Ron DeSantis defends hiding in ‘conservative media bubble’

Florida’s Governor is taking questions about whether he waited too long to talk to potentially adversarial media outlets during his national launch.

During a Sunday interview on Fox News’ “Mediabuzz,” Ron DeSantis explained how the “daily churn” of the presidential campaign compelled him to re-calibrate a strategy, established for years, of carefully curating his media presence while working the Florida market primarily.

Host Howard Kurtz asked if he “should have broken out of the conservative media bubble much earlier,” and DeSantis said he actually expanded who he did interviews with shortly after his launch.

“I actually had been doing that starting in the summer,” he said, acknowledging that in his home state he essentially sidestepped the mainstream press.

“You know, in Florida, it was a little bit different because the national corporate media was largely just trying to impose narratives on my state. And my view was I can just go out every day. I get the local coverage and that, that actually worked,” DeSantis said.

The Governor elides details here, of course. The uber-friendly “Florida Standard” blog provided friendly coverage with first-look access on the Governor’s Office initiatives. The “Florida’s Voice” website likewise has provided a lot of political cover for DeSantis. And national outlets like Fox News and Newsmax allowed the Governor to offer unchallenged takes on controversies of the day, with the former even getting to host “exclusive” bill signing events.

All this suggests that “local coverage” may have been one part of the strategy, but was not the whole thing.

“I think when you’re talking about a national campaign, you know, it’s just a daily churn and I think that I’ve shown that I can go out and handle all this stuff in ways that like a Nikki Haley has obviously had trouble,” DeSantis said.

Indeed, DeSantis has been able to take the tough questions on the trail from outlets he never would have sat down with before a few months ago. But as Sunday’s segment makes clear, there are those even in the conservative ecosphere who wonder what took him so long to take his case outside of their media bubble.