Media bias exposed in Florida hurricane reporting

 Washington Examiner:

Were Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) not a national political juggernaut, biased journalists would not be trying to blame him for a natural disaster and its largely inevitable ill effects.

And if you don’t think that’s what the journalists have been doing in the wake of Hurricane Ian, you need to look back to before the storm struck Florida’s west coast last week.

TEXAS SENDING ADDITIONAL RESOURCES TO ASSIST FLORIDA

Already at that point, they were attempting to lay the groundwork for a storyline about a supposedly “lax response to the storm so far,” as one reporter put it in a press conference.

DeSantis was not going to hear one word of it.

"Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa — give me a break,” he sharply interrupted the questioner. “That is nonsense. Stop politicizing, OK? Stop it. We declared a state of emergency when this thing wasn’t even formed. We’ve had people in here. We’ve had counties that have done a lot of hard work. And honestly, you’re trying to attack me. I get it. But you’re attacking these other people who’ve worked very hard. So that’s just totally false."

The insinuation that somehow Florida was not well prepared for Ian is deeply unfair and also untrue. This applies both to the evacuation preparations before the storm and to the equally important preparations to save lives afterward and restore vital services to storm-damaged areas.

Neither process is ever perfect. But both have been performed so far in Florida with admirable efficiency, compassion, and concern for human life under circumstances that can only be described as extreme, even for Florida in hurricane season.

It should be noted that since the storm passed, the volume of successful rescues — there were more than 1,600 — and the rapid restoration of services after Ian hit testify to fantastic pre-storm preparation at every level of government. (This is clearly not Florida’s first rodeo nor the Federal Emergency Management Agency's.) The reviews from Floridians on the latter have been overwhelmingly positive so far in spite of political media efforts to generate dissatisfaction.

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Once again we find out that many reporters are liberal jerks willing to take advantage of a storm to push their agenda.  DeSantis is not the kind of guy to let them get away with that nonsense.