The New York Times Fact-Checks Itself In Fumbled Fact Check Of RFK Froot Loops Claims
The New York Times fact-checked itself in an embarrassing attempt to fact-check President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
In an article published Friday on Kennedy’s crusade to regulate the food industry, the paper inadvertently contradicted its own criticism of a claim by Kennedy related to a popular cereal marketed to children.
“Mr. Kennedy has singled out Froot Loops as an example of a product with too many artificial ingredients, questioning why the Canadian version has fewer than the U.S. version,” read the original print of The New York Times’ reporting. “But he was wrong. The ingredient list is roughly the same, although Canada’s has natural colorings made from blueberries and carrots while the U.S. product contains red dye 40, yellow 5 and blue 1 as well as Butylated hydroxytoluene, or BHT, a lab-made chemical that is used ‘for freshness,’ according to the ingredient label.”
New York Times editors updated the article to include an additional comment from Kennedy on MSNBC from earlier this month after the excerpt went viral Sunday.
“Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article incorrectly described Mr. Kennedy’s recent comments on Froot Loops,” a correction read. “He was comparing the total number of ingredients in the U.S. and Canadian versions of the cereal, not the number of artificial ingredients.”
But the correction is not much better. Here’s the updated text:
Mr. Kennedy has singled out Froot Loops as an example of a product with too many ingredients. In an interview with MSNBC on Nov. 6, he questioned the overall ingredient count: “Why do we have Froot Loops in this country that have 18 or 19 ingredients and you go to Canada and it has two or three?” Mr. Kennedy asked. He was wrong on the ingredient count, they are roughly the same. But the Canadian version does have natural colorings made from blueberries and carrots while the U.S. product contains red dye 40, yellow 5 and blue 1 as well as Butylated hydroxytoluene, or BHT, a lab-made chemical that is used “for freshness,” according to the ingredient label.
In other words, the Times found fault with Kennedy’s Froot Loops claim because the White House nominee failed to distinguish between artificial ingredients and natural ones in the original comment targeted by the paper.
The New York Times was mocked online for having proved the point the paper was trying to discredit.
“While trying to own RFK, the [New York Times owned themselves and proved our point,” wrote Jaimee Michell, an online pundit.
Billionaire Bill Ackman called the Times an “embarrassment” claiming he had to “check the print paper just to make sure this was a real article.”
Last week, veteran nutrition journalist Nina Teicholz fact-checked a separate article published by the Times this month promoting seed oils as part of a healthy diet.
“Online forums, blogs and influencers say they’re ‘toxic,’ ‘slowly killing you’ and driving up rates of diabetes, obesity and other chronic diseases,” wrote Alice Callahan, a health and nutrition reporter at the Times, after highlighting comments from Kennedy that “Americans are being ‘unknowingly poisoned’ by them.”
Callahan went on to quote a handful of “nutrition scientists” to push back on Kennedy’s criticism of seed oils and published a follow-up article Friday to claim “Seed oils are a far better choice for health than solid fat alternatives.”
But Teicholz, author of The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet and the Substack “Unsettled Science,” wrote in a long post on X why Callahan, who relied on anti-meat industry sources, is wrong. While low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol drops with seed oil consumption, Teicholz wrote, “reducing LDL-C through diet has NEVER been shown to reduce cardiovascular or total mortality and only rarely shown to reduce cardiovascular events.”
“These ‘hard’ health outcomes (heart attacks, death) are the ones that matter, and for them, lowering LDL-C through diet has no effect,” Teicholz reported. Many large clinical trials have shown this.”
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