in Kennedy’s view, but rather “lockstep coordination among right-wing political operatives and the press.” The mainstream media is too concerned with the bottom line to finance investigative reporting while “radical ideologues, faced with Niagara-sized flows of money . . . bombard the media with carefully honed messages justifying corporate profit-taking." Relying on Media Matters’s David Brock, Kennedy’s tale turns somewhat conspiratorial. Kennedy writes of a “propaganda machine” that “orchestrate[d] Clinton’s impeachment” and largely dictates the public agenda. The Washington Times is not just a conservative newspaper, but a key element in a plot to “establish America as a Fascist theocracy.” At stake, Kennedy warns, is nothing less than “democracy’s survival.”

To support his claims, Kennedy cites polls finding that more Bush than Kerry voters believed Iraq was harboring weapons of mass destruction and supporting terrorist activity, and that many Bush voters support environmental positions the Bush administration opposes. This, Kennedy maintains, is proof that a majority of Americans cast their votes for Bush because they were misinformed. But it shows no such thing. Most intelligence agencies, foreign and domestic, believed Iraq had or sought WMDs; and, Kennedy’s rhetoric notwithstanding, there is no evidence that the Bush administration “lied” about Iraq. Relying upon faulty intelligence is not the same thing as deceiving the American public.

It is possible — indeed likely — that President Bush pursues some policies that are unpopular. That he nonetheless won reelection does not mean voters were ignorant of his plans. Rather it suggests that voters preferred Bush’s positions on the issues that mattered most to them. If, as Kennedy claims, most Bush voters disagree with the administration’s position on greenhouse-gas emission controls, it hardly means Bush’s election was an illegitimate con job — not when most voters were more concerned about terrorist threats from abroad and challenges to traditional moral values at home.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is tilting at windmills. That his arguments on media bias get such a wide airing — on major media outlets and in magazines like Vanity Fair — is proof itself that these claims lack any basis in reality. He clings to them nonetheless as the only way to make sense of the present political reality. Like so many on the angry Left, he cannot accept Bush’s reelection as a political loss on the merits. Instead it is a sign of voter ignorance, proof of the power of propaganda, and a harbinger of democracy’s decline. This approach makes it easier for Kennedy to dismiss the views of those with whom he disagrees — after all, they must be either dishonest or stupid. But it does not make his arguments any more convincing.

— Contributing Editor Jonathan H. Adler is associate professor and associate director of the Center for Business Law and Regulation at Case Western Reserve University School of Law, and a regular contributor to the environmental weblog The Commons Blog.