Did 60 Minutes Misleadingly Edit a Clip, Or Were They the Victim of Misleading Editing Themselves?

I can be hard on journalists. I think most produce more heat than light, and that it’s a bit insane to see this as anything other than a communal tragedy. But I also try to highlight great reporting when I see it — the sort of investigative work done with real diligence by people who clearly care about providing readers with the sort of useful knowledge that lets them make decisions consistent with a better world.

This story involves both types. Though not equally.

The governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, was an unlikely Twitter star this week. CBS, inspired by some excellent local reporting about vaccine distribution oddities in the Sunshine State, dedicated a 60 Minutes segment to the subject this past Sunday. But said segment included a clip from a DeSantis presser that many felt was cut so deceptively that it was as if the House of Cronkite and Murrow had gone full tabloid.

Were the critics right? It’s an important question! If the CEO of the third-most populous state in the union is guilty of what CBS questioned him of, that’s a big fucking deal. And just so, if one of our most storied news broadcasts really did DeSantis dirty despite knowing him to be innocent, that’s … also a big fucking deal?

Getting to the bottom of which side has the better claim was no easy task. Hopefully this summary makes it easier for you.

---

We reward corrections. See something wrong, misleading, or unfair? Say something. It helps. New readers can also learn more about our mission here.

As a subscriber note, there are two big-ish pieces dropping next week (I hope), then two much heftier stories on tap for later in the month. I’m just figuring out how to cut them down to size.

---

The Short(er) Version

I’m going to give the whole story here in bullet points, followed with some extended commentary and receipts for the more curious readers. If you’re just looking for the gist, the bullets should be enough.

• On January 5th, DeSantis announced a pilot program in which Publix (a grocery chain quite popular in Florida) would be allocated some of the state's vaccine supply to administer to seniors not living in long-term care homes. (Those in said homes were already being tended to by a federally-supplied program.)

• This pilot, covering 22 stores in three smaller counties, went well enough that DeSantis and others wanted to see it expanded.

• On January 12th a meeting was held between DeSantis and a handful of individuals representing Palm Beach County (PBC), home to some 365,000 of Florida's seniors. The Publix option came up, and was voted forward.

• But of PBC’s seven elected commissioners (one of whom doubles as county mayor), five weren't present at this meeting — for reasons that said mayor, Dave Kerner, has admitted some responsibility for, but has otherwise been cagey about. (One of the excluded commissioners, Melissa McKinlay, claims that Kerner told her that the governor's staff wanted the meeting to be "private".)

• While it seems that no one present at the meeting objected to the Publix idea, there was an element to DeSantis's implementation of the idea that everyone except Kerner (who has been silent on the point) agrees was never actually discussed in the meeting: that of Publix getting exclusive rights over local supply, thus overriding existing allocations to county health facilities.

• Well, McKinlay's district covers the Glades, a relatively poor part of the PBC at least 25 miles from the nearest Publix. Once she got word that promised shots were no longer en route, she raised her own little hell. And it worked. Kerner relented, and managed to get the shipments reinstated some three days later. [EDIT: On re-reading, it’s unclear if Kerner relented directly or if the decision came after McKinlay reached out to Florida’s emergency management team. EDIT 2: McKinlay confirmed to me by email that it was Jared Moskowitz from said state team that overruled. Kerner apparently doesn’t have the authority.]

• But the problem wasn’t isolated to PBC. Though Publix didn’t get exclusive rights elsewhere, they did end up with as much as ~23% of the state's supply at peak, often at the direct expense of hospitals and other community groups. While few questioned that Publix was a useful vendor to have in the mix, many wondered why other groups who’d already been distributing shots and booking appointments suddenly had to call previously confirmed registrants to tell them "yeah, sorry, try Publix's website".

