The New York Times is standing by its latest reporting on RFK Jr. over coverage the Health and Human Services Secretary called “unfair, inimical and inaccurate.”
After Sheryl Gay Stolberg published an article on Sunday entitled “Kennedy Shows Minimal Engagement With Vast Health Portfolio,” which questions his efficacy and work ethic, the HHS boss took to X on Wednesday to share his side of the story.
“Your article exemplifies the biased reporting we have come to expect from you and NY Times. It was unfair, inimical and inaccurate,” he wrote. “All one needs to refute your argument is to glance at my publicly available calendar and to review my unprecedented list of accomplishments on a wide range of issues, all of which I drove. You evidently never undertook these foundational due diligences. Why let facts obscure a good story?”
“In order to prove your preconceived case for my disengagement, you quote anonymous employees, some of whom I fired or who quit to avoid being fired. You also deceptively quote HHS employees without identifying whether they were among those I fired, thereby depriving your readers of the opportunity to make an independent judgment about their credibility,” RFK Jr. continued. “This species of journalist will always be able to find disgruntled individuals among the 70,000 employees of the Department from whom to cherry pick ‘facts’ to flesh out a preordained hit piece. All that is required for this brand of journalism is the ethical elasticity that you seem to have in spades. You had a preconceived thesis, and you set out to prove it. This is a widely accepted technique in journalism today, but I grew up in an era when it would not have been tolerated by the New York Times.”
“There was a time that journalists were proud to be the fearless and uncompromising champions of truth. Standards have devolved and journalism is dead,” he further noted. “The Times now employs propagandists. Your capitulation to partisanship further compounds your journalistic challenges; since we all are aware of your predictable bias, we at HHS are unwilling to talk to you about the topics that are important. The fact that you have minimal access to decision makers leaves you covering trivia and relying on your own capacity for invention.”
However, the paper insists it did indeed attempt to contact Kennedy for comment, while further defending its reporting and sources.
“The Times set out to examine Secretary Kennedy’s leadership and management style in light of numerous vacancies within the Department of Health and Human Services and concerns internally about his detachment from key issues and officials. The secretary declined an interview request and did not address detailed questions before publication about his approach to running the department,” the NYT communications team shared on X early Thursday morning. “This article is based on conversations with a dozen people who have worked directly with Mr. Kennedy during his tenure as secretary. We are confident in our reporting.”
