National Review
Online
Monday, April
05, 2021
There is no more accurate way of
describing last night’s 60 Minutes segment on Governor Ron
DeSantis of Florida than as a political hit job. It was an aspersion, a
slander, a smear — a calculated and premeditated calumny contrived for one
purpose and one purpose alone: To hint darkly at scandal where none exists,
and, thereby, to damage DeSantis in 2022 and beyond. Americans who tuned in
to 60 Minutes yesterday are now less informed than they were
before it aired.
The supposed “problem” that 60
Minutes highlighted was that Florida’s government has used the popular
grocery chain Publix to help it distribute COVID-19 vaccines, that Publix gave
$100,000 to Governor DeSantis’s re-election efforts last year, and that the
combination of the two represents a quid pro quo.
This claim is absurd on its face. Not only
is Publix the largest and most widely trusted grocery-store chain in the state
of Florida, but the majority of its 831 stores in the state have well-equipped
pharmacies at which Floridians are accustomed to getting flu shots.
Irrespective of any other logistical considerations, it would have been
surprising if Publix had not been one of the major players in
the state’s effort. It is true that Publix has recently given $100,000 to Ron
DeSantis’s gubernatorial reelection bid. It is also true that it gave a million
dollars to the progressive Urban League last year, and that, back in 2018, it
gave $100,000 to Democratic campaigns in the state. To believe that there is a
connection between this routine behavior and decisions that were made during an
unforeseen once-in-a-century pandemic is to stretch oneself to the breaking
point.
The producers of 60 Minutes know
this, which is why they edited out the portion of Governor DeSantis’s answer
that explains beyond question why Publix was chosen for its role. In the
offending segment, CBS’s Sharyn Alfonsi is seen asking DeSantis,
“Publix, as you know, donated $100,000 to your campaign, and then you rewarded
them with the exclusive rights to distribute the vaccination in Palm Beach. How
is that not pay for play?” But only DeSantis’s initial response is shown in
full. Deliberately missing from the governor’s comments was his detailed answer laying out how the distribution system has worked in Florida in
general, and how Publix has slotted into it in particular. In the unaired
portion, DeSantis says:
First of
all, the first pharmacies that had [the vaccine] were CVS and Walgreens and
they had a long-term care mission, so they were going to the long-term care
facilities. They got the vaccine in the middle of December, they started going
to the long-term care facilities the third week in December to do LTCs. So that
was their mission, that was very important and we trusted them to do that. As
we got into January, we wanted to expand the distribution points.
So yes,
you had the counties, you had some drive-thru sites, you had hospitals that
were doing a lot, but we wanted to get it into communities more. So we reached
out to other retail pharmacies: Publix, Walmart, obviously CVS and Walgreens
had to finish that mission and we said we’re going to use you as soon as you’re
done with that.
None of this was apparent to viewers
of 60 Minutes. The show did not note that CVS and Walgreens got the
vaccine first; it did not explain the difference between the strategy for
long-term-care facilities and the strategy for the broader population; it did
not mention that Walmart was also used in the delivery of vaccines to the
general public; it did not reference the work DeSantis has done extending the
state’s effort to minority
communities; and, crucially, it did not make clear
that the reason Publix was so prominent in the second phase of vaccinations was
that it was the first grocery chain to be ready. Instead, the show took two
facts that in no way intersect and pretended that they had a causal
relationship. There is a word for that sort of conduct, but it’s not
“journalism.”
So egregiously dishonest
was 60 Minutes’ attempt that, shortly after it aired, the director
of the Florida Division of Emergency Management took to Twitter to condemn it.
“I said this before and I’ll say it again,” Jared Moskowitz wrote. “Publix was
recommended by FLSERT [State Emergency Response Team] and HealthyFla [Florida
Department of Health] as the other pharmacies were not ready to start. Period!
Full Stop! No one from the Governors office suggested Publix. It’s just
absolute malarkey.” Moskowitz, note, is no ideological ally of Governor
DeSantis. On the contrary: He describes
himself as a “progressive,” served as a
Democrat in the Florida legislature until 2019, and has worked in various
capacities for Al Gore, Joe Lieberman, and Barack Obama. His father, Michael,
is one of the top Democratic fundraisers in the state.
Unlike the producers of 60 Minutes,
however, Jared Moskowitz is not a liar.
Alas, he is fighting against the
tide. 60 Minutes’ lies will now be laundered and repeated until, in
millions of minds around the country, they are habitually referenced as
“facts.” In that status they will be joined by the oft-repeated lie that
Florida has been “cooking its books,” which it has not. From the moment the
pandemic began, the mainstream press has proven itself incapable of writing
about Florida as anything less than a mysterious, godforsaken backwater that,
somehow, has managed to stumble through this crisis despite itself. That
Florida ranks in the middle of the pack for deaths, despite having the
fourth-oldest population in the country and being the destination of choice for
young people, seems not to matter. Nor do many commentators seem much to care
that Florida has done this while managing to stay largely open; that there have
been real, verifiable, and under-covered scandals elsewhere; that the most
populous state in the union is holding a recall election for its governor over
his COVID response; or that, at the moment the 60 Minutes segment
ran, it was not Florida that was in crisis, but Michigan.
In part, this monomaniacal failure of
imagination has been the product of the false reputation that Florida enjoys
among a certain sort of sneering Acela-corridor journalist. Bubbling below the
surface of all of last year’s coverage has been an unlovely implication: “That guy,
in that state? Something tricky must be going on.” Last
night, 60 Minutes made that explicit.
As it turned out, though, it wasn’t
DeSantis who was playing games with the truth. It was CBS.
No comments:
Post a Comment