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Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: The circus finale [1]

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Date: 2023-03-05

Katie Robertson and Stuart A. Thompson of The New York Times report that in spite of the wall-to-wall coverage given to the Fox News revelations, conservative media, with a few exceptions, has not mentioned the story.

On 26 of the most popular conservative television news networks, radio shows, podcasts and websites, only four — National Review, Townhall, The Federalist and Breitbart News — have mentioned the private messages from Fox News hosts that disparaged election fraud claims since Feb. 16, when the first batch of court filings were released publicly, according to a review by The New York Times. The majority — 18 in all, including Fox News itself — did not cover the lawsuit at all with their own staff. (Some of those 18 published wire stories originally written by The Associated Press or other services.) Four outlets mentioned the lawsuit in some way, but did not mention the comments from Fox News hosts. One of those, The Gateway Pundit, published three articles that included additional unfounded allegations about Dominion, including a suggestion that security vulnerabilities at one election site using Dominion machines could have led to some fraud, despite no evidence that votes were mismanaged. [...] Even in a media world often divided along partisan lines, the paucity of coverage stands out, media experts said. And it means that many of the people who heard the conspiracy theories about election fraud on Fox’s networks may not be learning that Fox’s leaders and on-air stars privately dismissed those claims.

Kyle Pope of Columbia Journalism Review takes a look at Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s war on the media.

..American newsrooms have reason to be very nervous. 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 towards the press a central tenet of his politics. 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. 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. 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. DeSantis, by contrast, largely shut out the mainstream media during his reelection campaign in Florida last year. DeSantis is dangerous in more insidious ways, too. 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. 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. 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.

As if things couldn’t get any worse in Florida...

x Python invasion has exploded out of the Everglades and into nearly all of southern Florida, new map shows https://t.co/n1JhsOS3ur pic.twitter.com/phFThOImTo — South Florida Sun Sentinel (@SunSentinel) March 4, 2023

Quinn Yeargain of Bolts magazine writes that laws passed in Republican states in response to Obamacare are now being used successfully in defense of abortion rights.

Reproductive rights advocates in Wyoming have sued to strike down the state’s abortion ban, saying that this “right to make . . . health care decisions” protects abortion access. A lawsuit in Ohio has made the same case using a similar provision in Ohio’s constitution that was adopted by voters in 2011. “If you have an amendment that says you have the freedom to choose your health care, then that’s going to apply to all health care: that’s the argument being made,” says David Cohen, a professor of law at Drexel University who studies constitutions and abortion. “It’s like, ‘you used broad words, and these broad words have certain meanings, and we’re just applying those meanings to this context.’” In both Ohio and Wyoming, these claims have seen early success in courts. [...] Since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe vs. Wade in June, legal organizations that are working to defend abortion rights have looked increasingly toward state courts and constitutions. This strategy’s most recent success came in January in South Carolina. Few states have constitutional language that explicitly protects abortion but many state courts have pointed to equal protection, due process, and privacy clauses to affirm a right to abortion under the state constitution, and strike down restrictions or bans on the procedure.

Brad Franklin writes for the Mississippi Free Press that when it comes to the Mississippi legislature, it is all about the racism.

Andrew Marr of The New Statesman gives British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak a pat on the back for his successful negotiation of the “Windsor deal,” an agreement on post-Brexit trade between Northern Ireland and the EU.

There’s always a danger in exaggerating turning points, but we should cheer this deal, rubber-stamped in Windsor. Ahead of its announcement, Sunak was frequently criticised for being “bad at politics” because he failed to properly square the Democratic Unionist Party and his internal Tory critics. Instead, he is revealed as patient, wily and ruthless, and rather good at politics. The details of the negotiation were kept tight. Key parts of it had been carried out by hardcore Brexiters such as the Foreign Secretary, James Cleverly; the one-time “Spartan” leader Steve Baker was placated with impeccable timing, and his endorsement proved more useful than anyone in selling the deal. [...] We shouldn’t exaggerate. The Sunak administration continues to face deep domestic discord. Having thrown himself into the protocol talks, the Prime Minister needs to throw himself personally into resolving the strikes in the NHS. The Budget will be difficult and I’d expect Johnsonian rebels to focus on defence spending and national security. While the Ukraine war goes on, and with cold economic winds beginning to blow from the US, it’s hard to see the return of much prosperity this year.

Finally today, Nicolas Camut of POLITICO Europe reports that Turkish opposition parties cannot agree on a single candidate to put up against Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan for the upcoming national elections scheduled for May 14.

Cracks in the wide-ranging alliance, which mixes parties from left to right, started to show on Thursday, when the six parties met to discuss their pick for a joint candidate for the upcoming presidential elections, and failed to settle on a name. On Friday, Akşener expressed her preference for Ankara Mayor Mansur Yavaş, or the high-profile mayor of Istanbul, Ekrem Imamoğlu, instead of the head of the main opposition party, Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, considered to be the favorite for the spot. The next Turkish general election, scheduled for May 14, promises to be one of the world’s most strategically significant elections of the year. The outcome will be keenly watched as observers seek to determine whether Erdoğan — who is taking treading a difficult political tightrope over Russia’s war against Ukraine — will push the country of 85 million in a more traditionalist, religiously conservative direction, or whether a new leader will be able to reset damaged relations with the West.

Have the best possible day, everyone!

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/3/5/2156282/-Abbreviated-Pundit-Roundup-The-circus-finale

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