Liberal media bias is available in two often-concomitant types: Acts of omission and acts of fee.
An April 13 editorial in The Washington Publish, “Freedom is below assault in Ron DeSantis’s Florida,” serves up a few of each, however most egregiously the previous.
The bias by omission begins with the editorial failing to say the truth that regardless of the Florida Republican governor’s supposed “assault on freedom,” People are transferring to ruby-red Florida by the tens of hundreds yearly—most of them fleeing leftist blue states like California, Illinois, Massachusetts, Michigan, and New York.
In January, reporting on its greater than 2 million one-way moving-truck leases nationally in 2022, U-Haul introduced that Texas and Florida “stay high locations for one-way strikes,” including: “Demand for tools out of California, Illinois, and New York remained robust in 2022, as extra individuals opted to depart areas of the West Coast, Northeast, and Midwest.” California led the nation for the third yr in a row, U-Haul mentioned.
The Publish possible wouldn’t admit it, however that represents an ongoing mass exodus from liberal states with economy-strangling taxes and rules and excessive, left-wing social insurance policies on abortion, transgenderism, and training to conservative states with low taxes, faculty alternative, cheap restrictions on abortion, and bans on gender experimentation on minors and on organic males interloping in women and girls’s sports activities. (In different phrases, from states with insurance policies The Publish helps to these it doesn’t.)
The Publish’s 1,179-word editorial screed additionally omitted the truth that DeSantis gained reelection in November in an almost 20-point landslide, 59.4% to 40%. He crushed the chameleonic Republican-turned-independent-turned-Democrat former Gov. Charlie Crist, who ran on a liberal platform the polar reverse of the incumbent’s conservative agenda.
The Publish’s editorial harrumphing however, DeSantis’ 1.5 million-vote margin of victory suggests—make that, screams—that Floridians approve of his low-tax, pro-life and pro-parental rights insurance policies.
It’s additionally price noting that DeSantis gained his first time period in 2018 in a nail-biter, 49.6% to 49.2%. As such, his 2022 reelection landslide win represents Florida voters’ resounding embrace of his insurance policies within the intervening 4 years—and a repudiation of The Publish’s unflattering characterization of his governance.
Floridians apparently appreciated how he didn’t flip the Sunshine State right into a police state through the COVID-19 epidemic with coercive faculty and enterprise closures and with oppressive masks and vaccine mandates, the way in which blue states with liberal governors similar to Gavin Newsom of California and Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan did.
So, if in The Publish’s telling, DeSantis is “assaulting freedom,” hundreds of thousands of Floridians seem to welcome that supposed lack of liberty. The paper’s myopic editorial board maybe thinks that the blue-to-red-state migrants, voting with their ft, are looking for to interrupt into jail.
“Backed by GOP supermajorities in each chambers [of the Florida Legislature],” DeSantis is waging frontal assaults on … reproductive freedom, free enterprise, and educational freedom,” The Publish editorial hyperventilates.
Absent any comparable considerations in regards to the far-left assaults being waged unchecked by Democratic governors and legislative supermajorities in California, Massachusetts, Maryland, and different blue states, it’s onerous to take The Publish’s handwringing critically.
Whereas it’s true Florida has among the many strictest limits on abortion within the nation with its new six-week heartbeat invoice signed into legislation April 13 (coincidentally, the identical day the editorial ran), The Publish has no related qualms about liberal states that not solely enable the process for any cause proper up by way of the total 9 months of being pregnant, however in some instances will even pay for it with state taxpayer funds.
The Publish additionally lamented DeSantis’ elimination from workplace of a pro-abortion prosecutor in Tampa who refused to implement the state’s milder prior 15-week ban. Although elected, he had no authority to disregard state legislation and was deservedly ousted. We don’t recall any related empathy from The Publish editorial board for Kim Davis, the elected Kentucky county clerk who in 2015 was jailed briefly for refusing to situation marriage licenses to same-sex {couples}.
The premise for The Publish’s assertion that DeSantis was “assaulting” free enterprise was equally specious. It deplored the governor’s justifiable stripping of the woke Disney Co. of its one-of-a-kind self-governance and particular tax remedy—which no different Florida enterprise loved—after the company goliath indefensibly injected itself into politics by opposing commonsense laws on parental rights in training.
In decrying DeSantis’ forbidding the state’s pension plan from doing enterprise with monetary establishments that push “environmental, social, and governance” funding standards, The Publish’s bias by omission is its failure to notice that the fund is obligated by its fiduciary responsibility to take a position for the perfect returns, to not pander to the left’s woke agenda.
What The Publish didn’t inform its readers about DeSantis’ purported “assault” on educational freedom are maybe probably the most egregious examples of its bias by omission. It failed to elucidate that the Florida governor’s rejection of the School Board’s Superior Placement African American research course was by no means racist, however slightly due to its far-left curriculum content material, together with queer black concept and the jail abolition motion.
Nor did the editorial clarify that what it decries as a “frenzy of e book banning” is aimed, rightly, at eradicating books from faculty library cabinets that shouldn’t be there within the first place; particularly, age-inappropriate, sexually express LGBT-themed books and graphic novels.
There have been different examples of bias by omission within the editorial, however you get the purpose. The Publish’s virtue-signaling masthead deplores that “Democracy dies in darkness,” at the same time as its personal editorial board intentionally leaves readers at midnight. However it was all in service of the editorialists’ greater goal—to derail DeSantis’ bid to “Make America Florida.”
Initially revealed at WashingtonTimes.com.
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