A local reporter in Florida was caught on a hot mic saying her job is to make Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis "uncomfortable."The reporter is correct. In a country with a free press, journalists are supposed to ask questions the powerful would rather not answer.
During a livestream of an event attended by DeSantis in Jacksonville, First Coast News reporter Atyia Collins was heard chatting with someone about her role at the press conference.
"No my job is to ask the tough questions and make him uncomfortable I guess," Collins said.
Later on in the exchange, Collins spoke about how her web manager urged her to "just run up to him" as he gets off the stage and "just yell questions at him," something she did not believe would work.For a little more than a year, Pushaw was DeSantis's gubernatorial press secretary, but what that really meant was that she was a Twitter troll paid by Florida taxpayers to agitate on DeSantis's behalf. She later became the director of rapid response for DeSantis's reelection campaign -- that's the most recent job on her LinkedIn page. She hasn't found another job or been rehired by the governor's office, which means that a presidential campaign is imminent and she'll be the spokesperson for that as well. She's clearly still flacking for DeSantis. Here's what she tweeted about this reporter:
"He already doesn't like the media," Collins is heard saying.
DeSantis rapid response director Christina Pushaw called out the "journactivist" on Twitter.
For reference, this is the journactivist today: pic.twitter.com/A6J0cRIil6
— Christina Pushaw 🐊 🇺🇸 (@ChristinaPushaw) February 14, 2023
Pushaw has been trying to make the word "journactivist" happen, presumably because "fake news" is identified with Trump and "Lügenpresse" is associated with ... well, you know. It's an ugly, cumbersome word, but Pushaw has more than a quarter million Twitter followers, so it's catching on a bit.
When you define anyone who asks you tough questions as not really a journalist, all while freezing out journalists who might be adversarial and working hand in glove with (and helping to create) an ecosystem of friendly media partisans, you're a lot more dangerous than Trump, who said "fake news" a lot but also spent a lot of time talking to Maggie Haberman, Bob Woodward, and other alleged enemies.
DeSantis also made clear last week that he'd like to make it much easier for politicians to sue journalists for libel, a goal Trump also talked about but DeSantis actually seems to know how to accomplish:
... Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida convened a round-table discussion about the news media....Portions of this took place before a backdrop that was a tad Orwellian....
Over the course of an hour, Mr. DeSantis and his guests laid out a detailed case for revisiting a landmark Supreme Court decision protecting the press from defamation lawsuits.
Mr. DeSantis is the latest figure, and among the most influential, to join a growing list of Republicans calling on the court to revisit the 1964 ruling, known as The New York Times Company v. Sullivan.
The decision set a higher bar for defamation lawsuits involving public figures, and for years it was viewed as sacrosanct. That standard has empowered journalists to investigate and criticize public figures without fear that an unintentional error will result in crippling financial penalties.
But emboldened by the Supreme Court’s recent willingness to overturn longstanding precedent, conservative lawyers, judges, legal scholars and politicians have been leading a charge to review the decision and either narrow it or overturn it entirely....
“How did it get to be this doctrine that has had really profound effects on society?” he said at the event, which featured two libel lawyers known for suing news organizations and a conservative scholar who recently published an essay titled “Overturn New York Times v. Sullivan.”
The Alito court is probably coming for Sullivan no matter who wins the presidential election, so maybe DeSantis isn't the person we need to worry about. But he's setting a new standard for illiberalism. He wants to destroy what he calls "the legacy media." We'll get scarily close to that goal if he's president.
No comments:
Post a Comment