On Friday morning, after the sports website Outkick responded to the “60 Minutes” hit piece on Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis by announcing they were selling a T-shirt emblazoned “60 Minutes of lies,” DeSantis quickly responded, quipping, “I know I’ll be ordering mine!”
I know I'll be ordering mine! https://t.co/3U7i0IgLom
— Ron DeSantis (@GovRonDeSantis) April 9, 2021
As The Daily Wire has chronicled over the last week, the furor over last Sunday’s hit piece by “60 Minutes” was precipitated by its deceptive reporting in which the show elided crucial parts of DeSantis’ answer to a query from a “60 Minutes” reporter.
Reporter Sharyn Alfonsi asked DeSantis about the way Florida implemented its vaccination program. As The Daily Wire noted:
In the clip, Alfonsi suggested that Publix, the largest grocery store chain in Florida, had engaged in a pay-to-play scheme with DeSantis where they donated money to his campaign in exchange for him awarding a contract to the grocery store chain to host vaccinations. CBS edited the interaction between DeSantis and Alfonsi when she showed up to a press conference a few weeks ago and repeatedly confronted the governor. The network cut out a lengthy portion of DeSantis’ response in which he explains what happened and how decisions were made.
Read the transcript of the interaction and how it was edited is here.
Publix fired back with this statement:
The irresponsible suggestion that there was a connection between campaign contributions made to Governor DeSantis and our willingness to join other pharmacies in support of the state’s vaccine distribution efforts is absolutely false and offensive. We are proud of our pharmacy associates for administering more than 1.5 million doses of vaccine to date and for joining other retailers in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia to do our part to help our communities emerge from the pandemic.
Former Florida state Rep. Jared Moskowitz, a Democrat, the director of Florida’s Division of Emergency Management, also fired a barrage at CBS, tweeting, “@60Minutes I said this before and I’ll say it again. @Publix was recommended by [FL Division of Emergency Management] and [Florida Dept. Health] as the other pharmacies were not ready to start. Period! Full Stop! No one from the Governor[‘]s office suggested Publix. It’s just absolute malarkey.”
As The Daily Wire noted, Palm Beach Democratic Mayor David Kerner issued a statement: “I watched the ’60 Minutes’ segment on Palm Beach County last night and feel compelled to issue this statement. The reporting was not just based on bad information – it was intentionally false. I know this because I offered to provide my insight into Palm Beach County’s vaccination efforts and ’60 Minutes’ declined. … They know that the governor came to Palm Beach County and met with me and the county administrator and we asked to expand the state’s partnership with Publix to Palm Beach County. We also discussed our own local plans to expand mass vaccinations centers throughout the county, which the Governor has been incredibly supportive. We asked and he delivered. They had that information, and they left it out because it kneecaps their narrative.”
After CBS insisted that they edited the DeSantis piece for “clarity,” DeSantis himself fired back at CBS, “But what they didn’t tell you also … is when there was a need in a more rural part of the county, like near Lake Okeechobee, we set up a separate site in a small town called Pahokee. They didn’t tell you that, they didn’t tell you that we were doing African American church vaccination drives before Publix ever gave a single shot. They didn’t tell you that. They didn’t tell you that hospitals were doing shots starting in the third week of December because it didn’t fit the narrative. They don’t believe in facts.”
On Wednesday, The Daily Wire reported, the edited remarks scandal “appears to be growing as newly released emails show that the show did not include remarks that DeSantis’ office sent them two days before the show aired.”