SNL adopts the media’s dishonest ‘don’t say gay’ framing.
Welcome back to “Forgotten Fact-Checks,” a weekly column produced by National Review’s News Desk. This week, we dive into the dishonest reaction to a new Florida law, fact check President Biden’s State of the Union address, and hit more media misses.
Don’t Say What?
A new bill emerging out of the Florida state legislature is causing quite a stir. On Saturday Night Live, “Weekend Update” host Colin Jost explained that “the law actually means that you can’t acknowledge that gay exists at all,” and a number of outlets have dubbed it the “Don’t Say Gay” Bill.
Kate McKinnon stops by the Update desk to discuss Florida's Don't Say Gay Bill pic.twitter.com/NjLd7HXXXq
— Saturday Night Live – SNL (@nbcsnl) March 6, 2022
But that’s not what the bill does. In fact, it prohibits teachers responsible for educating the youngest students from including sexual orientation as part of their classroom curriculum, on the grounds that the complicated topic of human sexuality is better left to parents when children are at such an impressionable age. The bill states 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.”
And it’s no mystery why Jost is confused about the bill, as countless major media outlets have adopted the misleading “don’t say gay” shorthand.
While there is a legitimate case to be made that the bill could be interpreted in an overly broad manner, it does not, as Jost and many members of the media have suggested, ban teachers from referring to their gay family members or to their own spouses. It just restricts schools from addressing these weighty and sometimes explicit topics with young children as part of their classroom curricula.
As NR’s Caroline Downey reported:
Republican State Senator Dennis Baxley, who spearheaded the bill, told Fox News it simply ensures that teachers avoid a sensitive subject that’s better left to parents in the early stages of childhood development. He suggested it’s a red flag when instructors jump into sexual education so early on with kids.
“Some discussions are for (having) with your parents,” Baxley said. “And I think when you start having sexual-type discussions with children, you’re entering a very dangerous zone. Your awareness should pop up right away, this isn’t teaching.”
Baxley assures critics that the bill doesn’t prohibit private conversations between students and teachers about sex and gender and applies only to “procedures” and “curriculum.”
The media’s disdain for Florida governor Ron DeSantis is well-documented by now, but using kindergarteners as pawns in their war against him marks a new low.
Comeback ‘Kid’
Joe Biden’s first State of the Union address was received with widespread acclaim by the press. By the next day, CNN was asking “Is Biden the Comeback Kid?” in a glowing piece that included almost universally positive reviews from the commentators it quoted (only Scott Jennings and Alice Stewart reviewed Biden’s performance negatively). Subsections included “Americans were reminded why they elected Biden,” “Biden may be restarting his engines,” “Biden delivers a sense of possibility,” and “Biden nailed it.”
Close to a week later, 52 percent of Americans disapprove and 42 percent approve of the president’s job performance, per the FiveThirtyEight average.
Most Americans, it turns out, were less enamored with Biden’s speech than the pundit class was.
And for good reason. Understandably, Biden tried to portray the unified Western response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine as a victory. “He [Russian President Vladimir Putin] thought the West and NATO wouldn’t respond. And he thought he could divide us at home. Putin was wrong. We were ready,” declared the president.
But for most Americans, the mere fact that Russia moved forward with a massive invasion of a nation of close to 45 million people is evidence of a failure of leadership on the part of the U.S. The blow to American power is only compounded by the economic consequences; gas prices have been skyrocketing for months and the sanctions levied on Russia have only worsened the problem. For this problem, Biden professed to have a solution. America will release “30 million barrels from our own Strategic Petroleum Reserve,” but this is only a drop in the bucket, as well as an imprudent response that will deplete a measure of last resort.
Biden misled Americans on not just his own record, but his predecessor’s. Touting his own economic record, he claimed that “unlike the $2 Trillion tax cut passed in the previous administration that benefitted the top 1 percent of Americans, the American Rescue Plan helped working people — and left no one behind.” And yet, contra Biden, studies show that the vast majority of Americans received a tax cut under the Trump administration’s Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017.
Even less convincing was his assertion that he would fight inflation by “lower[ing] your costs, not your wages.” If it were only so easy!
He also claimed that “gun manufacturers are the only industry in America that can’t be sued,” and called for that to be remedied. In truth, they just can’t be held liable for “harm solely caused by the criminal or unlawful misuse of firearm products or ammunition products by others when the product functioned as designed and intended,” the same way a car manufacturer couldn’t be held responsible if someone drove into a crowd.
Americans generally approved of the speech, as they always do, but if there’s a comeback underway, it hasn’t yet begun.
Headline Fail of the Week
For the second week in a row, HuffPost wins the award for “Headline Fail of the Week.” This week, the outlet published an article: “Gov. Ron DeSantis Bullies Teens Into Taking Off Masks For Press Conference.”
The article goes on to claim the Florida governor “scolded a group of teenagers . . . for wearing masks while they stood behind him during a press conference at the University of South Florida.”
The piece states that a “visibly annoyed DeSantis” told the mask-wearing students: “You do not have to wear those masks. Please take them off. Honestly, it’s not doing anything. We’ve got to stop with this Covid theater. So if you want to wear it, fine. But this is ridiculous.”
However, astute listeners may notice that while DeSantis suggested the students remove their face coverings, he did say: “So if you want to wear it, fine.”
Several students take off their masks to reveal big smiles, while others choose to keep their face coverings on.
DeSantis, and other Republicans, have fought to give Americans the freedom to choose whether or not to wear masks or to receive Covid-19 vaccinations. The governor’s comments amounted to more a reminder of that freedom than a bullying of teenagers.
Still, the “bullying” narrative was not confined to HuffPost. MSNBC’s Joy Reid asked: “If Florida is so ‘free,’ why does DeSantis think he has the right to bully and give orders to other people’s kids?”
MSNBC’s Chris Hayes took a similar approach: “Incredible [sic] predictable how conservative ideology goes from ‘Hey it should be my choice; dont tell me what to do!’ to ‘We are *abolutely* [sic] gonna tell you what to do once we have the power to do it.’”
Media Misses
-NBC News published an article entitled: “’Defcon 1 moment’: New Spanish-language conservative network fuels fresh Dem fears over disinfo, Latino outreach.”
“Democrats continue to sound the alarm about Spanish-language right-wing disinformation on social media and local radio, particularly in Miami, which is also Americano’s home base,” explains the piece, which struggles to define “misinformation” as anything other than a non-progressive perspective and includes subtle paternalism from Democratic strategists who fret that American Latinos might not think and vote like a monolith.
–The Federalist exposed NBC’s Josh Lederman for promising not to make a Biden nominee’s history of supporting eco-terrorism the primary focus of an upcoming article. In an email requesting comment from the Department of the Interior for an article on Biden’s nominee for director of the Bureau of Land Management, Lederman vowed to tread lightly: “We will not go overboard on it or anything. It’s a legitimate story given the position to which she has been nominated. But we will point out that a) she did not participate in spiking trees herself, b) she was not charged, c) this was decades ago when she was in her early 20s, and d) her record is otherwise unblemished.”
-Presented without comment:
https://twitter.com/HashtagGriswold/status/1498867210869219334