CNN anchor Jake Tapper published a first-person column Thursday ripping what he called a "wild and false story" that Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., told about the journalist on a podcast earlier this month.
Tapper called out the candidate and famous vaccine skeptic for claiming he worked with Tapper in 2005 to promote his article on links between vaccines and autism in a TV spot at the time.
Tapper claimed that during the recent podcast, Kennedy oversold how in-depth and significant his interview with Tapper – then a reporter with ABC News – was. He accused the Democrat of failing to mention that both Salon and Rolling Stone retracted his article that the reporter was interviewing him about due to inaccuracies, and that the candidate falsely claimed that Tapper called him and told him ABC "corporate" killed his story before airing.
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Tapper’s column alleged that wasn’t true, and that the ABC piece on Kennedy's article aired on the broadcast network on June 22, 2005, with added context from doctors claiming that "the vast majority of scientific data" did not support his claims.
"He told the story as ‘evidence’ of TV news networks trying to censor the truth when it came to vaccines. In it, he mangles the facts and wildly misrepresents what actually happened. The truth about it is instructive because of how untethered he is to facts," Tapper wrote.
The CNN anchor then detailed the several errors he alleged belonged to the candidate’s re-telling. He first noted that the initial article that Kennedy was looking to promote at the time was factually inaccurate.
Tapper stated, "Flash back to 2005. Kennedy was co-publishing a piece on Salon.com and Rolling Stone with his spurious since-disproven claims about autism and vaccines. (After amending the story with five significant corrections, Salon.com ultimately took it down. Rolling Stone, too, removed the piece but with less transparency.)"
At the time, Tapper reached out to Kennedy "to see if we were interested in doing a TV spot tied to the publication of the Kennedy Jr. piece." He added, "I interviewed him via phone, with a TV crew in his office, and prepared a spot for ‘World News Tonight with Peter Jennings.’"
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He then explained how the candidate’s retelling differed greatly from Tapper’s assessment of what happened.
"In Kennedy’s bizarre retelling a few days ago… I worked with him ‘for three weeks doing this incredible documentary’ (no and no) about his Rolling Stone story – please note he makes zero mention of the article having since been retracted and disappeared," Tapper wrote.
Tapper also called out the candidate for claiming Tapper told him on the phone, "All my career, I have never had a piece killed by corporate and I’m so mad." Tapper wrote, "I hadn’t. I had been at ABC News for two years. I had had plenty of pieces killed. Not once did ‘corporate’ play a role in killing any of them."
Tapper then declared, "RFK Jr. has been misrepresenting the content of this call for years. (I told him we were holding the story for a day.) Now in his retelling, a two-minute piece was an ‘incredible documentary,’ a few days of work was three weeks, one remote interview was me working intensely with him, and a piece that got delayed one day so we could interview some actual experts is a piece that got killed."
He also noted that the TV report that went up nearly 20 years ago featured experts debunking claims made in Kennedy's article. Kennedy has long linked vaccinations to childhood autism, but the vast majority of medical experts reject his claims as unfounded.
"He remains someone you cannot rely upon for facts, truth or accuracy," Tapper concluded.