• As a deeper concern, Publix was never required to share where they planned to send the shots. Some stores got them, some didn’t, and many got a limited supply that ran out almost immediately. And the data seems to show that stores in Blacker neighborhoods were much more likely to be left out. (Of the 160k PBC residents vaccinated by February 1st, only 5% were Black or Hispanic, which is about 1/10th their local population proportion.*) Frustratingly, Publix only provided allocation data after shots were in arms, leaving state orgs to figure out which counties and zip codes and neighborhoods were getting too little. Publix was left free to distribute per their own whims as long as recipients were over 65, with no transparency or effective oversight. And despite repeat requests, no copy of a contract or agreement has been produced to date. [*CORRECTION: It’s more like 1/4th when you narrow to just seniors, as the 60+ segment in PBC skews much whiter than younger segments. CBS got it wrong, and I didn’t notice it until a reader corrected me. See longer explanation in my follow-up here.]

• We know all this because local reporters across Florida did their jobs, and well. But DeSantis wasn’t interested in answering their questions, at least in any direct sense. When asked, he and allies seemed keen to just rehash that Publix was a ready partner that many had agreed on. But few ever disputed this! The problem was never Publix being named a distributor. It was Publix receiving profitable allocation at the expense of hospitals and other groups who were already deep into the distribution process. And the lack of democratic controls. And the optics of them having donated $100k to DeSantis’s PAC in December.

• Anyway, this all caught the attention of CBS / 60 Minutes, who decided to report on it themselves. Cue Sunday’s thirteen-and-a-half minute report “Inside Florida’s Chaotic Vaccine Rollout”, which covered an apparent pattern of selection that seemed to consistently benefit WASP-y types, some of whom happened to be prominent GOP/DeSantis donors. The Publix bit was just one concern of six, all but one of which (in my judgment) demanded good answers.

• CBS tried to ask those questions directly, and were repeatedly shot down in their attempts to get DeSantis to sit for an interview. But they were able to get in a question at a March presser about their Publix concern. It was a harsh question, to be sure. But not an unreasonable one in context. And the fact that DeSantis had been asked it more than once or twice prior is actually a point in CBS’s favor, as he hadn’t yet (and still hasn’t) gotten around to really answering it.

• True to form, his roughly three-minute, very loud answer did not answer the fucking question. He then yelled at the CBS reporter for holding on to a false idea that he had just fully “disabused” her of. (For the doubters, we’ll go through his comments line-by-line in the appendix. They add up to exactly nothing.)

• CBS, per their handbook, edited down his response to the most relevant bits, (leaving some two-thirds out), then inserted the remainder into a larger package that pointed to a pattern of behavior they felt he needed to give account for.

• But DeSantis had an ally. The Daily Caller got opportunistically outraged on his behalf and tweeted out a video showing the CBS edit of the exchange followed by the uncut version. This video was then reshared in a different tweet, which broke through into both tech and political Twitter, where the absence of the above context made it seem like CBS's editing was nefarious (as opposed to them just cutting out irrelevant and incorrect things he’d said before that were evasive as to the actual points that he’d been confronted with enough times to understand).

• The net result? CBS is now getting dragged and DeSantis is taking a victory lap WHILE STILL NOT ANSWERING THE FUCKING QUESTIONS.

I trust we get the theme here.

• [EDIT: I have a section below that criticizes CBS for their framing errors, which I should have made clear in this TLDR originally, having told readers that they didn’t need to read the full thing. While I don’t see CBS as equally at fault, nor do I see the criticisms against them as being especially well-informed, that isn’t to say they didn’t miss the mark here. They definitely did.]

---

Appendix

Three main questions to cover:

• What else did the 60 Minutes segment cover outside the Publix deal?

• What did DeSantis say in the uncut version, and what should we make of it?

• What level of criticism should CBS face?

In that order:

I. Beyond Publix

CBS brought up five other major points of contention in their segment, which together I think reasonably constitute a pattern (perhaps an explainable one, but one that looks bad enough to merit a meaningful explanation).

1. The first 1,000 shots made available to PBC all went to the Town of Palm Beach (a tiny island that’s 95% white and very rich). The initial reason given was “they were ready and other’s weren’t”. But the mayor of West Palm Beach (34.4% Black, 12.7x the population, 17.7% the per-capita income) said he’d signed a letter announcing the same preparation, and that he was told after the fact that a mistake had been made (by a state health director whose incredible explanation was “we had a limited amount of vaccine and I didn’t want to run out”).

