Topic: Media Research Center
We've shown how the Media Research Center's softball interview with Ron DeSantis in early November -- effectively an in-kind donation to his presidential campaign -- landed with such a thud that it basically ignored him for the rest of that month (even its very own DeSantis Defense Brigade). The Brigade didn't come alive again until after DeSantis' Nov. 30 Fox News debate with Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom. A Dec. 1 post by Curtis Houck served up the usual complaint that non-right-wing networks didn't sound like Fox News when talking about DeSantis:Friday’s CBS Mornings did its best to all but ignore Thursday night’s fiery debate on the Fox News Channel between Governors Ron DeSantis (R-FL) and Gavin Newsom (D-CA) by stashing it in the Eye Opener (which we at NewsBusters don’t formally account as most of it’s teases for segments), but the others stepped up to the plate with full stories on ABC’s Good Morning America and NBC’s Today.
They took different approaches, however, as ABC used three-time bestselling Trump author Jonathan Karl to trash Trump’s lead 2024 GOP primary opponent while NBC’s Meet the Press moderator Kristen Welker largely treated it like a substantive debate.
Karl began with the platitudes, boasting “it was billed as the red state versus blue state debate” and “preview[ing] perhaps of some of the issues, if not the candidates, we could see debated in next year's general election campaign.”
The professionalism ended there as Karl quickly dismissed the entire event and channeled both Newsom and DeSantis’s opponents, which made sense given how financially lucrative Trump has been for him in terms of book sales.
“At the start of the debate, California Governor Gavin Newsom, who isn’t running for president, taunted Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who is running, but trailing badly with a reminder that neither of them would likely be on the ballot next fall,”“neither of us will be the nominee for our party in 2024.”
Karl briefly touched on the fact that each candidate represented their party’s message on the economy, but went back to trashing DeSantis, who took on his employer’s parent company, Disney.
Despite his insinuations, Houck offered no proof that Karl is a Disney lackey, nor did provide evidence that anything in Karl's Trump-related books is false.
Tim Graham used his Dec. 1 podcast to nitpick a fact-check of the debate:
The Sean Hannity-moderated debate between Gavin Newsom and Ron DeSantis drew a predictable outcome from PolitiFact. They tried to ignore the raw numbers on Californians leaving Florida (and the reverse) and proclaim Newsom wasaccurate by using a "per capita" measurement for America's most populous state. That's playing with "alternative facts."
In all of PolitiFact's checking since they started in 2007, Newsom has 29 fact checks, and DeSantis has 54. But Newsom has 13 of 29 (almost half) that are True or Mostly True. DeSantis has 12 of his 54 (22 percent) True or Mostly True. Newsom has only 6 of his 29 as Mostly False/False/Pants on Fire, DeSantis has 32 of 45 (or almost 6o percent). This is what PolitiFact does, writ large. Republicans are 60 percent wrong, Democrats are 20 percent wrong. That’s why Newsom is excited to see the report!
Meanwhile, Jeffrey Lord ranted in his Dec. 2 column:
The event of this past week that drew a great deal of attention was Fox’s Sean Hannity hosting a debate between the Florida GOP Governor Ron DeSantis and California’s Democrat Governor Gavin Newsom.
One of the striking features of this face-off was the regularity with which the two governors accused each other of lying. Which raises an obvious couple of questions. Where is the media? And will the media do their job in 2024?
It surely can’t be that difficult for journalists to dig into the obvious question. That would be: Was DeSantis really lying about this or that? Or was Newsom? As President John Adams famously said in the long ago, facts are stubborn things. And that they are. But if journalists are going to ignore and not report on facts because they are uncomfortable or make Democrat X (can you say Joe Biden?) look bad then suffice to say the 2024 campaign will not be a good one, with each party held accountable for the facts of their record.
Alex Christy spent a Dec. 14 post complaining that Newsom went on late-night TV to talk about the deabte and DeSantis, complaining that he said that DeSantis is "out there talking about anti-woke, and I mean this, for me it's not anti-woke, what he really means is anti-black he's out there censoring historic facts, he's rewriting history. He was out there, you know, he eliminated AP African American Studies. He said slavery was somehow a workforce development program and he doubled down on that." Christy huffed in defense that "Florida’s standards say that slaves learned skills that were later useful in life, not that slavery was some sort of benign job training program." As we've noted, most examples served up by Florida education officials in defense of DeSantis' claim about this were either people who were never enslaved or who never actually used skills learned in slavery later in life.
The fact that the MRC didn't talk much about the contents of the debate itself is a likely indicator of how it knows how badly it went for DeSantis -- indeed, Newsom shredded DeSantis in discussing how their respective states responded to the COVID pandemic.
