The Ron DeSatanist Right-wing Media Machine

[LFC]

Here comes the amplification. He's building his own media ecosystem.

Governor Ron DeSantis (R-FL) is taking another page out of Donald Trump’s playbook for his burgeoning presidential campaign: harnessing his own media echo-chamber.

A recent investigation from Grid found that a handful of local right-wing websites have managed to get exclusive access to the governor’s administration, while DeSantis himself evades and even threatens the rights of the mainstream press in his state.

For example, one of the publications, The Florida Standard, was the first news outlet to acquire the syllabus to the AP African American Studies course that the DeSantis administration loudly rejected back in January. The story was promoted by DeSantis aide Christina Pushaw who tweeted it out to her 279,000 Twitter followers.

The website is also less than a year old, with a masthead of five staffers total. Will Witt, its founder and editor-in-chief, only lists a position as a social media manager for the right-wing propaganda outfit PragerU on his LinkedIn before he reportedly launched the Standard last summer.

A handful of local news websites with a right-wing bent have popped up recently: The Florida Standard, Florida’s Voice, and Florida Media Integrity are all less than two years old, as Grid noted.

Some of the journalists behind the new publications told Grid that they had become acquainted with DeSantis over the years. Javier Manjarres, who launched The Floridian in 2017, said that he launched the website after years of “friendly interviews” with the governor for another website. He also claimed that the outlet’s DeSantis boosterism is less about him than their web traffic.

“He makes news almost every day or every other day—and everyone knows that,” he told Grid. “We write fairly about him. We try to not make it about pushing his agenda.”

"We try?" Uh, huh. Yeah. Sure.

[LFC]

DeSatanist's media team has deep roots in right-wing propaganda, as expected.

Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) likes to make a big show of his hostility towards the mainstream press. He most recently made that clear at a February roundtable when, between a panel of libel lawyers and critics, he complained about journalists advancing “narratives” designed to “attack” him and denounced the landmark 1964 Supreme Court decision New York Times v. Sullivan for enabling the media to “find a way to smear you.” A month later, the Republican-led state legislature introduced a bill seeking to roll back press freedoms seemingly based on his complaints.

DeSantis has spent much of his time since he took office as governor in 2019 claiming that the mainstream media treats him unfairly—not unlike former president Donald Trump’s constant cries of “fake news.” At the same time, a coterie of local right-leaning outlets have sprung up around Florida, reporting on state politics from a DeSantis-friendly perspective. And the governor appears to have harnessed their congeniality to produce favorable coverage for his administration.

The men behind these outlets have deep right-wing bonafides. Here are the guys behind Florida’s growing pro-DeSantis media circuit:

[LFC]

Axios just folded in the face of DeSatanist's attacks and fired a reporter. This is horrifying.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ (R) press team often attacks the reporters who cover his state. On Monday, they cost one of those journalists, Ben Montgomery, his job with Axios.

In a conversation with TPM, Montgomery said he felt the situation was an example of how DeSantis’ media “machine” was impacting the news business.

“This sort of thing has a chilling effect. Nobody wants to have their life disrupted by this machine,” Montgomery said in a phone call on Wednesday evening. “They call it ‘media accountability,’ and it is not that. It’s meaner than that, and more personal, and affecting. … It has a quieting effect and that’s a shame. It’s sad for democracy and sad for all of us.”

DeSantis, who is widely expected to run for president next year, has a press shop that is known for being combative with the media. Members of his team have highlighted individual reporters on Twitter while demanding corrections. They have also shared screenshots of emails and requests for comment sent by journalists in an effort to paint those reporters as biased.

These posts from DeSantis’ press team have led to the reporters who are targeted being bombarded with angry messages and threats from the governor’s fans. In one 2021 instance, the Associated Press publicly accused a former DeSantis spokesperson of engaging in “harassment.” In addition to DeSantis’ official press operation, far-right Florida activists have set up their own publications focused on positive coverage of the governor that have been rewarded with exclusive coverage opportunities.

“My colleagues have sort of run into this situation where they will send an email asking for information and that email is then screenshotted and sometimes … it’s framed in a certain way … it’s tweeted of course by the press officers and used as a way to kind of paint the reporter as a lefty liberal activist. It’s weaponized,” Montgomery said.

[LFC]

Josh Marshall on the firing of the Axios reporter.

It’s fine for politicians and presidents to criticize journalists, their questions, the state of the profession — more fine than a lot of people let on. To say otherwise is special pleading. Criticism isn’t only okay in one direction. But what Ron DeSantis has developed in Florida is something far more predatory. It’s not about criticism. It’s a performative breaking and taming of reporters. In Florida it’s coupled with cryptic DeSantis funders standing up pro-DeSantis propaganda mills posing as real publications. DeSantis’s approach to the media is the one area in which people are right when they say he’s taken the Trump model and run it with greater efficiency and effect.

But the real issue here is Axios, the publication that immediately fired its own reporter in response to this. This is the downside and the civic achilles heel of a publication whose business model is access coupled with a purported inviolable neutrality that the subjects of its reporting can withdraw at any moment. Having spent more than a decade studying every intricacy of the advertising business of D.C. political news organizations I can tell you — because I was immersed in the world of the major D.C. ad agencies when Axios launched — that its central value proposition for advertisers and sponsors is the premise not only that it has no partisan bent but can never be accused of one.

That second point is key. Even the accusation is existential. And so is the potential loss of access.