Media face the music: Ron DeSantis got it right

by Eddie Scarry, Commentary Writer
Washington Examiner

If you blinked while watching CNN this morning, you might have missed it, but the cable news outlet has finally come around to admitting what so many of us have known for months: Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican (AHHH!!), was right.

CNN’s Jeff Zeleny went to Florida, no doubt on a mission to see just how badly DeSantis was screwing up. He was left with no choice but to report a segment Wednesday with the truth. Florida, all things considered, is a model state for how we should have handled the coronavirus pandemic from the start.

“The governor’s gamble to take a laissez-faire approach to coronavirus appears to be paying off,” said Zeleny. “At least politically. At least for now.”

He added that DeSantis’s governing was “getting a second look” and that his “standing is stronger than other governors across the country,” even noting that his state’s virus-related death rate is much better than Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s New York and that his state’s economy is significantly better off than heavily locked down California. Despite the fact that Florida remained mostly open, California’s coronavirus death rate is only 6% lower. Meanwhile, its unemployment rate (9.0%) is almost twice as high as Florida’s (4.8%).

Still, it bears noting that DeSantis did not take a “laissez-faire approach” to the pandemic. It’s just that he didn’t put his state’s citizens in a chokehold. The DeSantis administration did take action in some important areas, using “the science” to target who exactly needed the most protection (the elderly). Meanwhile, he simply encouraged everyone else to carefully monitor their own individual risk levels. Unlike Cuomo, DeSantis did not mandate that infected patients be admitted to nursing homes.

DeSantis refused to shut down the state’s biggest public spaces, its beaches, on the understanding that this was one of the few places people could go while easily distancing from others. He also made sure the state’s schools opened in the fall and stayed open — something “the science” has said all along is safe.

Endlessly frustrating for liberals and the media was DeSantis’s reluctance to institute indefinite statewide mask orders and restrictions on businesses. It was supposedly “anti-science” to consider that governing a state or even a country through a pandemic might also mean weighing the costs of a severely restrictive policy designed to slow the spread of a virus that’s harmless for the vast majority of people who contract it. When you force businesses to shut down, throwing untold numbers of people out of work and preventing many necessary activities such as health checkups, it hurts people in different but equal ways that a virus does.

Democrats such as Cuomo, Newsom, and Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan were lauded by the media for closing hair salons and bars, in many cases permanently ending the lifelong dreams of many of their own residents. DeSantis determined that the cost for that was too high.

CNN isn’t the only news outlet taking a second look at Florida. The New York Times on Saturday wrote, “For better or worse, Florida’s experiment in returning to life-as-it-used-to-be offers a glimpse of what many states are likely to face in the weeks ahead, as they move into the next phase of the pandemic — the part where it starts to be over.”

Axios wrote Monday that “after a solid year of living with a pandemic, the national press are beginning to ask the question that even Democrats have been quietly pondering in the Sunshine State: Was Gov. Ron DeSantis’ pandemic response right for Florida?”

We welcome them all to the DeSantis party.

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https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/media-face-the-music-ron-desantis-got-it-right