Wickham: Failure to provide context, explanation evident in coverage of DeSantis victory

It’s been just over a month since Ron DeSantis’ big reelection victory, and many media organizations have already crowned Florida’s Republican governor the heir apparent to Donald Trump. In a way, that’s understandable. Trump’s obsession with undoing the results of the 2020 presidential election has driven the former president to openly consort with Holocaust deniers and racists which, seemingly, has pushed him to the brink of political madness. But the media’s fawning over DeSantis is driven by more than Trump’s decline. It is born of the kind of me-too journalism that involves far more repeating than reporting. In winning by nearly 20 percentage points in what was expected to be a close gubernatorial race in a battleground state, DeSantis is being credited with moving Florida solidly to the Republican end of this nation’s political spectrum.