DeSantis vs. CBS, Part 2
An update, a correction, and responses to reader questions/concerns.
On April 9th, I wrote about the dustup between CBS’s 60 Minutes and Florida governor Ron DeSantis. (If you haven't read it, there's a two-paragraph recap below.)
I've since collected an update, a correction, and responses to four reader questions/concerns. Taken together they seemed enough to justify a sequel.
What this writeup covers:
What did CBS get wrong about the racial inequities of the pre-February vaccine rollout in Palm Beach County? [<- the correction]
Why were 5 of 7 Palm Beach County commissioners (including the most affected one) not in the room for the big DeSantis meeting? [<- the update]
Was CBS right to criticize DeSantis for declining to adopt the CDC's recommended vaccine prioritization list? [<- reader pov question]
Was CBS acting in a partisan way in taking the heat to a Republican governor while not also going after a Democrat like Cuomo? [<- reader pov question]
Is it possible that there's a wholesome (or at least less shady) explanation for everything that DeSantis did? [<- reader pov question]
Should I have been clearer earlier on in my original writeup that I thought CBS did some inexcusable things in their coverage? [<- Twitter criticism]
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Prior Context Recap
Governor DeSantis had a meeting in January with a limited number of Palm Beach County officials in which they discussed using Publix stores to help distribute vaccines. While all present said ok, the plan that DeSantis came away with was to give Publix an exclusive right to short-term distribution, which meant both pulling shots from local health facilities that had already booked appointments and leaving some communities (that didn’t have a Publix) with no local access. Of the three senior county officials in the room, two say the exclusivity element was never discussed, and one is effectively pleading the fifth. Despite receiving $45.33 from Medicare for each two-shot vaccination (on top of in-store spending), Publix was never required by DeSantis to coordinate with the state as to how the shots would be distributed in terms of fair access. And given that Publix had donated $100,000 to a DeSantis PAC in December (and was a frequent GOP donor in general), various local papers found cause to ask questions about the optics, none of which were ever really answered.
In April, CBS's 60 Minutes program decided to run a 13.5 minute package about "Florida's Chaotic Vaccine Rollout" that covered the Publix story as part of a larger apparent pattern of favoritism. Said package included a roughly one-minute portion from a three-minute exchange that a 60 Minutes journalist had with DeSantis at a recent press event. In the aftermath of said package airing, The Daily Caller put a clip on Twitter of CBS's minute-long edit next to the full three-minute exchange (while leaving out the larger context of that 13.5 minute package), claiming that CBS had made a deceptive edit. But while CBS did communicate their editorial choices poorly, nothing in what they cut actually addressed the questions that they and others were asking. (What they cut was DeSantis angrily answering questions they hadn't asked, where all the details left out were a mixture of irrelevant and wrong.)
Q1. What did CBS get wrong about the racial inequities of the pre-February vaccine rollout in Palm Beach County?
At roughly 5:40 in their report, CBS said:
By February 1st, casualties of the chaotic rollout became clear. State data revealed of the more than 160,000 residents in Palm Beach County who'd been vaccinated, only 2% were Black and 3% Hispanic, even though minorities make up almost half the county.
Which led me to write:
Of the 160k PBC residents vaccinated by February 1st, only 5% were Black or Hispanic, which is about 1/10th their local population proportion.
But while Blacks and Hispanics do indeed make up 43.2% of Palm Beach County, there's an important caveat to that data that CBS and I both missed:
What that link shows is that Blacks and Hispanics only make up 19.4% of the population when you narrow to just seniors, as the 60+ segment in Palm Beach County skews much whiter than younger segments. (This is technically still a mismatch, as what we’re really looking for is 65+. But I couldn’t easily find anything that specific.)
So, still quite a big gap between that 19.4% and the ~5% who managed to get shots in the first 5-6 weeks of the rollout. But this is obviously quite a bit better than what CBS and I made it out to be. Shame on both of us.
(The Twitter user didn’t reply to my DM about a corrections bounty, so I’m opting to donate $25 to my current default charity in their name. Right now that’s Black Journalists Therapy Relief Fund. See entry in corrections tracker here.)
Q2. Why were five of the seven Palm Beach County Commissioners (including the most affected one) not in the room for the big DeSantis meeting?
I acquired some public record text messages between Melissa McKinlay (one of the excluded commissioners, whose constituents were the most affected) and Dave Kerner (the commissioner, doubling as county mayor, who set up the meeting with DeSantis).
Reproduced exactly, with typos. Brackets are my clarifications.
