(In a review in the New York Times, Jennifer Szalai noted this conflict and was otherwise scathing of the book, writing that, although DeSantis’s first book “was weird and esoteric enough to have obviously been written by a human, this one reads like a politician’s memoir churned out by ChatGPT.”) DeSantis seems happy to present himself as a practitioner of journalism-or at least memoir-as he promotes his book, which was published by a unit of Rupert Murdoch’s empire. Fox, as I wrote last week, is now fighting a defamation suit, in which its primary defense is rooted in the very legal framework that DeSantis is hoping to weaken. Ironically, this is in some ways a delicate dance for DeSantis, who has squared an antipathy for the mainstream media with a public embrace of Fox News. Because of the clear-cut constitutional questions, the legislation could eventually be appealed all the way to the United States Supreme Court, where at least two justices have already signaled they are interested in revisiting libel law and press protections. Given the governor’s clout in Tallahassee, it stands a solid chance of passage this spring in the Republican-controlled state Legislature and would likely spur more defamation cases in Florida, legal experts say. The Miami Herald and the Tampa Bay Times, covering the legislation, wrote that it’s reasonable to assume that any anti-press legislation will leach out of Florida: In a serious threat to investigative reporting, Florida’s legislature is now looking at a provision to specify that comments made by anonymous sources in news stories would be presumed false for the purposes of defamation lawsuits. The proposals go beyond the usual efforts to gut libel laws, including lowering the threshold for when a public figure can sue a media outlet. Last month, according to a report in Politico, he urged Florida’s Republican-controlled state legislature to consider a slate of breathtaking anti-press measures. DeSantis, by contrast, largely shut out the mainstream media during his reelection campaign in Florida last year.ĭeSantis is dangerous in more insidious ways, too. Trump did these things, too, but in a sense, DeSantis is playing the bad cop to Trump’s Pick me! approach, in which he seemed to grant reporters nearly unlimited access even as he publicly pilloried their employers. Some of DeSantis’s anti-media ploys are old favorites, like stonewalling public-records requests and bullying reporters who write articles that he doesn’t like. Perhaps in an attempt to differentiate himself from his Florida neighbor-or as part of a wider ploy to show he’s Trumpier than Trump-DeSantis is doubling down on press threats to an extent never before seen in a (presumed) major-party candidate. In the race for the Republican nomination for president, DeSantis is widely expected to run against Donald Trump, who, both as a candidate and in office, made antipathy toward the press a central tenet of his politics. If he’s right, American newsrooms have reason to be very nervous. He says so right in the title: The Courage to Be Free: Florida’s Blueprint for America’s Revival. In a new book, Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, lays out the case that the future of America can be seen in his state.
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