DeSantis Calls Media’s Jan 6 Coverage ‘Nauseating,’ and a ‘Politicized Charlie Foxtrot’

By Debra Heine

Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis mocked the corporate media’s “nauseating” coverage of the Jan. 6 Commemoration at the Capitol Thursday, calling it “Christmas” for Democrats, and a “politicized Charlie Foxtrot,” using  military slang for a poorly-managed operation, or “clusterf-ck.”
 
​”This is their Christmas,” ​DeSantis said, meaning Washington and New York-based media outlets. “They are going to take this and milk this for anything they can to be able to smear anyone who ever supported Donald Trump​,” he added. DeSantis made the remarks during a news conference about COVID-19 testing in West Palm Beach. The governor took a number of questions from reporters on COVID-related issues. The last question related to the Jan. 6 anniversary of the Capitol Hill riot.
 
The likely 2024 presidential contender told reporters that “obviously” he would not be watching any of the media’s histrionic coverage.
 
“I don’t expect anything good to come out of anything that [House Speaker Nancy] Pelosi and the gang are doing,” he said. “I don’t expect anything from the corporate press to be enlightening. I think it’s going to be nauseating, quite frankly, and I’m not going to do it.”
 

 
DeSantis compared the media’s obsessive nonstop coverage of the Jan. 6 riot to their light coverage of the congressional baseball shooting in 2017, when a left-wing activist opened fire on Republican lawmakers as they were practicing for the next day’s Congressional Baseball Game for Charity.
 
On June 14, 2017, Bernie Sanders supporter James Hodgkinson came to the park with a GOP kill list, and shot U.S. House Majority Whip Steve Scalise, U.S. Capitol police officer Crystal Griner, congressional aide Zack Barth, and lobbyist Matt Mika.
 
DeSantis, who was one of the 24 Republicans who was in the park that day, said that the Capitol Police protected them and saved lives.
 
But the media, he noted, turned the attempted slaughter into “a one-day, two-day story” because “that’s not something that the Capitol-based press wanted to talk about.”
 
The governor said the reason for the media’s disinterest was “because it totally undercuts their preferred narratives. Jan. 6 allows them to create narratives that are negative about people who supported Donald Trump.”
 

 
“I just look back and compare when I was in Congress, what event that we faced was the attempted assassination of Republican members of Congress on the baseball game,” DeSantis exclaimed.
 
“I was actually on the field, this guy, who was a big Bernie Sanders guy, it definitely was a politically motivated attack, came up and pulled his van in…we walked out to go to the car and we came in contact with him. He wanted to know if it was Republicans out there.”
 
The governor went on to blast Democrats who have compared the Jan 6 riot to the al Qaeda terrorist attacks against the United States on September 11, 2001, and questioned the widespread use of the term, “insurrection” to describe a protest that got out of control.

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