A DeSantis-Mastriano tag team against the press | Will Bunch Newsletter

The highly watched race for U.S. Senate in Pennsylvania has taken another unexpected turn — over raw vegetables. The GOP’s Mehmet Oz is reeling — at least in the overly online community — from his bizarre video in which he complains to voters in WawaLand about his $20 pricetag for “crudités” in a supermarket the perpetually lost New Jerseyite calls “Wegner’s” (there no such place). A referee would stop this fight.

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I can’t help but wonder whether Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Pennsylvania gubernatorial nominee Doug Mastriano — the current and would-be future strongmen of today’s anti-democratic GOP — are spoiling for an old-fashioned Friday fight night when they stage a joint rally in Pittsburgh at the end of the week.

Sure, sharing the stage with the Republican Party’s most popular figure who’s not named Donald Trump (and who isn’t under investigation for violating the Espionage Act) is something of a coup for state senator Mastriano, a Christian nationalist whose campaign has been flagging in recent days after the disclosure that it paid a website whose owner and history are both tied to anti-Semitism. Still, I have questions about the location, the timing, and the ground rules.

Regarding those first two issues, why are Mastriano and DeSantis — and their sponsor, the youth-oriented right-wing group Turning Point Action, led by extremist Charlie Kirk — avoiding Pennsylvania’s wide swaths of “Trump Country” to stage an event in Pittsburgh, an increasingly left-leaning city that just nominated a democratic socialist, state Rep. Summer Lee, for Congress?

Even more intriguing, why is the rally — slated for Friday at the Wyndham Grand Pittsburgh Hotel at 4:30 p.m. — occurring smack in the middle of Netroots Nation, a national gathering of several thousand progressive activists also taking place in the Steel City? Is the tag team of Mastriano and DeSantis hoping their appearance will trigger a brawl with the leftists in town — many of whom are political-protest veterans?

In the paranoid style that DeSantis and Mastriano have come to epitomize, fights with their perceived enemies are a badge of honor. After left-wing activists, no one ranks as high on their Nixonian enemies list than journalists — a point driven home by the ground rules for Friday’s working press that could have been drafted by Joseph McCarthy ... or maybe Joseph Stalin.

Journalists who are lucky enough to be granted a press pass for Friday’s event must agree to a stifling set of rules, including not filming anything shown on a screen or even filming attendees or speakers without their permission. In fact, Turning Point Action insists it has “the right to have access to footage for archival and promotional purposes, upon request, and to know in what manner the footage will be utilized.” And finally, officials from Turning Point “shall have the final say on all matters.”

“It’s not what you expect to see in a developed democracy,” a media ethics professor at Duquesne University, Maggie Patterson, told veteran Pittsburgh journalist Chris Potter, in a piece on the rules for local radio station WESA.

But it is increasingly something you expect to see in the United States of America in the midterm elections of 2022 — at least when that candidate has an “R” next to their name. In races across the country, Republican candidates are refusing to give interviews or even share information with traditional news outlets, limiting their media appearances to right-wing websites and podcasts or broadcasters like Fox News or Newsmax. NPR’s Danielle Kurtzleben went to Wisconsin to report a story on how the abortion controversy was affecting elections there and ended up with a piece on how the GOP candidates would not talk to her.

Florida’s DeSantis — who trails Trump but is far ahead of any other Republican rival in 2024 presidential polling — is also a national leader in anti-press hostility. His Florida GOP recently stunned reporters from legacy news organizations like the Washington Post by banning them from its annual Sunshine Summit, with DeSantis declaring, “I’m not going to have a bunch of left-wing media people asking our candidates gotcha questions.”

In Pennsylvania, Jan. 6 bus organizer and rally attendee Mastriano has been taking this to the next level. His campaign posts pictures of journalists deemed unfriendly in order to bar them from events, and his goon squad blocked reporters from a Bucks County rally on the eve of his May primary victory. Pundits who thought Mastriano might change his ways after getting the nomination have instead seem him run away from small but legitimate news outlets like the Indiana (Pa.) Gazette. Reporters from Pittsburgh station KDKA who tried to question the GOP nominee at a recent event said “we weren’t allowed to engage or approach him.”