McKinlay: "I need a response immediately to the Governor's accusation that I was noticeably absent from that meeting you and Verdenia [county administrator] had with him. I need to know now why the entire county commission was not notified by you of this visit and whether or not we all were invited. Who called the shots?
Kerner: "I was contacted by eog and asked if I would be willing to meet with the governor when he was in town of course I am honored to do that. Shortly before the meeting I contacted the chief of staff and asked if I could have Commissioner Bernard and the administrator in there and they say that would be fine but we did not want a large crowd. Ultimately the governor never indicated that he wanted to meet with the entire board of County commissioners nor did I intend to invite the entire board of County commissioners. I invited [fellow commissioner] Mack because he had an important perspective that I thought needed to be shared on behalf of minority communities of the county at large and this was not a publicized event, but a limited event in terms of invitees to discuss public policy"
So, look, parse that how you will. But if I were McKinlay, I'd have been furious. By their own procedures, it's pretty clear that this meeting violated at least two core rules (II.A plus either of II.G or II.H). That the role of mayor/chair is rotated among the commissioners for expediency’s sake doesn't grant the holder discretionary powers to just leave out their peers when discussing something so important!
That said, the two who were invited (Verdenia Baker and Mack Bernard) are both Black, which makes any "they wanted a closed room to launch some racist scheme" narrative deeply improbable. Even so, I've been led to believe that these limited-attendance meetings are a departure from how things worked under the previous governor, and it seems prudent for journalists to ask pointed questions about this change in policy and why it would ever be ok for one commissioner to fail to invite five of their elected peers for a meeting of such obvious consequence (and to have no public attendance or available minutes).
(Plus there's the issue of DeSantis saying he met with "all the folks of Palm Beach County" when he very clearly didn't by design, and the fact that two of the three officials that were in the room have said that exclusivity rights were never part of the discussion. I also don’t get how Kerner has gotten away with staying silent there.)
Q3. Was CBS right to criticize DeSantis for declining to adopt the CDC's recommended vaccine prioritization list?
(Sorry, this is the long/detailed one. If you aren’t wonky, feel free to skip.)
See the full question here, the gist of which bends around whether the upsides of DeSantis's orders (i.e, “just vaccinate everyone over 65 first”) would justify the likely political advantage that would come with overtly favoring a major voting block.
(Two meta things here. One is that virtually every state, including Florida, joined federal initiatives that focused on long-term care homes and frontline health workers. So the debate for state allocations was between at-large seniors and essential workers and younger folks with extreme vulnerabilities. And one thing about this story that many have missed is that Florida did allow for some in that last group to get shots. See this executive order from December 23rd. The catch was you had to get it through a hospital, which made it impractical for most. This didn’t change until February 26th, at which point it was left to broader doctor and pharmacist and nurse discretion.)
Anyway, the reader pointed to this piece by Matty Yglesias, which argues two things:
Less complexity equals more (a) orderliness and (b) fairness
Vaxxing older folks first saves the most lives (in real-world conditions)
For the first, A and B are in obvious tension. Using age as the sole criterion does indeed negate the need to rank other things, which at least wins on neatness. But a healthy 65 year old is not more likely to die of COVID than a 30 year old who just finished chemo or a 42 year old with severe heart disease. Just so, a retiree may be more likely to die from the virus than an essential worker, but has the advantage of being more free to just stay home. Orderliness has some things going for it. Fairness has some things going for it. Whatever system you pick is going to be subjective and is going to anger some people, which is why how you go about it is the important thing.
(While it's true that limiting eligibility to age does avoid the gamesmanship of "who is really extremely vulnerable" and "who is really essential", those are questions that lots of governments were able to resolve well enough anyway. And it's not like Florida actually achieved any perception of orderliness, as their late prioritization change caught the state off guard and was rife with examples of preferential allocations and line-cutting. And per the above, Florida didn’t actually avoid the “who is extremely vulnerable” question. They just made it hard for said population to get shots.)
For the second, we don't have the data yet to know if vaxxing old people first was the right call. I can certainly imagine how it could be a better strategy than allowing all essential workers to register (where some categories are dominated by young people and those who aren't really facing much risk). But various governments tried different permutations, and we'll soon have the data to know how each strategy did in terms of excess deaths per month. If the four states that decided to go primarily age-first ended up materially winning there, that's a useful data-point that should guide future consideration. But there's no a priori reason to assume that a strict seniors-first plan would win on anything other than admin costs.
