Another swing and a miss.
The Washington Post published a shocking headline this weekend that read, “GOP candidate for Fla. governor spoke at racially charged events.”
Post employees teased the sensational-sounding story on social media.
“Ron DeSantis, GOP nominee for Florida governor, spoke four times at conferences organized by a conservative activist who has said that African Americans owe their freedom to white people,” tweeted White House Bureau Chief Philip Rucker.
What a scoop! What scandal! Whose conference was it, David Duke? Richard Spencer? Not quite. It’s nothing as ugly or crazy as all that. Or interesting. Try David Horowitz instead. If you think that’s disappointing, just wait until you find out the Post’s 2,758-word article doesn’t quote DeSantis as saying anything “racially charged” during any of his four appearances at the Restoration Weekend conference.
The article’s authors dedicate their energy to highlighting controversial and/or terrible things said by other conference attendees, including right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos. The authors also spend a great deal of time exploring the public remarks of the conference’s founder, David Horowitz. But as to DeSantis’ participation in “racially charged” rhetoric? There’s no there there.
This is how the Post’s story opens:
If you think this is the set up to a big reveal, something truly awful where DeSantis is caught alleging that whites are genetically superior or some such thing, you’re in for a big letdown.
It’s not until the ninth paragraph that the Post gets around to reporting the following about the GOP gubernatorial candidate’s appearances at the David Horowitz Freedom Center conferences:
Though the article’s headline and opening paragraph clearly imply DeSantis himself may have said something “racially charged” during one of his many conference appearances, the report simply fails to deliver on that promise.
The article is nearly 3,000 words long, and all the reader gets is a collection of things said by other people, all of which leads to the story’s none-too-subtle suggestion that DeSantis himself is complicit in such rhetoric.
If we’re going to go down the route of holding public figures responsible for the things said by the organizers and attendees of mainstream political forums, I fully expect to see a cluster of these articles following the next Netroots Nation conference, which was founded by Markos Moulitsas, author of “American Taliban: How War, Sex, Sin, and Power Bind Jihadists and the Radical Right.”
There, now, we’ve just ruled Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris out of the presidency …