That’s a shame for the voters of Pennsylvania, because there are many things they need to hear from Mastriano between now and November that the candidate can glibly ignore without pointed questions from a free media. Ditto for DeSantis. I’d love to hear someone press the Florida governor — with a large Jewish constituency back home — on why he thinks it’s OK to endorse Mastriano knowing about his connection to Gab, at a rally that’s just a few miles from the synagogue where a Gab enthusiast murdered 11 Jewish people in 2018. On Friday, no one will get within a 10-foot microphone pole to ask DeSantis to explain, and if they somehow did, some goon from Turning Point or the campaigns would be demanding the tape.

That’s not surprising, I guess, from a Florida governor who displays a consistent contempt for democratic norms — taxing corporations or firing duly elected county prosecutors who dare to disagree with him. But a major political party that no longer just complains about the media but actively restrains it is really attacking the core of democracy, because an actual “rigged” election is the one where the public is denied factual information. When candidates attack a free press, people should assume the worst and vote accordingly.

Question: Do presidential approval ratings mean anything this year? Most Dem candidates are running way ahead of Biden’s numbers, and Biden himself is delivering on many of his promises, which *should* please the base. So what’s going on? — Via Jason Ginsburg @Jason on Twitter

Answer: Jason, the rules of politics are meant to be broken. The maxim that midterm election voters rebel against the party in the White House, and often in a big way, almost always holds except when it doesn’t — like in 2002, when voters were overwhelmed by 9/11 and rewarded George W. Bush’s GOP instead of punishing it. For 2022, the usual dynamic is starting to look topsy-turvy because of who the electorate perceives is holding the actual power in America. The Trump Court’s reversal of Roe seems to have caused more anger and passion — at least for now — among normally casual voters than the things that the public was thought to be mad about, like high gas prices (which are no longer so high). So instead of rando Republicans winning seats because of anger at President Biden, we could see Democrats gaining from an anti-SCOTUS uprising.

In today’s main item, I wrote about the importance of unhindered journalism for American democracy. But there’s a flip side to the First Amendment: The media’s role in society is so powerful that a free press can’t be free from criticism. Not surprisingly, the mainstream media has been wildly ambivalent about turning the lens on itself. But the 2000s — and the hard-to-avoid failure of the press in confronting the lies of the Iraq War — did usher in a golden age of media criticism. The avatar of this moment has been Margaret Sullivan, who as the public editor of the New York Times kept the Paper of Record on its toes — and may have inspired the peeved bosses to kill the job a short time after she left to become the Washington Post’s media columnist.

Sullivan’s backstory — she’d risen the ranks from summer intern to become the first female top editor of the Buffalo News in her blue-collar upstate New York hometown — provided a moral framework for her much-needed perspective. A champion of the power of local news and shoe-leather reporting in an age when old-school journalism is under assault from all sides, Sullivan also saw through the silly rituals and broken compass of Beltway journalism in a way that writers too immersed in that culture simply could not. That’s why it was wonderful news for Sullivan — and yet something of a setback for media accountability — when she announced last week she’ll be leaving the Post this month to teach journalism at Duke University.

At the start of 2022, our two best media critics were Sullivan and the independent gadfly Eric Boehlert, whose newsletter regularly challenged the lies of the right while also showing how popular notions about liberal bias in mainstream journalism are often a myth. But Boehlert died tragically in a cycling accident near his New Jersey home in April. For very different reasons, the voices of Sullivan and Boehlert will now be absent at arguably American journalism’s most pivotal moment. The trauma of the Trump years seems to have driven too much of the mainstream media to retreat into its worst habits — viewing Biden’s struggles and the latest neo-fascist bleats out of Mar-a-Lago in the context of a 2024 horse race, too often ignoring the existential threats to American democracy. Now, two irreplaceable voices must somehow be replaced. The survival of a free press demands someone prodding its rear end to do better.