Legacy Media PushIng Anti-DeSantis Narratives

Initially, much of the national press coverage of Gov. Ron DeSantis's (R-FL) presidential primary campaign rollout last week began with a fixation on proving whether or not he was likable to Republican primary voters.

According to Saleno Zito, National Politics Reporter for The Washington Examiner, the reason for that fixation is likely because many of them had spent the past six months writing stories about how the former Navy officer and congressman did not possess that attribute.

When that was disproved after several planned and unplanned retail stops, the fixation turned to his disdain for the press by not taking questions from them. Even after doing over a dozen interviews with local press and taking questions during a press conference, the narrative became: He doesn’t take questions from voters.

In fact, the narrative hit a fever pitch on Thursday when a reporter from the Associated Press asked DeSantis, “How come you’re not taking questions from voters,” at the very moment he was standing in a sea of voters who were clearly asking him questions and talking to him.

It was clear DeSantis was dumbfounded by the question, answering, “People are coming up to me, talking to me. What are you talking about?"

DeSantis looked around at all the people he was just talking to and asked the reporter, “Are you blind? OK, so people are coming up to me, talking to me whatever they want to talk to me about.”

Then things got silly real fast, at least on social media, as fellow New York- and Washington, D.C.-based reporters swooped in to comment on Twitter about how DeSantis “snapped” and “lashed out” at the reporter. Within hours stories were written in the legacy press detailing the “confrontation.”

Zito writes when legacy media reports that DeSantis, or any other Republican candidate, isn’t engaging or taking questions from voters when he is clearly standing in a field of voters and taking questions from them, people are not going to trust that you are getting the story right. Or worse, they are going to assume you are trying to create a storyline rather than follow a story.

There is a reason that the most recent Gallup polling shows a meager 34% of Americans trust the media to report the news "fully, accurately and fairly."