THE MEDIA CAN'T STOP TWISTING THE TRUTH ABOUT FLORIDA'S PARENTAL-RIGHTS LAW

National Review

 

The Media Can’t Stop Twisting the Truth about Florida’s Parental-Rights Law

By BECKET ADAMS

March 17, 2024 6:30 AM

 

DeSantis notches another victory against left-wing propaganda, yet the coverage continues to obscure what actually happened.

 

Activists who sought to block Florida’s Parental Rights in Education law settled with the state last week in an agreement that leaves the 2022 legislation intact and unchanged.

 

“We fought hard to ensure this law couldn’t be maligned in court, as it was in the public arena by the media and large corporate actors,” said General Counsel Ryan Newman. “We are victorious, and Florida’s classrooms will remain a safe place under the Parental Rights in Education Act.”

 

He’s right to take a victory lap. The settlement not only vindicates the law’s authors, who’ve maintained this entire time that the measure restricts only the instruction of gender ideology and sexual topics in K–12 public schools, but it also underscores the dishonesty of the bill’s critics.

 

From the very beginning, left-wing activists accused the bill of criminalizing all discussion of topics related to sexual orientation and LGBT issues, including even mentions of the word “gay.” It does no such thing. The bill focuses exclusively on instruction. Nevertheless, critics dubbed it the “Don’t Say Gay” law. The word “gay” is not even in the bill. Yet major media, including the Washington Post and the Associated Press, eagerly mainstreamed the obviously misleading activist-branded nickname, even though the bill doesn’t do what the nickname suggests. Last week’s settlement proves this is the case.

 

The settlement, which left-wingers weirdly claim as a victory, stipulates only that the state must “clarify” that the law does not bar something it never barred in the first place. The clarification will reiterate precisely what the law says when it holds that “classroom instruction by school personnel or third parties on sexual orientation or gender identity may not occur in kindergarten through grade 3 or in a manner that is not age appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards” (my emphasis).

 

Nothing has changed because of the settlement. The law stands precisely as written, with its exact meaning intact.

 

Amazingly, even after the settlement proved the law’s critics wrong, and even after it revealed compliant media as plain lazy and dishonest, this is how the same newsrooms that helped popularize “Don’t Say Gay” have reported the news:

 

“BREAKING: Sexual orientation, gender ID can be talked about in Florida classrooms under lawsuit settlement,” reported the Associated Press.

 

They could always be discussed.

 

The Washington Post reported, “Settlement in Florida ‘don’t say gay’ lawsuit says it’s okay to say gay.”

 

It was always okay.

 

Let’s turn to Bulwark reporter and intrepid Florida man Marc Caputo, himself no great fan of the state’s governor, to underscore how badly major media failed the public. “The settlement literally restates what the law clearly says,” Caputo explained last week on Twitter. “I said this [at] the time that calling it the ‘Don’t Say Gay’ law was inaccurate. But we kept saying it anyway. Now the settlement proves the name was misleading.”

 

He added,

 

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The media, by uncritically adopting the phrase “Don’t Say Gay,” bears a huge amount of responsibility for this misunderstanding. The bill sponsors repeatedly stated it was about “instruction” not “discussion”— and they changed the bill accordingly. … This is a great example of how social media campaigns bias news coverage — especially on cable the news media plays cleanup without admitting fault.

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While we’re on the topic of the press’s ever-collapsing standards, it’s worth remembering the agony that reporters and editors experienced in the mid Aughts when the term “Obamacare” first appeared. Was this term, created and tossed around by the president’s critics, derogatory? Was it — was it racist? Did newsrooms have a duty to ignore the ever-popular shorthand for the Affordable Care Act and adhere strictly to the legislation’s actual name? Oh, the agony!

 

It wasn’t until after President Obama himself embraced the term “Obamacare” that major media felt brave enough to adopt the word that everyone else was already using.

 

In 2013, Stuart Seidel, National Public Radio’s then–managing editor for standards and practice, recalled in a note to NPR’s ombudsman:

 

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Republicans coined the term “Obamacare” during the debate over the Affordable Care Act, seemingly as a means to generate opposition to the president’s health care initiative. During that time, NPR avoided using the term “Obamacare.” Since passage of the legislation and its enactment into law, the president has said he rather likes the term “Obamacare” and it has gradually come into the vernacular as a shorthand for referring to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. I’m confident that NPR listeners and readers understand that whatever its origins, the term “Obamacare” has lost its pedigree as a politically charged term.

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For the record, neither Governor DeSantis nor any architects of the Parental Rights in Education law have embraced “Don’t Say Gay.” On the contrary, they’re adamant that the activist branding is misleading.

 

On March 12, 2024, after plaintiffs agreed to a settlement that left Florida’s Parental Rights in Education law unchanged and intact, NPR aired a news segment under the headline “Court overturns large part of Florida’s so-called ‘don’t say gay’ law.”

 

How far we’ve come since those innocent days of “Obamacare” and supposedly worrying about getting it right.