https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/wxjdj5/abc-news-and-cnn-manage-to-demonstrate-exactly-what-not-to-do-with-robert-f-kennedy-jr

If there’s one thing to know about prominent anti-vaccine activist and current presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., it’s that he makes false claims about vaccines. Although he went out of his way to avoid mentioning his anti-vaccine activism during his candidacy announcement, it was supremely obvious that he would begin seeding his campaign with his usual talking points as soon as possible. Media outlets, then, would need to be prepared to respond to lies, misinformation, and half-truths about this topic in real time in order to competently interview or report on his run. In the first major fuck-up covering his campaign, ABC News instead elected to simply cut false claims it says Kennedy made about COVID-19 vaccines out of a recent interview with him. That editing has, predictably, given Kennedy a plausible cause to claim he’s being censored, created a nice, convenient news cycle for places like Fox News, and, in general, provided a crystalline example of exactly what not to do here. CNN’s Michael Smerconish, meanwhile, gave Kennedy a largely friendly interview that somehow managed to skirt his anti-vaccine activism almost entirely. 

In the ABC interview, conducted by anchor Linsey Davis, Kennedy went out of his way to depict himself as an underdog, someone going up against “large forces,” as he put it, “who are very very powerful and are able to silence me.”