A Florida bill that would require bloggers to register with the state has drawn a flood of media attention in recent days — and bipartisan condemnation.
Filed in the Florida Senate by Jason Brodeur of Seminole County on February 28, the legislation stipulates that bloggers who write about elected state officials and receive compensation will be fined (reportedly up to $2,500) if they fail to “register with the appropriate office.”
“The idea that bloggers criticizing a politician should register with the government is insane,” tweeted former House Speaker Newt Gingrich.
Charles C.W. Cooke of National Review concurred.
“The bill is an unconstitutional, moronic disgrace, and the guy who wrote it, Senator Jason Brodeur of Seminole County, is an embarrassment to the GOP,” wrote Cooke.
Condemnation of the bill is warranted. One needn’t be a member of the Federalist Society or the ACLU to recognize the bill is unconstitutional and an affront to anyone who values the First Amendment, which carves out clear protections for free speech and a free press.
Yet as Cooke also notes, the legislation is not a serious proposal. It currently has the support of a single lawmaker: Brodeur himself.
Nevertheless, the bill generated an onslaught of media attention. It was the lead story on the Drudge Report for days, and has inspired dozens of articles.
Why the bill garnered such a firestorm of national attention is not hard to guess. We are talking Florida, home of Ron DeSantis—the conservative governor of the Sunshine State who appears to be gearing up for a 2024 presidential run. Fresh off a landslide electoral victory over former governor Charlie Crist, DeSantis looks formidable, which is why he finds himself not just the center of attention.
Because of this, everything in Florida is magnified (much like it was during the pandemic, when the Florida governor was excoriated daily in the national press for embracing Covid policies that look like common sense today). The Florida governor’s battles with the media — both local and national — have been intense and highly visible. In February, his office announced it would boycott appearances on MSNBC and NBC News after television journalist Andrea Mitchell falsely claimed the governor believed that “slavery and the aftermath of slavery should not be taught to Florida schoolchildren.” (Mitchell later conceded she was “imprecise” with her language.)
Predictably, online critics once again swarmed. Media highlighted the legislation to suggest DeSantis was targeting the free press, and some online even suggested DeSantis supports the bill — even though there was zero evidence that he did.
On Wednesday, DeSantis removed all doubt, saying he does not support the legislation and that it was irresponsible of the media to imply he was by using his photo on articles about the bill.
The attacks are designed to damage DeSantis, but he could still use the flood of media attention to his advantage.
Instead of issuing a single statement that he doesn’t support the bill, DeSantis should condemn the legislation and explain why. He could point out that a free press and free speech are far too important to liberty to infringe, something many of his political and media critics have failed to do in recent years.
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and free speech advocate Glenn Greenwald has long pointed out that many of the loudest proponents of social media censorship have been the media themselves, as well as Congressional Democrats, who held numerous committee hearings in recent years urging CEOs to more aggressively suppress speech. (The Twitter Files show an even more intense effort to control speech has been waged by government officials behind the scenes.) Most of the calls for censorship are done under the guise of protecting users from “misinformation” or “hate speech.” But there’s something else they tend to have in common.
“[T]heir demands almost always, if not always, mean silencing those who are opposed to their ideology and political agenda,” Greenwald has pointed out..
The Florida bill may very well be a tempest in a teapot, since it has virtually no chance of passing. But it’s also a golden opportunity for DeSantis.
By taking a bolder stance for free speech and a free press, he could neutralize his fiercest critics, chastise the media for its hypocrisy, and — most importantly — show that principles matter more than politics.
Jonathan Miltimore (@Miltimore79) is managing editor of the Foundation for Economic Education. An alumni of the Institute for Humane Studies journalism program, he formerly was a reporter for the Panama City News Herald, senior editor of the History Channel magazine, and served in the speechwriting department for President George W. Bush.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of The Daily Caller.