Over the Easter weekend, CBS “News” was busy smearing Florida’s Republican Governor Ron DeSantis and, at the same time, promoting Hunter Biden, the scandal-ridden, drug-addict son of White House pretender Joe Biden. With Donald Trump now taking a lower profile and no longer occupying the Oval Office, denizens of the media industrial complex have settled on DeSantis as their default hate object. Governor DeSantis, one of the most conservative and popular political figures in the country, is feared by the Left and the globalist Deep State as a potential presidential contender. Moreover, he is hated by the would-be COVID dictators because Florida, under his leadership, has rejected the Fauci/CDC/WHO mandates and lockdowns. As a result, Florida has led the way in economic recovery and in COVID health metrics, in comparison to New York, California, and many other states that adopted the draconian controls called for by “experts” such as Bill Gates and Anthony Fauci. (See here, here, and here.)
CBS’s 60 Minutes took aim at DeSantis in a thoroughly dishonest Easter Sunday piece that accused him of “pay to play” with the COVID vaccine, giving the vaccine distribution contract to Publix, a large grocery/pharmacy chain that had contributed to his campaign. CBS reporter Sharyn Alfonsi attempted to ambush DeSantis with the charges at a press conference in March.
“First of all, what you’re saying is wrong,” DeSantis said, in response to Alfonsi’s charge. “How is that not pay to play?” Alfonsi asked. “That’s a fake narrative,” DeSantis replied. “I met with the county mayor. I met with the administrator. I met with all the folks at Palm Beach County, and I said, ‘Here’s some of the options: We can do more drive-thru sites. We can give more to hospitals. We can do the Publix.’ And they said, ‘We think that would be the easiest thing for our residents.’”
The governor then explained in detail how the vaccine rollout had involved all of the major pharmacy chains: CVS, Walgreens, Publix, and others. It also involved extensive consulting and coordinating with state, county, and city officials, agencies, and institutions. However, CBS then selectively edited the governor’s two-minute, detailed refutation of the charges, reducing it to a few seconds, in an obvious attempt to make Governor DeSantis look bad.
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Republicans were not alone in slamming CBS’s reporting. Jared Moskowitz, the director of the Florida Division of Emergency Management and a Democrat, attempted to set the record straight. “I said this before and I’ll say it again,” Moskowitz tweeted. “Publix was recommended by [the Florida Division of Emergency Management] and [the Florida Department of Health] as the other pharmacies were not ready to start. Period! Full Stop! No one from the Governors office suggested Publix. It’s just absolute malarkey.”
The full, unedited, three-minute exchange between Alfonsi and DeSantis can be seen below.
It was apparent from the title of the 60 Minutes piece and the opening lines that this was going to be a political hit piece disguised as investigative journalism. The title? “How the wealthy cut the line during Florida’s frenzied vaccine rollout.” It carries this subtitle: “Sharyn Alfonsi reports on corruption allegations clouding Florida’s efforts to vaccinate its residents.”
Confirming the partisan bias of the episode, Alfonsi opens with a promo for Joe Biden, before attacking Ron DeSantis. “This past week,” she tells the CBS audience, “President Biden said 90% of U.S. adults will be eligible for the COVID vaccine by April 19 and will be able to get their shots within five miles of their home. That will be welcome news to many in Florida.”
Yay Biden! Our COVID hero! Then she shifts gears to attack mode. “For three months, we’ve been reporting around Palm Beach County, the third-largest in the state. It’s home to old-monied millionaires but also some of the poorest day laborers and farm workers in America.” “During those months,” Alfonsi states, “we watched Florida’s vaccine rollout deteriorate into a virtual free for all and watched as some wealthy and well-connected residents cut the line, leaving other Floridians without a fair shot.”
Having clipped Governor DeSantis’s defense to less than half a minute, Alfonsi and the CBS crew then had lots of time to lavish on interviews with the governor’s Democrat opponents, who, naturally, gave Alfonsi precisely the innuendo and accusatory rhetoric she was looking for. To add to the lopsided presentation, Alfonsi larded her narration with plenty of adjectives such as “chaotic,” “frenzied,” and “free for all,” as though Florida under DeSantis is somehow unique with experiencing logistical challenges in obtaining the vaccines and delivering them to those who want it.
Fighting Back
In her 60 Minutes hatchet job, Alfonsi tries (unsuccessfully) to give the impression of fairness. CBS attempted to set up an interview with the governor about his “deal” with Publix, she said, but “he declined our requests for an interview.”
No need to explain why; she gave it in her opening salvo: “For three months, we’ve been reporting around Palm Beach County, the third-largest in the state.” Governor DeSantis was undoubtedly familiar with that reporting, as well as the network’s malicious coverage of himself, President Trump, and other conservatives over the past few years. What would be the point of having a sit-down interview with the media and letting them put a “Kick Me” sign on your back? They’re going to do it anyway, but why help them?
