Rarely is the collusion between the mainstream press and the Democratic Party as apparent as it was on Thursday, when CNN Jake Tapper launched an all-out assault on, of all people, Aaron Rodgers.
Within a day of the New York Jets quarterback emerging as a leading choice to run with independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Tapper claimed Rodgers shared Sandy Hook conspiracy theories with CNN reporter Pamela Brown at a party following the 2013 Kentucky Derby.
“Hearing that [Brown] was a journalist with CNN, Rodgers immediately began attacking the news media for covering up important stories,” Tapper’s CNN.com story alleged. “Rodgers brought up the tragic killing of 20 children and 6 adults by a gunman at Sandy Hook Elementary School, claiming it was actually a government inside job and the media was intentionally ignoring it.”
Brown did not record the alleged conversation, took no notes, and apparently told no one else about it for nearly 11 years, but on Thursday—the day after Kennedy first floated the possibility of adding Rodgers to his ticket—she was finally ready to report on their conversation.
CNN’s apparent lack of any editorial standards in publishing such an unprovable story notwithstanding, the timing of it was notable—especially after TMZ.com reported just a few hours after Tapper first broke the story that the Democratic National Committee was so scared of Rodgers’s potential to swing votes from President Biden and toward Kennedy that it was actively digging up dirt on the quarterback.
“DNC members acknowledge third-party candidates can easily play spoiler in a close election … so all the more reason to face Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and possibly Rodgers head-on,” TMZ reported Thursday afternoon. “Moving forward, we’re told Democrats will be looking through old Rodgers interviews and dredging up the skeletons in the QB’s locker. Essentially, they’re welcoming AR to a whole new kind of gridiron … one where Rodgers isn’t likely to get an unnecessary roughness call in his favor.”
What a coincidence! On the very same day that high-ranking Democrats express their fears about Rodgers, CNN ignores every fundamental standard of journalistic ethics to slam him! It’s almost as if Tapper and Brown were following orders that had gone out from the DNC that very day and were not acting as journalists but opposition researchers.
It would make sense that Rodgers would wind up in their crosshairs, as he would provide enough celebrity cache (and, frankly, enough weirdness) to keep Kennedy’s campaign in the headlines straight through to Election Day. He wouldn’t even need to take time away from football to campaign: Every locker room interview, every postgame press conference, every Pat McAfee appearance would give him ample opportunity to tout his running mate.
Moreover, Rodgers played nearly all of his NFL career for the Green Bay Packers, who are less a football team than a religion in the critical swing state of Wisconsin. To be sure, he has alienated plenty of fans with the increasingly self-absorbed strangeness that contributed to the team’s decision to move on from him last year, but he still has a sizeable share of supporters.
Could just enough of them be persuaded to vote for a Kennedy-Rodgers ticket instead of a Biden-Harris one to deliver Wisconsin to former President Trump? Perhaps, especially since a third-party candidate almost certainly delivered the state to Trump in 2016.
That year, Green Party candidate Jill Stein received 31,006 votes—nearly all from left-wing environmentalists or liberals who just couldn’t bring themselves to vote for Hillary Clinton—and Trump beat Clinton by 22,751 votes. Four years later, the Wisconsin Elections Commission controversially refused to allow the Green Party on the state’s presidential ballot and Biden beat Trump in the state by 20,682 votes.
Wisconsin also isn’t the only state in which Kennedy could cost Biden votes. Recent Bloomberg/Morning Consult polls put Trump ahead of Biden in all seven swing states—Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada—and Trump performs better in hypothetical matchups with Biden and third-party candidates Kennedy, Stein, and Cornel West than he does in just a head-to-head race against Biden.
This suggests that all three candidates, Kennedy chief among them, are far more likely to siphon votes from Biden than from Trump. It’s thus no surprise that Democrats would be ordering their attack dogs to sic both Kennedy and his potential running mate.
It has long been somewhat obvious that doing Democrats’ bidding is the primary role of corporate media, but the sheer speed of the Rodgers hit was stunning. Tapper and Brown didn’t try very hard to hide what they were doing. The DNC told them to pounce and they asked, “How low do you need us to go?”
Dan O’Donnell is a talk show host with News/Talk 1130 WISN in Milwaukee, Wis. and 1310 WIBA in Madison, Wis., and a columnist for the John K. MacIver Institute.
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