National Review
60 Minute DeSantis Successful Work
There is no more accurate way to describe the 60-minute segment from the previous night about Florida’s governor Ron DeSantis than a successful political job. It was a defamation, a slander, a defamation – a calculated and premeditated slander designed for one purpose and one purpose: to darkly suggest a scandal where none exist and thus harm DeSantis in 2022 and beyond. Americans who tuned in to 60 Minutes yesterday are less informed than before they aired. The alleged “problem” that 60 Minutes highlighted was that the Florida government used the popular supermarket chain Publix to help it distribute COVID-19 vaccines, which Publix gave $ 100,000 to Governor DeSantis’ reelection efforts last year. and that the combination of the two represents a quid pro quo. This statement is absurd at first. Publix is not only the largest and most reliable supermarket chain in the state of Florida, but most of its 831 stores in the state have well-equipped pharmacies in which Floridans are accustomed to getting flu shots. Regardless of any other logistical considerations, it would have been surprising if Publix had not been a major player in the state’s effort. It is true that Publix recently gave $ 100,000 for Ron DeSantis’ governmental re-election proposal. It is also true that he gave the progressive Urban League a million dollars last year and that, in 2018, he gave $ 100,000 to Democratic campaigns in the state. To believe that there is a connection between this routine behavior and the decisions that were made during an unforeseen pandemic that occurs once in a century is to stretch to the breaking point. The 60 Minute producers know this, which is why they edited the part of Governor DeSantis’s answer that undoubtedly explains why Publix was chosen for his role. In the offensive segment, Sharyn Alfonsi of CBS is seen asking DeSantis, “Publix, as you know, donated $ 100,000 to his campaign, and then you rewarded them with the exclusive rights to distribute the vaccination in Palm Beach. How is it not paid to play? ”But only DeSantis’s initial response is shown in full. Deliberately absent from the governor’s comments was his detailed response, outlining how the distribution system worked in Florida in general, and how Publix fit in with it in particular. In the non-aerial portion, DeSantis says: First, the first pharmacies that had [the vaccine] they were CVS and Walgreens and they had a long-term care mission, so they were going to the long-term care facility. They got the vaccine in mid-December, started going to long-term care facilities in the third week of December to do LTCs. So that was their mission, that was very important and we trust them to do that. As soon as we entered January, we wanted to expand the distribution points. So, yes, you had the counties, some drive-thru locations, hospitals that were doing a lot, but we wanted to take this to the communities more. So, we contacted other retail pharmacies: Publix, Walmart, obviously CVS and Walgreens had to finish this mission and we said that we will use you as soon as we finish this. None of this was apparent to 60 Minutes viewers. The program did not notice that CVS and Walgreens received the vaccine first; it did not explain the difference between the strategy for long-term institutions and the strategy for the general population; he did not mention that Walmart was also used to deliver vaccines to the general public; he made no reference to the work that DeSantis did by extending state efforts to minority communities; and, crucially, he did not make it clear that the reason Publix was so prominent in the second phase of vaccinations was that it was the first supermarket chain to be ready. Instead, the program took two facts that in no way intersect and pretended that they had a causal relationship. There is a word for this type of conduct, but it is not “journalism”. The 60 Minutes attempt was so blatantly dishonest that, shortly after it aired, the director of the Florida Emergency Management Division accessed Twitter to convict her. “I said that before and I will say it again,” wrote Jared Moskowitz. “Publix was recommended by FLSERT [State Emergency Response Team] and HealthyFla [Florida Department of Health] since the other pharmacies were not ready to start. Time course! Full stop! No one from the governor’s office suggested Publix. It is pure nonsense. Moskowitz, please note, is not an 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 worked in various capacities for Al Gore, Joe Lieberman and Barack Obama. Her father, Michael, is one of the largest Democratic fund-raisers in the state. Unlike the producers of 60 Minutes, however, Jared Moskowitz is not a liar. Unfortunately, he is fighting the tide. 60 Minutes’ lies will now be washed away and repeated until, in millions of minds across the country, they are habitually referred to as “facts”. In that status, they will be accompanied by the often repeated lie that Florida has been “messing with its accounts”, which it has not. From the moment the pandemic began, the mainstream media was unable to write about Florida as anything less than a mysterious and God-forgotten backwater that somehow managed to overcome the crisis in spite of itself. That Florida is in the middle of the death list, despite having the fourth oldest population in the country and being the destination of choice for young people, does not seem to matter. Not many commentators seem to care much that Florida did this while it managed to remain broadly open; that there have been real, verifiable and poorly covered scandals elsewhere; that the most populous state in the union is holding a revocation election for its governor because of its response to COVID; or that, at the time the 60-minute segment aired, it was not Florida that was in crisis, but Michigan. In part, this lack of monomaniacal imagination was the product of Florida’s false reputation among a certain type of mocking journalist in the Acela corridor. Bubbling below the surface of all last year’s coverage has been an unpleasant implication: “That guy, in that state? Something complicated must be happening. “Last night, 60 Minutes made that explicit. In the end, however, it was not DeSantis who was playing with the truth. It was CBS.