March 3, 2023
THE SNOWFLAKE EVEN MELTS BEFORE HAND-PICKED PRESS:
Ron DeSantis loses his cool with a reporter after failing to answer a question on how his Ukraine policy would differ from Biden' (Tom Porter, March 3, 2023, Business Insider)
Timy Trump stamping his size 8 cowboy boots.Ron DeSantis lost his cool with a reporter when challenged over how his policy on the war in Ukraine would differ from President Joe Biden's, amid speculation the Florida governor is poised to launch a 2024 presidential bid.DeSantis was profiled Thursday by The Times of London, which was granted a relatively rare level of access to the Republican rising star. The Times is owned by Rupert Murdoch, whose Fox News network frequently interviews DeSantis.David Charter, a US Editor at The Times, wrote that DeSantis showed a "flash of temper" when asked about Ukraine."I ask about Ukraine and he says that 'there's a critique of Biden, and I think I'm sympathetic to it in the sense that, is our policy just do whatever Zelensky wants? Or do we have a concrete idea of what we're trying to achieve exactly?'" Charter wrote."When I ask him how it should be handled differently, he refers to Biden being 'weak on the world stage' and failing at deterrence, but as that is not answering how it should be handled now, I ask again. DeSantis does not have anything to add: 'Perhaps you should cover some other ground? I think I've said enough.'"
MORE:
Florida's Blueprint for America's Media (KYLE POPE, 3/03/23, CJR)
Some of DeSantis's anti-media ploys are old favorites, like stonewalling public-records requests and bullying reporters who write articles that he doesn't like. Trump did these things, too, but in a sense, DeSantis is playing the bad cop to Trump's Pick me! approach, in which he seemed to grant reporters nearly unlimited access even as he publicly pilloried their employers. DeSantis, by contrast, largely shut out the mainstream media during his reelection campaign in Florida last year.DeSantis is dangerous in more insidious ways, too. Last month, according to a report in Politico, he urged Florida's Republican-controlled state legislature to consider a slate of breathtaking anti-press measures. The proposals go beyond the usual efforts to gut libel laws, including lowering the threshold for when a "public figure" can sue a media outlet. In a serious threat to investigative reporting, Florida's legislature is now looking at a provision to specify that comments made by anonymous sources in news stories would be presumed false for the purposes of defamation lawsuits.The Miami Herald and the Tampa Bay Times, covering the legislation, wrote that it's reasonable to assume that any anti-press legislation will leech out of Florida:Given the governor's clout in Tallahassee, it stands a solid chance of passage this spring in the Republican-controlled state Legislature and would likely spur more defamation cases in Florida, legal experts say. Because of the clear-cut constitutional questions, the legislation could eventually be appealed all the way to the United States Supreme Court, where at least two justices have already signaled they are interested in revisiting libel law and press protections.Ironically, this is in some ways a delicate dance for DeSantis, who has squared an antipathy for the mainstream media with a public embrace of Fox News. Fox, as I wrote last week, is now fighting a defamation suit, in which its primary defense is rooted in the very legal framework that DeSantis is hoping to weaken. DeSantis seems happy to present himself as a practitioner of journalism--or at least memoir--as he promotes his book, which was published by a unit of Rupert Murdoch's empire. (In a review in the New York Times, Jennifer Szalai noted this conflict and was otherwise scathing of the book, writing that, although DeSantis's first book "was weird and esoteric enough to have obviously been written by a human, this one reads like a politician's memoir churned out by ChatGPT.")
Posted by Orrin Judd at March 3, 2023 1:31 PM