Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s ascension to the national stage over the past year has invited intense scrutiny from the media that, in some cases, has backfired.
The latest example came over the weekend, when a Washington Post reporter fired off a tweet accusing DeSantis of withholding an invitation to the Federal Emergency Management Agency for nearly a day after a condominium complex collapsed in Surfside, Florida.
“There’s a saying in emergency management: The first 24 hours are the only 24 hours,” wrote the Washington Post’s Hannah Dreier on Saturday. “FEMA was ready to deploy to the condo collapse almost immediately, and included the crisis in its daily briefing, but didn’t get permission from Gov. DeSantis to get on the ground for a full day.”
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A spokeswoman for DeSantis quickly pushed back, noting that the protocol for declaring an emergency involves local leaders doing so first and then state leaders; she said DeSantis signed his emergency declaration less than an hour after the Miami-Dade County mayor signed hers.
Other disaster response experts argued that FEMA would have dispatched the same local resources that were already on the scene long before the administrative process of declaring an emergency got underway.
The back-and-forth last week was reflective of how attacks DeSantis has weathered since his push to open Florida schools and businesses ahead of other states turned a national spotlight on his leadership in 2020. An ally of former President Donald Trump, DeSantis has gained support among Republican voters and has even begun to rival Trump’s popularity. In a straw poll conducted at the Western Conservative Summit in Denver last week, for example, DeSantis narrowly edged out the former president.
While the governors of blue states, most notably New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, attracted a seemingly endless parade of accolades for maintaining restrictions as COVID-19 spread, DeSantis became the target of harsh, and occasionally unfair, coverage that has continued even after data has proven his approach effective.
In April, CBS’s 60 Minutes aired a report about Florida’s vaccine distribution efforts that alleged an unethical link between a donation to DeSantis’s political action committee and a vaccine rollout partnership with the state.
The venerated program suggested grocery chain Publix had scored a deal with the state to distribute vaccines in Palm Beach County because it had donated $100,000 to the Republican governor’s reelection bid. In the television piece, a lengthy answer DeSantis had given to a question about the partnership was edited to omit key context related to how the state’s emergency management division decided where and how to offer vaccines — deepening the suggestion that a pay-for-play arrangement was involved.
DeSantis and his supporters decried the story as deceptive, as did several others across the aisle. Palm Beach County’s Democratic mayor spoke out against the report, as did the state’s Democratic director of the emergency management division and Publix itself. CBS stood by the story.
Multiple outlets elevated the claims of a state data analyst who alleged last year that DeSantis’s health department had pressured her to falsify coronavirus numbers in an effort to paint a more flattering picture of the state’s response.
Rebekah Jones briefly became a cable news fixture after she was terminated from the state government, with DeSantis critics using her allegations to suggest the Republican governor was concealing a more severe outbreak in Florida than was reported.
“DeSantis administration fires COVID-19 data guru for ‘insubordination,’” the Miami Herald declared in a May 2020 story that repeated Jones’s claims about transparency with little skepticism and accused DeSantis of misleading the public by citing different sets of data in public.
“Rebekah Jones Tried to Warn Us About COVID-19. Now Her Freedom Is on the Line,” read the headline of a glossy Cosmopolitan magazine feature that described her accusations about DeSantis and his state government as “devastating.”
“COVID-19 Data Scientist and Whistleblower Rebekah Jones Is a Profile in Courage,” said the heading of another praise-laced feature, this one in Ms., a feminist magazine.
Jones presently faces a criminal charge for illegally accessing Florida Department of Health data; her claims have never been substantiated. A judge on Tuesday refused to dismiss the case at Jones’s request.
At the time, Jones was amassing fame for targeting DeSantis, and the governor was facing relentless criticism of his pandemic management.
The New Republic ran a headline in June of last year: “Florida Man Leads His State to the Morgue,” attacking the decision to ease restrictions on businesses.
“Even by Florida standards, Gov. Ron DeSantis is a covid-19 catastrophe,” opined a Washington Post headline atop a story that said the governor had “conveniently, even diabolically, airbrushed covid-19 out of public life.”
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Florida’s COVID explosion did not come to pass, however. While coronavirus cases in the state continued to climb in the later months of 2020 after the restrictions were eased, the rate of increase fell well below rates in many states that kept their economies shuttered.
By May, Florida’s economy was also bouncing back far more quickly; its unemployment rate was 4.7%, while New York’s was 8.5%.
