CNN's RFK Jr. interview ignored policy issues – by design

By Greg Orman
Real Clear Wire

Erin Burnett had Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on her CNN show this week. Burnett is to be commended for giving her viewers the opportunity to consider an alternative to the major party’s candidates. She will no doubt receive criticism from partisans on both sides of the aisle who would like to eliminate consideration of any candidate who might draw support from either Joe Biden or Donald Trump. The complaints won’t just be made publicly. Calls to CNN producers likely preceded Kennedy’s appearance and will continue. Controlling access to the media is one of the tools partisans use to maintain their grip on power, despite the clear desire from voters to hear new voices. 

While giving Kennedy significant airtime is laudable, Burnett demonstrated her strong biases in the interview and with the panel of partisan guests who dissected the interview in the following segment. Over roughly 30 minutes, Burnett didn’t ask Kennedy a single question about policy issues themselves. She didn’t even ask the most basic question one asks of a candidate – why are you running? The interview was primarily devoted to how RFK Jr.’s candidacy would “spoil” the race for President Biden. 

The partisan Democrat on Burnett’s panel then went on to criticize Kennedy for not talking about what he would do to improve people’s lives, notwithstanding the fact that Burnett never asked him about that. (Had Kennedy ignored Burnett’s questions and just spoken about the issues, he would have been criticized for being evasive.) This is one of the attacks routinely leveled against independents. Voters already have a perspective about where Democrats and Republicans stand on the issues. Independents can be a mystery. So, the attack is really a two-step: Don’t ask independents about the issues in interviews (focus on the horse race) and then complain that we don’t know where the candidate stands on the issues. The intent is to sow confusion about the independent, while simultaneously implying that their candidacy isn’t credible. 

That was one of the attacks leveled at me in 2018 by the media in Kansas when I ran as an independent for governor. In one egregious example, the Kansas City Star editorial pages were attacking me for not talking about the issues on the same day that the news pages were ignoring a detailed policy paper that I had just released on how we were going to bring more transparency to the state capital. Their omission was particularly troubling, as the Star had won a Pulitzer Prize for its series on the lack of transparency in Kansas government. 

Howard Schultz faced similar attacks in 2019, when he considered a run for the presidency. The attempts to marginalize his campaign sent the thoughtful and accomplished Starbuck’s founder scrambling to produce hundreds of pages of policy prescriptions. Had he stayed in the race, it wouldn’t have mattered. Partisans would have repeated the charge, knowing that a complicit or lazy media would go along, and hoping that voters were too time-pressed to do their own research. 

The media’s defense of the two-party system is often subtle. By not asking Bobby Kennedy what he would do to improve people’s lives and focusing on the impact his candidacy would have on the race, Burnett was reinforcing the duopoly’s narrative that independents can’t win, and their candidacies only lead to unintended consequences. Why bother asking him how he’s going to address chronic illnesses and the debt crisis? Doing so would imply he was a serious candidate.

Having a panel evaluate the interview, after the fact, without the presence of an independent, also reinforces the notion that there are really only two choices in our politics. It gives the duopoly the last word and the first chance to mold impressions. 

Ironically, this tactic may end up backfiring. Having campaigned as an independent twice throughout Kansas, I noted broad consensus for what ails America. Voters from across the political spectrum believe that the system is rigged for the benefit of political insiders – party bosses, politicians, special interests, lobbyists, big business, and the media. RFK Jr. gets that and is using every opportunity to reinforce that he shares that belief. 

If Kennedy gets to walk through every interview only describing the problems our nation is facing and not being challenged on his solutions, he’s going to get a lot of heads nodding. He’s going to be able to connect with American people and may end up doing precisely what he’s said all along – spoil the race for both Biden and Trump.

Greg Orman is a Kansas entrepreneur, author of “A Declaration of Independents,” and a former independent candidate for governor and senator of his state. His website is www.greg-orman.com.

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