There is a frustrating amount of glee dwelling within negative reporting on Florida. ABC affiliates run headlines that sound like sports coverage, such as “‘We’re not in a good place’: Florida leading states in COVID-19 cases following spike.” The Associated Press smugly released “Florida mayors defy DeSantis with mask, vaccine mandates,” an article chock-full of snippets from Governor DeSantis’s political opponents. It all seems to be an effort to make an emerging conservative political leader out to be failing.
But he is not.
The media are right to point out that hospitalizations and cases have spiked in the Sunshine State. Medical centers in Tallahassee and Central Florida once again have had to suspend elective procedures because of patient overloads. But the corresponding death spike is not present in the data, as Florida continues to have around 0.24 daily deaths per 100,000 residents. While this is above the national average, it is also below the rate of some Democrat-run states, such as Nevada (0.39 per 100,000), and also fails to account for Florida’s status as the second-most-elderly state in the union. There’s a lot at play here, and you can always count on journalists to omit important details.
The most loathsome thing to recently come out of the media is “The right’s new tone on COVID vaccines,” published by the Los Angeles Times editorial board. The only possible justification for this festering excrescence would be if the entire opinion staff of the LAT suffered a collective bout of amnesia. They claim that, had “DeSantis and other prominent Republicans been as forceful vaccine supporters as President Biden . . . from the start of the immunization campaign, the country might not have to consider new mask mandates and other restrictions.” They must be joking.
https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-la-times-and-the-rest-of-the-liberal-media-are-discredited-on-florida/