2. DeSantis overruled the CDC’s guidance on priority, choosing instead to favor seniors across the board. (While this is somewhat defensible from an epidemiological perspective, the concern here is that seniors in Florida are a reliable vote in a swing state, which makes for bad, very avoidable optics.)

3. Though the long-term care home vaccinations were initiated by the federal government, states like Florida played a significant role in administration. And there were somewhat infamous cases of those doses going to rich white folks who were neither residents of the care homes nor of Florida itself — where DeSantis proved unwilling to do much about it beyond cursory finger-wagging.

4. It took DeSantis until January 19th to require proof of residency, at which point rich seniors from outside Florida had already had nearly a month to take advantage of the Learjet-sized loophole (~1.2m shots were already in arms by the time the rule came into effect).

5. While it’s true that DeSantis and company did spread “pop-up” distribution centers around the state, there was an egregious case where one was limited to just two specific zip codes that were abnormally white, abnormally wealthy, and abnormally healthy — where again there was some shadiness about relevant stakeholders not being invited in for the decision-making process. (More on this and a rhyming incident here.)

Add in the Publix thing (pulling shots from hospitals + weirdly limited meetings + no contract + no oversight + high economic value of the contract + dodgy timing of the donation) and I feel like CBS certainly had the right to ask hard, suspicious questions.

And look, DeSantis could have good answers here! None of those things are smoking guns. There could be compelling explanations for all of them! But when CBS reached out to get them, DeSantis deferred. And the answers he’s given elsewhere mostly share the same quality of being some combination of evasive, irrelevant, an uncompelling.

When a journalist has an important public-interest question and they don’t get a good answer to it, what do we hope that they do? Stop asking? CBS pressed for an answer, didn’t really get one, then declined to take the non-answer as a good reason to just drop it. This is…how it’s supposed to work?

(This isn’t to say that CBS did nothing wrong in their edit. We’ll get into that after we’ve gone through the governor’s excised comments.)

II. The DeSantis Cut

Quoting him from Wednesday:

I gave a very detailed answer, and that answer was edited out. Every single fact that I discussed was edited out. Everything they left on the cutting room floor was designed to take away all the evidence against their narrative.

Except, lol, no.

You can read the transcript for yourself here. But I’ll quote the sections that CBS left out in what follows, briefly addressing each in turn.

So first of all ... the first pharmacies that had [the vaccines] were CVS and Walgreens. And they had a long-term care mission, so they were going to the long-term care facilities. They got vaccine in the middle of December, they started going to the long-term care facilities the third week of December to do LTCs. So that was their mission, that was very important and we trusted them to do that.

This was a red herring. The program in question was federal (i.e., DeSantis wasn’t allocating any shots to them from state-controlled supplies). Saying “we trusted them to do that” gives an impression of some kind of mandate coming from him. But that never happened. And it’s a total aside anyway.

As we got into January we wanted to expand the distribution points. So yes, you had the counties, you had some drive-thru sites, you had hospitals that were doing a lot. But we wanted to get it into communities more, so we reached out to other retail pharmacies — Publix, Walmart. Obviously CVS and Walgreens had to finish that mission, and we said we're going to use you as soon as you're done with that.

First, this is an argument for adding Publix to the vendor mix. BUT NO ONE OBJECTED TO THAT. And exactly none of this would explain why pulling already-assigned, already-scheduled shots from hospitals was a good idea.

Also, why couldn’t CVS and Walgreens have done both at the same time (which they did in at least Boston). Excluding them because they were already involved on the federal side doesn’t make any sense when the feds were happy to give Publix shots to add to their state supply. Why would it work one way and not the other?

For Publix, they were the first one to raise their hands (and) say they were ready to go. And you know what? We did it on a trial basis. I had three counties. I actually showed up that weekend and talked to seniors across four different Publix — How was the experience? Is this good? Should you think this is a way to go? — and it was 100% positive. So we expanded it and then folks liked it.

