DeSantis: Fox News’ ‘golden child’
The journalists who gathered last week to cover Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ signing of a controversial voting law met with a rude surprise, said Philip Bump in The Washington Post. Fox News “was the only network allowed to cover the signing.” The exclusive coverage of DeSantis’ bill signing, complete with breathless live coverage by the sycophantic hosts of Fox & Friends, made for a “bizarre” scene, but a “fitting one.” For months, Fox has fueled the Big Lie that the November election was riddled with voter fraud—the same lie the disingenuous Florida bill supposedly addresses, by adding stricter ID requirements, limiting drop boxes, and making it harder to vote by mail. For 2024 presidential hopeful DeSantis, “it made perfect sense to restrict his bill signing to just the media outlet that had indirectly championed it,” turning an official act of governance into a “nationally televised campaign event.”
Fox claims it never asked for “exclusive” coverage, said Steve Contorno in the Tampa Bay Times, while DeSantis defended boxing out other media by pointing out that the event was “broadcast to millions of people.” Besides, the liberal media has made clear it despises DeSantis, said Kyle Smith in NationalReview.com. They’ve showered the governor with “hysteria and hostility.” As a successful conservative and a rising star in the party, “he must be treated as Public Enemy No. 1,” subject to “nonstop bashing” until “the threat has been successfully neutralized.”
The unholy alliance between Fox and DeSantis goes well beyond a bill signing, said the Orlando Sentinel in an editorial. He’s become the network’s “golden child,” a constant guest whose “middling record at managing the pandemic”— Florida’s per capita death rate is higher than much denser California’s—is repeatedly cast as “the most brilliant campaign against an enemy since Patton’s Third Army swept across France.” As he serves up the “right wing–policy catnip” that Fox feasts on, said the South Florida SunSentinel in an editorial, DeSantis “acts increasingly like his role model”—the authoritarian Donald Trump, who trolled liberals, cherrypicked questioners, and treated the press as enemies of the state. DeSantis’ stage-managed, closed-door bill signing in his safe space on Fox offered a “revealing glimpse” of his “iron-fisted rule” in Florida, “where the doors are shut tight to anyone who might question his wisdom or challenge his authority.”