Do Dana Bash and other CNN moderators and hosts fail to understand Alaska's ranked choice voting?

CNN is regularly discussing the duplicate Dan Sullivan candidate, and yet the reporters fail to even mention how little difference that candidate can make. Dana Bash interviewed AG Todd Blance, for 10 minutes mostly about DOJ's effort to relitigate the Dan Sullivan issue in Alaska. She spent several minutes debating the election clause, supremacy clause, and other esoteric legal issues, without even asking him: Why does this even matter with ranked choice voting, given that anyone confused can just vote for both Dan Sullivans? The final round of counting will just be Peltola versus Senator Sullivan (unless someone gets more than 50% of first choice votes). For that matter, she did not even mention to the AG the fact that the ballot lists "incumbent" next to Senator Sullivan.

Then today, Bash reported on the New York TImes expose that some democratic campaigners went out hunting for Dan Sullivans, and had some hand wringing about this "dirty trick". Her panel on Inside Politics all agreed that they would probably get caught, so they should have known better. But neither Bash nor her panel of experts bothered to mention that there never was any upside to getting extra Dan Sullivans to run because there is no such thing as a spoiler in a ranked choice voting. Bash actually left the impression that ranked choice voting makes it easier to benefit from this "dirty trick" because there are so many candidates. Fox news makes the same claim, but they have an obvious political motive.

Why can't CNN get this right?