RFK Jr. Spent a Decade Attacking ‘Notoriously Biased and Dishonest’ Fox News Before Embracing Its Audience

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has become a regular fixture on Fox News thanks to his longshot bid for the presidency, first as a Democrat and now as an Independent. While he has received a large platform on Fox News, often taking aim at his fellow Democrats including President Joe Biden, Kennedy once trained his rhetorical fire on a different target: Fox News.

A longtime environmental activist and lawyer, that Kennedy took shots at Fox News over its coverage of climate change and the environment should come as no surprise. In November of 2011, he wrote an op-ed in the Huffington Post titled, “Big Carbon’s Sock Puppets Declare War on America and the Planet.” Among those “sock puppets” he included Fox News for attacking then-President Barack Obama’s push into renewable energy, concluding, “To Fox News and other right-wing media sources, the facts meant very little. Their intent is only to suggest wrong-doing in an attempt to undermine the Obama Administration and its clean energy goals.”

Kennedy, however, extended his criticism far beyond policy and established a habit of calling Fox News liars. In June 2011, during a sitdown with the Commonwealth Club World Affairs of California, he argued that America’s “democracy is broken” in large part because of Fox News. “The problem is, our democracy is broken. The press is broken in this country. We have 30% of Americans now getting their information from talk radio, which is 95% controlled by the right. We have 22% getting their news from Fox News,” he said, later adding:

You know, in Canada, they don’t allow lying on television. It’s illegal on the television news to lie. That’s why Fox News is not in Canada. That’s why the Canadians didn’t follow us into Iraq. Into a, you know, 800-year fist fight in Mesopotamia where Dick Cheney was saying, ‘Oh yeah, they’re going to meet us with flowers in the streets.’ The Canadians were saying, “Are you crazy?’ Because they weren’t listening to Fox News.

In 2011, Kennedy also wrote in the Huffington Post, “In the Unitesd States, Fox News and talk radio, the sock puppets of billionaires and corporate robber barons have become the masters of propaganda and distortion on the public airwaves. Fox News’s notoriously biased and dishonest coverage of the Wisconsin protests is a prime example of the brand of news coverage Canada has smartly avoided.”

In December of 2012, Kennedy blamed Fox News for dividing the U.S. in a “way not seen since the Civil War.” “Twenty-two percent of Americans say their primary news source is Fox News,” Kennedy told HuffPost Live at the time, adding:

It’s divided our country in a way that we haven’t been divided probably since the Civil War, and its [sic] empowered large corporations to get certain kinds of politicians and ideologues who are in the United States Congress elected – the Tea Party ideologues who control the Republican Party.

Fast-forward to 2024 and Kennedy has spent the last year appearing regularly on Fox News and praising the network in the process. In a September 2023 interview, he thanked Fox, calling it “very, very generous” for giving him such a major platform. “I’m not allowed on CNN or MSNBC at all,” he lamented to Fox News anchor Martha MacCallum. “Jake Tapper has said publicly that he will not do a town hall for me, even though it’s done with Nikki Haley and with Ron DeSantis. So, it’s surreal.”

Kennedy referred to CNN and MSNBC as “DNC Channels” during the interview, prompting MacCallum to ask how the then-Democrat planned on breaking through to voters in the Democratic primary given mainstream media was dismissing him as a conspiracy theorist. “So the strategy that we’re employing is actually working, and that is to do a lot of long-form interviews on, you know, on podcasts to come on this network, which does allow me on. You guys have been very, very generous,” Kennedy replied.

Notably, Fox has at times pushed back against some of Kennedy’s more outlandish claims on its airwaves. Neil Cavuto took issue with him claiming that the U.S. “killed 350,000 Ukrainian kids” during an interview in June of 2023. Sean Hannity, in October of 2023, took Kennedy to task on the network and accused him being “pretty liberal.”

“You called the NRA once, a ‘terror group.’ You supported, over the years, Democrats – Gore, Kerry, Obama, Hillary. You praised Bernie Sanders multiple times. You support affirmative action. So, why is this party of yours– why didn’t they want to allow you to compete? ‘Cause that’s as pretty liberal of a record as anybody I know,” Hannity asked him, to which Kennedy accused Hannity of cherry-picking from his record.

Kennedy has long had a mixed history with Fox News, while he was publicly attacking the network he also had a longtime relationship with Roger Ailes, the former CEO of Fox News. In a more recent criticism of the network,Kennedy told YouTuber Theo Von in December of 2021 that Fox is controlled by big pharma. “I went to [Roger Ailes] I think around 2018, I went to him with a movie I had just made about mercury in vaccines. And he had a child who had, and that he suspects it was, vaccine injured, he was very sympathetic to this movie, he saw it, he watched it, he believed it,” Kennedy said at the time, adding:

He said I cannot let you go on to [Fox News] to talk about it, and he said if any of my hosts allowed you onto their show I would have to fire them, and if I didn’t I would hear from Rupert, meaning Rupert Murdoch, within ten minutes. And he said to me, during non-election years, we get – Fox News, for its evening news, gets up to 70% of its revenues from pharmaceutical companies.  And, he said typically there’s 22 ads on an evening news show, and typically about 17 of those are pharmaceutical ads. So those companies are not just using that as a platform to promote their products, they are dictating content on that news show.

As the 2024 election gets into full swing, Kennedy is poised to be a possible spoiler and both Trump and Biden are maneuvering to attack him to ensure he doesn’t chip away any of their voters. As a result of that dynamic, Kennedy’s relationship with conservative media is likely to become even more complicated than it already is. Kennedy and Fox News have long made for strange bedfellows and soon he may become more of a liability than an asset to the forces working to put Donald Trump back in the White House, a strong indicator of which will be whether or not he continues to find a platform on right-of-center media.