Former Salon Editor: I ‘Should Have Been Fired’ for Publishing RFK Jr’s Anti-Vax Article

Eighteen years after running an article from anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. blaming autism on childhood vaccines, former Salon editor-in-chief Joan Walsh now says she “should have been fired” for that fateful decision. In a Thursday op-ed for The Nation, Walsh apologized for publishing the since-retracted “mendacious, error-ridden piece,” especially in the wake of Kennedy’s “farcical presidential candidacy.” The 2005 article, titled “Deadly Immunity,” was co-published in partnership with Rolling Stone, and Walsh was the sole editor of the piece. “It was the worst mistake of my career. I probably should have been fired, but since Rolling Stone founder and then-editor Jann Wenner was on the Salon board at the time, that wasn’t going to happen,” she wrote. “Rolling Stone had taken responsibility for the arduous task of fact-checking (a process that, I learned later, was less than thorough).” Noting that she initially added numerous corrections after it became clear Kennedy had “falsified data” and cited “known crackpots,” Walsh pointed out that the article was eventually retracted six years later by her successor. “But as subsequent articles and books continued to debunk Kennedy’s conspiracy theory, it felt irresponsible to leave it up,” Walsh stated. She also pushed back on Kennedy’s claim, which he recently repeated to conspiratorial podcaster Joe Rogan, that the magazine caved to pressure from Big Pharma to take down the article. “That’s just another lie,” Walsh declared. “We caved to pressure from the incontrovertible truth and our journalistic consciences.”