As is often the case with effective Republican leaders, Ron DeSantis has taken a barrage of incoming mainstream media fire during his time as Florida’s governor. As Legal Insurrection has extensively documented, the attacks only intensified after former President Donald Trump left office in January 2021.
The reason for this, of course, is that the Democrat apologists in the press see DeSantis as a threat to the far left’s vision for the future and to Joe Biden’s presidency, with the understanding in mind that if DeSantis were to run for president and win, war would immediately be declared on the woke agendas of Congressional Democrats, much like DeSantis has done with an impressive degree of success in the Sunshine State.
But though we’re a few weeks out from April Fools’ Day, one would think we were already there judging by a recent column from Guardian media columnist Margaret Sullivan, whose resume includes six years working as a media columnist at the Washington Post and before that holding the public editor position at the New York Times for four years.
In her latest piece, Sullivan declares that the “media mostly fawns” over DeSantis and that it must stop before it gets out of hand and helps him get elected to the White House. Or something:
In the column, she argues that the media’s supposed love affair with DeSantis goes well beyond Fox News. Her lone example was, I kid you not, a CNBC headline that quoted DeSantis directly:
That’s why it’s appalling to see the media lavish him with so much fawning coverage. Fox News has put its calamitous love affair with Donald Trump on ice while it swoons over his younger rival.DeSantis enjoys glowing treatment from the mainstream press, too. All too predictably, many of the headlines from his recent State of the State speech not only centered on presidential politics but also magnified his boasts. Here’s a skepticism-free example from CNBC:“‘You ain’t seen nothing yet’: Florida Governor Ron DeSantis touts state record and fuels 2024 speculation.”
“The media should be delving into the substance of that record,” Sullivan went on to write, apparently trapped in a cave somewhere and not aware that is exactly what the press has been doing with DeSantis since the outbreak of the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic, albeit with their typical left-wing slants where they make the worst accusations first before sifting through the actual facts (if they even do that).
We saw it with their wildly distorted contrasts between the respective pandemic managment styles of DeSantis and then-New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo in 2020, and their bizarre 2021 “60 Minutes“/NBC News hit pieces criticizing DeSantis for alleged “pay to play” for sensibly prioritizing senior citizens for vaccines.
More recently, MSNBC falsely claimed DeSantis didn’t want black history taught in Florida’s public schools.
There’s been a whole lot of partisan press “coverage” against DeSantis in between all that (including the ever-growing “worse than Trump” talking point) as well, but you wouldn’t know it by reading not just Sullivan’s piece but also the praise she received for it from so-called “journalism professors” including Columbia Journalism School’s Bill Grueskin and New York University’s Jay Rosen:
Other media figures who suffer from DeSantis Derangement Syndrome also weighed in with praise, including Randi Rhodes’ show producer Shawn Peirce and NBC News senior “reporter” Ben Collins, whose bias against Twitter CEO Elon Musk was so obvious that the network temporarily suspended him from providing on-air commentary about Musk for several weeks in December:
Fortunately, sanity prevailed—at least on Twitter, anyway—as evidenced by the pushback on Sullivan’s gaslighting, including by some who were even DeSantis fans:
Ironically, it is pieces like Sullivan’s, where the writer is so far removed from reality on the topic, that help drive more people DeSantis’ way, just like the volumes of media hit pieces against Trump helped grow his fanbase in 2016. So if the Margaret Sullivans of the world really want to throw a cloud over DeSantis’ political star status, they’ve sure got lousy ways of showing it.
— Stacey Matthews has also written under the pseudonym “Sister Toldjah” and can be reached via Twitter. —
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