CNN anchor Jack Tapper posted a column accusing Robert F. Kennedy Jr. of telling a “wild and false” story about an interaction they had in 2005.
Kennedy’s comments were made during an appearance on a podcast hosted by Jordan Peterson on June 5 and as part of an attack on how the media covers Big Pharma.
RFK Jr. said he spent three weeks working with Tapper, who was at ABC at the time, on a documentary critical of vaccines that was suddenly deleted.
Tapper’s account indicates that he did not collaborate with Kennedy but simply interviewed him over the phone for an ABC television segment, which was not deleted.
The attack on Kennedy Jr. comes as a remarkable video surfaced showing the 69-year-old Democratic presidential candidate lifting weights at the legendary Gold’s Gym in Venice Beach, dubbed “the mecca of bodybuilding.”
A photo accompanies the video and shows RFK Jr. shirtless and well built.
The attack on Kennedy Jr. comes as a remarkable video surfaced showing the 69-year-old Democratic presidential candidate lifting weights at legendary Gold’s Gym in Venice Beach, dubbed “the mecca of bodybuilding.”
Tapper’s account indicates that he did not collaborate with Kennedy but simply interviewed him over the phone for an ABC television segment. He is pictured in May 2019
“RFK Jr. has made so many wild and false assertions on a number of vital topics,” noted Type in the columnpublished on June 22, before asserting that it is “detached from the facts”.
Tapper provided a fairly lengthy account in the column and proceeded to explain that their interaction stemmed from Kennedy in 2005 co-publishing an article with Rolling Stone magazine and Salon.com.
In it, he claimed there was a link between certain mercury-containing vaccines and autism – both publications have since retracted it due to factual inaccuracies.
A photo accompanies the video and shows RFK Jr. shirtless and well built
Tapper provided a rather lengthy account in the column and proceeded to explain that their interaction stemmed from Kennedy in 2005 co-publishing an article with Rolling Stone magazine and Salon.com
In the Jordan Peterson podcast, which has been removed from YouTube but remains on Twitter, RFK Jr. said he had been working “for three weeks on this incredible documentary” with Tapper.
He then said Tapper informed him over the phone that the ‘documentary’ was going to be killed off by a ‘corporate’ – something that had never happened before.
“RFK Jr. has been misrepresenting the contents of this appeal for years,” Tapper wrote.
Tapper in his CNN column suggested that he would never have used the word and that a number of his stories would have been deleted before.
He said that although the take was not pulled on his article, he delayed the segment for a day to interview other experts, and it finally aired on June 22, 2005.
“Now, in his story, a two-minute piece was an ‘incredible documentary’, a few days of work was three weeks, a remote interview was that I was working intensely with him, and a piece that was delayed one day so that we can interview some of the real experts is a piece that has been killed,” Tapper wrote.
Tapper also appeared on a podcast last week, Pod Save America, in which he aired similar scatters about Kennedy.
CNN anchor Jake Tapper is pictured with his wife Jennifer Marie Brown at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York in 2018
‘[Kennedy] spreading dangerous misinformation about childhood vaccines,” he said, before saying he would not host Kennedy for a town hall on CNN.
“He was so dishonest in that experience and since then he’s been lying frequently about the experience,” he said.
Tapper also quoted his own segment to reflect how he covered Kennedy’s article.
Tapper claims he said during his segment, “The medical community disagrees with Kennedy, who is neither a scientist nor a doctor.” They point out that autism rates aren’t going down, even though thimerosal has been removed from most childhood vaccines as a precaution.
He wrote at the end of his column that “we fact-checked for our article that RFK Jr. did not do himself,” before adding, “And there’s still someone you can’t tell. not count for facts, truth or accuracy.”
