On Monday, CNN's Rosa Flores tried to trap Florida Governor Ron DeSantis with a loaded question about the logistical difficulties of rolling out the vaccine across the state. Never mind that lags in distribution are happening all over the nation, or that states like California with far-left governors are struggling with logistics as well. What CNN wants to focus on are those evil GOP-led states, where they hate #sCiEnCe.
With that in mind, watch the following clip and then we'll break it down:
Flores asks DeSantis this question:
"What has gone wrong with the rollout of the vaccine that we've seen phone lines jammed, websites crashed, and also senior citizens waiting overnight for the vaccines."
What Flores is doing here is an example of what the media does every dang day. It's a bit of manipulative wordsmithing. First, notice she had the cameraman pointing the camera at her from the start, because it's really about her after all. Next, notice the question assumes something has "gone wrong" in the first place (note too how this works with the wording of chyron at the bottom of the screen). On a factual level, yes, there have been distribution difficulties. But notice how the blame is being pointed at DeSantis from the beginning of the question to paint him as the bad guy.
Here are just a few of the media's usual tricks at play here:
- Distraction – They're pointing the cameras at DeSantis, not at Democratic governors like Newsom and Cuomo who are having high death rates and logistical problems with the vaccine, despite the fact that their states are locked down to the extreme and have big-government dominance that should, according to the theorems of the Left, make such logistics run more efficiently than a private market solution.
- Appealing to emotion – "Senior citizens waiting overnight" is a clear case here. They want to pull at your heartstrings, objective facts be damned.
- Proof by example – This fallacy attempts to prove something by a statistically insignificant example. In this case, we are told there is a problem because phone lines are jammed, websites crashed, and senior citizens waiting overnight. What we aren't told is what phone lines "jammed" and for how long (could have been a 2 minute wait or a 2 hour wait), what websites "crashed" (for all we know, CNN did a test and forgot to turn on their WiFi), or where and how many "senior citizens" were waiting (was it three people outside a rural clinic, or a thousand outside four Miami hospitals??).
DeSantis, having an IQ over 10, immediately recognized the hostile intent of the question. He tactfully turned the question around, asking her for examples. She had the names of a few counties handy, but not much else, insisting that it was the governor's job to do her investigative reporting for her.
"Did you investigate why?" he asks her.
DeSantis then pointed out that the demand is high and that they've used a first-come, first-serve system.
"So are you saying there was no plan then from the state?" Flores asks. This is called a leading question.
The governor fired back with the honest-to-God truth that private market professionals are about a billion times more effective at doing their jobs than bureaucrats who know nothing about supply-chain logistics and/or medicine.
"The state is not dictating to hospitals... how [to] run [their] operations," he said. "That would be a total disaster. These guys are much more competent to be able to deliver healthcare services than a state government could ever be."
Was DeSantis being a bit rude and uncouth? Yep. Does CNN deserve it?
Well, if you haven't been paying attention to the wanton recklessness of the mainstream media for the past few decades, your answer might be no.
