The Coverage of Ron DeSantis Is Historically Awful

By Becket Adams

Sunday, September 03, 2023

 

Even by today’s low standards, the corporate press’s coverage of Ron DeSantis is breathtakingly bad.

 

Indeed, after the media’s exceptionally poor showing during the Trump years, it seemed unlikely that the quality of national news coverage, or lack thereof, could get any worse. But our vaunted Fourth Estate is yet capable of surprising us.

 

Take, for example, what the Associated Press did last week: It suggested Florida’s Republican governor bears responsibility for a racially motivated shooting in Jacksonville, in which a white shooter killed three black people.

 

“Ron DeSantis scoffed when the NAACP issued a travel advisory this spring warning Black people to use ‘extreme care’ if traveling to Florida,” AP reporter Steven Peoples announced on social media as he promoted a report he co-authored with AP colleague Brendan Farrington.

 

Peoples added, “Just three months later, DeSantis is leading his state through the aftermath of a racist attack that left three African Americans dead. Black leaders in Florida — and across the nation — say they’re outraged by his actions and rhetoric ahead of the shooting.”

 

DeSantis was correct to scoff. The “travel advisory” is abject nonsense.

 

But here’s the thing: The NAACP is free to be as asinine as it pleases. Partisan groups have a tendency toward the intensely stupid. But what excuse is there for the AP, once the gold standard in straight news reporting, to function as a public-relations firm for Democratic interests?

 

And what, exactly, did DeSantis say or do that supposedly encouraged the Jacksonville shooting? What damning evidence does the AP uncover?

 

For starters, the AP cites the time the governor denied that America still suffers from “systemic racism.” The newswire also quotes NAACP president Derrick Johnson, who outright accuses DeSantis of inspiring the Jacksonville killings.

 

 “What Gov. DeSantis has done is created an atmosphere for such tragedies to take place,” said Johnson. “This is exactly why we issued the travel advisory.”

 

The AP article itself continues, “The leading civil rights group argued that the state’s loose gun laws and the Republican governor’s ‘anti-woke’ campaign to deny the existence of systemic racism created a culture of ‘open hostility towards African Americans and people of color.’”

 

Hard proof that DeSantis directly inspired or encouraged racist violence, however, never materializes in the AP report. It is simply the word of the NAACP, amplified by and treated as a perfectly reasonable and valid position by a newswire, and the fact that the governor opposes hyper-racialist curricula and the teaching of tendentious works such as the historically illiterate 1619 Project.

 

Do the NAACP and the AP not understand that it is despicable to exploit a horrendous crime to smear a governor whose politics they dislike? Are they so blinded by their contempt for DeSantis that they can’t see that this is a vile slander?

 

Worse still, the AP’s slipshod anti-DeSantis hitjob is not even a one-off for the press. It’s part of a larger, long-running effort by politicos and their pliant media partners to destroy DeSantis both politically and personally, an effort that mirrors the one launched against the Trump administration but with what feels like even more invective and dishonesty.

 

Just a few weeks ago, for example, major newsrooms falsely accused the governor of signing off on a state African-American-history curriculum that presents an upside to slavery. The curriculum does no such thing, but you’d hardly know it from a casual read of the headlines.

 

“New slavery curriculum in Florida is latest in century of ‘undermining history,’” reads a USA Today headline.

 

A July 26 Washington Post opinion column bore the headline, “Black History Is a Casualty in Ron DeSantis’s Christian Nationalist Quest.”

 

Then, there’s the AP’s Peoples and Farrington again, who co-wrote an article titled, “DeSantis is defending new slavery teachings. Civil rights leaders see a pattern of ‘policy violence.’”

 

Here’s the truth of the matter: Earlier this year, the Florida Department of Education adopted new social-studies standards. The updated standards include a section for black history. The black history section, which fills 19 pages and includes more than 185 references to slavery, segregation, and racism, covers everything from “the struggles and successes for access to equal educational opportunities for African Americans,” to “how slave codes were strengthened in response to Africans’ resistance to slavery,” to “how slave codes resulted in an enslaved person becoming property with no rights.”

 

One sentence in the updated standards reads, “Instruction includes how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.” It turns out that that sentence, which prompted vehement condemnations of DeSantis, is nearly identical to the language included in the College Board’s most up-to-date Advanced Placement African American Studies course framework, which says that slaves learned “specialized trades” and after being freed could use “these skills to provide for themselves and others.” When Florida rejected the Advanced Placement framework earlier this year, it prompted a round of outrage against DeSantis from people who hailed it as essential for the education of young people. No objection was made at the time to its reference to slaves’ learning “specialized trades” and “skills.” The people howling now about the language conveying a simple historical fact in the state’s new African-American history standards are the same ones who howled when the state rejected a framework that included near-identical language conveying the same fact. DeSantis is damned either way. No matter what he does, the press will fault him.

 

There’s more.

 

Earlier this month, newsrooms insinuated that DeSantis suspended state attorney Monique Worrell, an elected official, merely because she’s a Democrat. What most of the news coverage failed to mention, however, were specific cases in which Worrell’s office inexplicably freed violent repeat offenders, who then went on to commit even more egregious acts of violence. To ignore these examples of her bad decision-making was clearly a choice, given that the governor’s office cited them specifically in its justification for the suspension.

 

In an example of sloppy DeSantis reporting from 2021, CBS News disgraced itself with a particularly dishonest bit of “reporting” that accused the governor of coordinating a sweetheart vaccine-distribution deal with a local grocery chain in exchange for political contributions. The story was a load of nonsense, which the producers of 60 Minutes would have known had they done even the bare minimum required of basic reporting. Even Florida Democrats objected to the 60 Minutes report.

 

Then, of course, there’s the issue of Florida’s Parental Rights in Education law, which its critics dubbed “Don’t Say Gay,” a name the press happily adopted.

 

“DeSantis to expand ‘Don’t Say Gay’ law to all grades,” reads the headline of a March 22 AP article.

 

The report doesn’t get around to mentioning the actual title of the bill, which prohibits the state’s public schools from teaching students in kindergarten through third grade about sexual orientation or gender identity, until the seventh paragraph. And contrary to what you may believe based on the press’s coverage of the law, the word “gay” is not featured anywhere in the Florida bill. “Don’t Say Gay” is simply a product of left-wing branding, amplified and legitimized by an all-too-compliant press.

 

Then, of course, there’s the fact that major newsrooms are eager to elevate every crank, loon, and liar willing to go on the record to accuse DeSantis of the worst sorts of transgressions. See: Rebekah Jones (disgraced fabulist) and the idiot Grim Reaper guy who stalked Florida beaches during the pandemic (recommended by an appeals court to the Florida Bar for disciplinary action).

 

Having weathered the hysterical excesses of Trump-era news reporting, we ought not to be shocked by the corporate press’s increasingly lax standards, shameless parroting of Democratic talking points, and sheer lack of effort. But the persistently misleading and downright dishonest coverage of DeSantis is a new, disturbing low, even for them.