I hammered the “news” media the past couple of days over their “news” coverage of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s pending announcement (they started bashing him preemptively — before the announcement — so it didn’t matter one whit how the announcement actually went); and then their ever-so “newsy” reviews post-announcement… wow.
The reviews of course focused not on the sum and substance of what he said, nor even the historic fact that he chose a non-legacy-media platform to do it for the first time, thus launching the beginning of the much-awaited end of the legacy “news” media. That alone was a victory and displayed pretty good leadership. No, it was all about “the glitch.”
That doesn’t mean I think it was a great announcement. At all. And I know I’m being a little contradictory here vis-à-vis my previous articles. I just think the news media reviews were massively overwrought and misdirected.
So… to the sum and substance of the announcement: It was all pretty normal Ron DeSantis stuff. Delivered policy-wonk style, sort of what some people would describe as “boring.” Passionately and maybe even a little angrily delivered, but that’s totally fine with me. It was lacking the song and dance, drama, clowns juggling, colorfully-dressed bunnies, and so on. Some people have come to expect that of their politicians <cough>Donald Trump</cough>. I’m not one of those. Quiet, determined, effective, drama-free “boring” government leadership is totally great with me.
DeSantis has been a great governor (unless you’re a groomer or a member of the woke cult or both, as most of them are). Polls agree. But his management of that announcement was the stuff of the Trudeau/Liberal brain room — well ok, not quite that bad. But pretty bad.
I would have scripted a more positive set of visions and aspirations to talk about, and talk about how he understands the pain that has been wrought by forces outside of people’s control, etc. That really grabs people, and I know he honestly feels all that.
But of course it was that technical glitch that really gave the “news” media their excuse to write their nasties. Any excuse would do, of course, and as I said, they preemptively bashed it, but, so, don’t give them any excuses!
Did he not have an advance team working with the Twitter Spaces engineer to ensure a smooth delivery? Can we, as most “news” media hacks have attempted, blame Elon Musk? I have a feeling the answers are both yes and no. DeSantis probably had an advance team working with Musk or his team, who examined everything, and all agreed everything was set to work just fine. I mean test rockets blow up and I’m pretty sure everyone agreed that wouldn’t happen! The fact that it didn’t work as planned doesn’t excuse them, I suppose, but it does get them off the “lack of proper advance planning and management” and ipso facto “DeSantis can’t manage shit” -type of (BS) criticism.
To be honest, as much as I admire Elon Musk’s glorious turnaround of the hell-hole Twitter once was, a better or safer venue — which still would have gotten the good anti-legacy-media cred — might have Ben Shapiro’s podcast (bonus and pretty amazing update – see below), or Megan Kelley’s. Both have built-in audiences in the millions and both are super-smart, fair, conservative-tolerant interviewers.
There’s more than enough time to shuffle what has been deemed to be this “fiasco” —into voters’ memory hole where it belongs.
PTBC was founded by Mr. Johannesen in 2000.
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