Publix was (maybe) the first retailer to say “we’re ready to help”. But do you know who else was ready? THOSE ALREADY DISTRIBUTING THE GODDAMN SHOTS.

Otherwise this is just an irrelevant anecdote about old people and survivorship bias.

And I can tell you, if you look at a place like Palm Beach County, they were kind of struggling at first in terms of the senior numbers. I went, 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, we can do this. They calculated that 90% of their seniors live within a mile and a half of a Publix, and they said, We think that would be the easiest thing for our residents.

(The bits in bold were left in by CBS. Note the deceptive use of “all” in “all the folks”.)

At first glance, cutting that 90% stat does seem pretty prejudicial. But I’ve asked around and couldn’t find a source for it outside of DeSantis himself. (A PBC public affairs official told me “I don’t think we gave him that stat, and I don’t recall our staff using it anywhere.”) So CBS did what the other papers should have done and deprecated an unsupported claim that taken at face value would slant the story.

But even if the stat is true for PBC, it’s certainly not true for Florida as a whole. And it discounts that some Publix stores don’t have pharmacies. And it elides that Publix only sent the shots to certain stores, using a mysterious decision matrix that they were never required to disclose.

So we did that, and what ended up happening was, you had 65 Publix in Palm Beach. Palm Beach is one of the biggest counties, one of the most elderly counties. We’ve done almost 75% of the seniors in Palm Beach, and the reason is because you have the strong retail footprint. So our way has been multi-faceted, it has worked — and we're also now very much expanding CVS and Walgreens now that they've completed the long-term care mission.

If you look at the numbers through the end of February (i.e., covering when Publix's exclusive rights were at peak effect), PBC actually came in 14th out of 67 for vaccinated seniors. If this was entirely (or even mostly) thanks to Publix, that would be something of a minor win. But if we have any data to support this, I haven’t seen it (though I’ll happily pay a reader $20 if they can find it, just in the interests of fairness).

But again it’s all a total aside anyway, AS NO ONE WAS ARGUING AGAINST ADDING PUBLIX TO THE MIX. It was about the specifics of the deal. You don’t increase vaccination rates by taking shots that are already scheduled and giving them to someone else. You just shift who gets it. And shifting that allocation to an online portal that favors those with more resources (e.g., digital devices, stable internet, free time) is not going to shift towards equitable outcomes.

I trust we get the point here. DeSantis’s contention of “everything they left [out] was designed to take away all the evidence against their narrative” was disingenuous.

Anyway, final section.

III. Faded Glory

Do I think that CBS deserves the same level of condemnation here as DeSantis or The Daily Caller? No, because I’m not on drugs (chemical or partisan).

Does that mean CBS did a fully defensible job? Also no.

• “Pay to play” is a loaded term that doesn’t help anything. I don’t think anyone believes that DeSantis actually took someone aside and said “bribes or GTFO”, or that Publix committed a crime. Garden-variety cronyism is bad enough.

• CBS’s main defense for the cuts was fitting the footage to their traditional format. But “muh tradition” is a bad argument when regressives make it, and it’s a bad argument when institutionalists make it. Even though none of what DeSantis said really helped his case, CBS needed to understand the optics here. It’s fine that they had the means of deconstructing the bits they left out. But you have to actually do it! Your political opposites are never going to charitably assume “oh I’m sure they had reasonable editorial reasons for cutting the bits where the accused seemed to be giving a passionate and detailed defense”.

• CBS’s statements post-blowup should have looked like this post. Walk people through why the cut bits didn’t matter. Give context. Show your work. If you can’t be bothered to do that and instead just lazily take the line of “for over 50 years the facts reported by 60 Minutes have often stirred debate and prompted strong reactions…our story Sunday night speaks for itself”, your journalism sucks and you deserve to get shamed.

I hope the shame works.

---

Editor’s Note: The original version of this article was posted late afternoon Friday, April 9th. I’ve come back in late evening April 21st to add in a correction and two marked edits, and to link the sequel that will be going out by email tomorrow morning. All other edits have been cosmetic.

---