Governor Ron DeSantis is a real threat to the powers that be in the two-party duopoly. He’s smart, articulate, good looking, telegenic, and a good communicator. And, from his record thus far, he appears to be a genuine constitutionalist conservative. To top it off, like President Trump, he’s a fighter. On Tuesday, April 6, DeSantis fired back at CBS. Asked about the 60 Minutes charges at a press conference in Panama City, Florida, DeSantis laughed and claimed the series “cut out everything that proved their narrative was a piece of horse manure.”
“Corporate media can’t run over this governor,” DeSantis said, “I’m punching back.” He ended his presser with this Trumpian broadside at the Fake News: “Unless you’re a partisan leftist, do not trust corporate media. You can’t trust them, they’re not trustworthy. They will lie, they will smear and then they just move on to the next target and think they are going to be able to get away with it. You ain’t getting away with it here, OK? You come down to our state and you try to smear people, we’re going to bite back, and we’re going to hold you accountable. This is not over by any stretch of the imagination.”
Poison Darts for DeSantis, Kisses for Hunter Biden
Are the folks at CBS completely clueless, or do they simply not care that the non-brainwashed viewers in their audience will recognize their “news” as blatantly partisan propaganda? First of all, consider that after being AWOL, like the rest of the Big Media, on the horrific COVID nursing-home deaths caused by Democrat governors — New York’s Andrew Cuomo, Pennsylvania’s Tom Wolf, Michigan’s Gretchen Whitmer, New Jersey’s Phil Murphy, and California’s Gavin Newsom — CBS then went all-out to smear DeSantis, whose policies have proven to be far more successful medically, economically, and socially.
But it gets worse. Not content with deceitfully hammering DeSantis on COVID while throwing a COVID bouquet to Joe Biden, the network also blew kisses to his son, Hunter Biden. After being likewise AWOL on the Bidens’ Burisma and China dealings, and Hunter’s drug, sex, and porn addictions, CBS scored a major victory with a sit-down interview with Hunter. But (surprise!) the network’s ferocious investigative bulldogs turned into pathetic lapdogs, failing to ask the most basic questions that would be expected of a Journalism 101 student, and failing to press when Hunter dodged pertinent questions. And then there is the issue of the infamous laptop computer with all the incriminating evidence on his sex-drug-porn scandals and his multi-million-dollar deal with Communist China. In a CBS Sunday Morning interview promoting his new “memoir,” Beautiful Things, he is asked if the laptop is his, something he has denied previously. Knowing that the evidence is overwhelming that it is his (see here and here ), he now dodges by saying it “could be” his but he really doesn’t “have any idea.”
“Was that your laptop?” CBS’s Tracy Smith asked.
“For real, I don’t know,” Hunter replied.
“I know. But you know that, this isn’t…,” Smith comes back.
“But my point is, I really don’t know. The answer is, that’s the truthful answer,” Hunter insists.
Smith: “You don’t know, yes or no, if the laptop was yours?”
Biden: “I don’t have any idea. No idea whether or not…”
Smith: “So, could have been yours?”
Biden: “Of course, certainly. There could be a laptop out there that was stolen from me. It could be that I was hacked. It could be that it was Russian intelligence. It could be that it was stolen from me.”
Not only did CBS let Hunter Biden get away with this flagrant evasion, they clearly structured the whole sham to give the appearance that they had actually conducted a legit, probing interview, when the truth is it was meant from the start to be a valentine celebrating Hunter’s “heroic” struggle against his inner demons and a testimony to the unfailing love of his father, Joe Biden.
It should be mentioned that before she asked Hunter Biden about the laptop, Smith referenced a newly released intelligence report from Papa Biden’s Deep State National Intelligence Council stating that the “Russians had launched a smear campaign against Joe Biden and his family.” That was a setup to reinforce the line that Joe Biden has been bellowing since last October, that he and Hunter are victims of the Russians. Yes, don’t believe any of the facts and evidence; it’s all the work of those dirty Russians!
CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, PBS, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, the New York Times, Washington Post, et al. — the entire hate-Trump, pro-Biden media cartel — conspired to censor the damning Hunter Biden laptop revelations that broke in the critical weeks before the election. They protected Biden then and they are continuing to protect him now. Oh, and by the way, Hunter’s new Beautiful Things memoir is published by Simon & Schuster, a subsidiary of ViacomCBS. So for CBS it’s a twofer: promote the Bidens while scoring corporate profits by pushing Hunter’s book to bestseller status.
More coverage of Governor DeSantis:
Top Scientists Join DeSantis to Slam Masks, Mandates, and COVID Tyranny
Fla. Governor Rips Media: We’ve “Done Better” Than Completely Locked-down States
DeSantis Nixes Idea of “Vaccine Passport” in Florida
DeSantis Keeps Florida Open and Mask-free for Thanksgiving
Related stories on CBS’s bias and scandals:
Bad Boy Bannon? CBS Accused of Doctoring Video to Make Ex-Trump Official Look Ominous