Anyway, moving back to what actually happened, there’s how DeSantis came to his plan. What CBS failed to mention (though that many local papers did) was that Florida had released an official draft plan in October (based on a CDC-provided template).
Three things to note about it:
It was the collective product of some 43 people, all of whom were closer to the actual fieldwork and further away from bad political optics
Said group had done a lot of thinking and planning around distribution (including registration and comms, starting on page 31)
Said plan did not prioritize seniors above the other two categories
But it got binned, because DeSantis unilaterally replaced it in late December with an executive order that ran a few hundred words. While there’s certainly a theory of politics that gives him that right of unilateral action (on account of a voter mandate and means of direct accountability), I’d reckon that in such a system it’s important that voters get answers on why he threw out that prior planning — so that they can vote intelligently next year on whether that’s the crisis leadership they want. (Some very well might! I don’t mean to say his approach was objectively wrong. I just think it’s important that voters get a clear sense of what happened.)
All said, this was the weakest of the six cases that CBS brought up against DeSantis, in that they raised too broad a concern. It wasn't/isn’t that DeSantis made the right or wrong choice in prioritizing seniors. It’s how he approached and communicated the decision. And CBS failed to ask that more direct question: “what led you to unilaterally replace the draft plan in late December, knowing that doing so would erase work and almost certainly cause confusion and uncertainty across the system?”
That said, other local news orgs did raise that point, and didn’t seem to get very far with it. As you’ll see in section 5, DeSantis and his office seem to stonewall journalists whose questions they don’t care to answer — even where they’re legally compelled to provide relevant documents under Florida law. It’s fine if they have a good answer to that and other questions. But if they don’t actually share it, it doesn’t count.
Q4. Was CBS acting in a partisan way in taking the heat to a Republican governor while not also going after a Democrat like Cuomo?
If I were a CBS producer in this political climate, I’d have done a package on each. Or at the very least I’d have begun the DeSantis package explaining why I was picking on a single team, knowing that it’s a must now if you really want to reach people.
So while I think it’s trivially true that there was a real story here worthy of the local reporting that it received, is it acceptable in a vacuum for CBS (or any national network) to put their spotlight on a single regional story where it’s likely that other regions (run by the other party) have comparably damning stories? I think not.
But how many states actually have comparably damning rollout stories? That’s what’s less clear to me. From what I’ve read, New York is a good candidate. But they’ve been getting plenty of national attention for months? If DeSantis was getting less, is it wrong for a single outlet to try and balance the scales (where the story is independently newsworthy)? I think not.
So the open questions to me are:
Did other states outside of Florida or New York have comparable intrigue in their rollouts that was/is worthy of national coverage?
Was Florida’s rollout actually getting meaningfully less national coverage than New York’s?
I don’t know the answer to either. But I reckon they’re important.
Q5. Is it possible that there's a wholesome (or at least less shady) explanation for everything that DeSantis did?
Yes and no. Mostly no.
While everything above (and in my original writeup, and in the cases I didn’t even get to), could theoretically be purely circumstantial, two problems remain:
When asked to explain all these oddities, DeSantis has mostly either refused to answer the questions posed, angrily answered different questions, or given explanations that don’t actually explain the bits that matter
When the The Orlando Sentinel tried to get relevant records under Florida law, they experienced a ludicrous runaround that still isn’t resolved (which I’m led to believe is not unique to them)
My sense is that DeSantis knows how politics works now, and that he’s going to maximize the value of the gift that CBS gave him in their incautious framing. He gets to continue stonewalling reasonable requests (whatever his underlying motivation), and now he gets to look the victim too.
If this is the kind of tactic we’re ok with, we’ll get the governance we deserve. For the most privileged among us, maybe that’s more feature than bug. But even though I lean conservative and privileged personally, this thought concerns me deeply.
And it should concern you too. Regardless of which team you’re on.
Q6. Should I have been clearer earlier on in my original writeup that I thought CBS did some inexcusable things in their coverage?
Yeah, I think so. I had a TLDR that I’d framed as “this gives the gist”, but failed to mention in that gist that I had an entire section of CBS criticisms at the end of my extended commentary.
Someone on Twitter pointed this out:
While I disagree strongly on the bias and lightweight criticisms parts, the last bit isn’t unreasonable, and my corrections policy does extend to unfair framing. So I’ll be sending them a $25 bounty as well. [Corrections tracker entry here.]
More on other topics soon. And hopefully no more on this one. I don’t even like Florida.
[EDIT: To be clear, that’s because of the heat, not Florida Man.]