Ron DeSantis gets all kinds of negative media coverage, and it’s working to his advantage now.
Does that remind you of someone else who’s in Florida right now?
The Republican governor is the clear beneficiary of the broken ’60 minutes’ story about him and Covid vaccines. An important Democratic mayor supports him. The setback increases its position among GOP voters. And he increasingly looks to be the leading candidate for the 2024 nomination.
DeSantis is a big ally of Donald Trump, who spent his tenure in war with what he calls fake news.
Ron DeSantis, Governor of Florida, announces during a news conference on Sunday, April 4, 2021, at the Manatee County Emergency Management Office in Palmetto, Florida (Associated Press)
And he shares the Trump ability to hit back hard on the fourth estate. When Sharyn Alfonsi, CBS, confronted him at a news conference (because he would not give an interview), he read to her about the fact that she did not care about the facts and said that his version was irrefutable.
It was all on camera because the governor said Publix was the only outlet people in Palm Beach County wanted to vaccinate, that he had consulted local officials and that it had nothing to do with the supermarket chain that had previously given $ 100,000 to its PAC did not donate. And this is where ’60 Minutes’ made a big mistake, without using most of its sound grip or even summarizing most of its content defense.
Instead, the program tried to portray DeSantis as one of the bad guys he’d like to chase down a room with a hallway.
The most devastating rejection of the story came when Palm Beach County Democratic Mayor Dave Kerner deliberately called the story false. Kerner told Fox yesterday that he had searched for the show, talked for 45 minutes, and yet none of his comments or views were included.
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CBS magazine issued a second statement yesterday, saying “our story on Sunday night speaks for itself.”
According to the program, dozens of sources were interviewed and that DeSantis as well as the director of state emergency management refused to speak on camera, saying “the idea that we ignored their perspective is untrue.” “60 Minutes” said it also spoke on Kerner’s record, but he says the same, so it’s unclear why it is described as “contrary to his statement.”
There is no doubt that the mainstream media has tried it for Ron DeSantis, who took office in 2018, to portray him as the pandemic response, while Florida is now doing pretty well. This is not to say that everything he did was perfect, but that he was consistently portrayed as numb and reckless as far as the virus was concerned. Yet this journalistic hostility only increased his Republican support.
As National Review puts it, the hostile press DeSantis has “turned into a national political force with all the conservative beliefs of Trump and none of the warts that offend many American sensitivities.” In other words, the magazine says, he has ‘all the real enemies’.
It’s hard to avoid the contrast between the coverage of DeSantis and that of Andrew Cuomo, who was delivered early by the press and won an Emmy for his Covid briefings. Now the Democratic governor of New York is making calls for resignation in light of his mistreatment of deaths in nursing homes (as well as a series of allegations of sexual harassment), while the governor of Florida has strengthened his position.
There is a striking difference between the way conservatives rally around DeSantis and their silence on another Florida Republican, Matt Gaetz. The member of the House is under investigation for the charge of sexual trafficking in minors and the payment of women for sex, which he strongly denies.
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Politico reports that “no Trump assistant or family member tweeted about the Florida congressman. Also, almost any of the most prominent Trump surrogates or Trump-related conservatives and media personalities” hastened Gaetz’s defense.
This may be in part because Gaetz will no doubt lose his seat if charged, and few people want to be left on the deck of a sinking ship. And there is what has always been seen as his wild personal life, including bragging to colleagues about women. Politico puts it this way: “Gaetz has always been considered a grenade whose pen has already been drawn.”
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At a news conference, DeSantis attacked the people on ’60 Minutes’ as’ lubricators’. That’s why no one trusts corporate media. ‘
Whether it’s fair or not, he’s very offensive against the CBS grenade that fell back. In the emerging reality of the post-Trump world, the story probably helped him.