Exclusive: Ramaswamy to Join Tim Pool in Counter-Programming to ‘Ratings Wasteland’ CNN’s GOP Debate

Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy will join podcaster Tim Pool for a live audience show in Des Moines, Iowa, as counterprogramming to CNN’s Republican presidential debate on January 10, Breitbart News can reveal.

Ramaswamy’s campaign announced in a press release first shared with Breitbart News that he would join Pool, host of Timcast, for the event at 8:00 p.m. ET in direct competition with the debate.

The Ramaswamy campaign highlights multiple gripes it has with “ratings wasteland” CNN, including a cease and desist threat the campaign said it received from the network for posting Ramaswamy’s CNN town hall to his campaign YouTube account.

The campaign also contends the network is “cherry-picking” polls in picking which GOP candidates met polling criteria for the January 10 debate.

After his December 13 CNN town hall in Iowa, which the campaign argues was “disgracefully cut short” by the network, Ramaswamy’s team posted the video to his YouTube page. By December 14, the campaign says the network threatened it with a potential cease and desist demanding it take the video down after it reached 200,000 views. Meanwhile, a CNN town hall posted to rival Nikki Haley’s campaign, which has 68,000 views, can still be watched on her page as of this writing.

The campaign also accused the network of “cherry-picking” polls that met its requirements for the debate. 

To qualify for the debate, a candidate must score 10 percent of support “in three separate national and/or Iowa polls of Republican caucusgoers or primary voters that meet CNN’s standards for reporting,” CNN stated in its requirements released in December.

Ramaswamy garnered 13 percent of support in a Morning Consult poll of 337 likely Iowa voters from November 1-30, according to FiveThirtyEight. However, the network would not count the poll as satisfying its requirements, according to the campaign. Notably, the network omitted Morning Consult from its list of pollsters that meet its “standards for reporting” in its December 7 release.

Ramaswamy’s team also pointed to multiple instances of CNN personalities, including media reporter Oliver Darcy, being impartial toward the candidate. Ahead of Ramaswamy’s CNN town hall in December, Darcy wrote in the Reliable Sources newsletter that the network was “helping to legitimize the dishonest GOP presidential hopeful who has spewed dangerous lies and injected poison into the national discourse at every chance.” 

Similarly, CNN political commentator Van Jones said after the third Republican presidential debate in September, he was “shaking” while listening to Ramaswamy speak and that the candidate was “one step away from Nazi propaganda coming out of his mouth.”