(Republicaninformer.com)- Governor Ron DeSantis’s press office revealed last week that it would turn down interview requests from NBC News and MSNBC until host Andrea Mitchell corrects a “blatant lie” she made about the governor’s education policies.
During Mitchell’s one-on-one interview with Vice President Kamala Harris the previous week, Mitchell presented a question in which she misrepresented the Florida governor’s education policy by claiming that DeSantis was preventing Flordia students from learning about slavery and “the aftermath of slavery.”
In a tweet last Wednesday, the governor’s press secretary Bryan Griffin notified the networks that until Mitchell apologizes for the false claim “and your track record improves,” the Governor will not appear on either network.
Griffin included in his tweet a copy of his letter to NBC News’s bookers and producers in which he wrote that unless the networks “display a consistent track record” of reporting the truth, the Governor will not agree to future appearances.
In response to Griffin’s letter, at the end of her Wednesday morning broadcast on MSNBC, Mitchell added a “postscript,” in which she said that she had been “imprecise” in how she summarized the governor’s education policy, noting that DeSantis doesn’t oppose teaching slavery in schools.
Rather than quit while she was ahead, Mitchell added that DeSantis opposes teaching African American studies which some “historians and teachers” claim make it “all but impossible” for students to have a broader understanding of the “context behind slavery.”
Needless to say, Mitchell’s “correction” didn’t cut it for DeSantis’s press office.
In a tweet responding to Mitchell’s couched apology, deputy press secretary Jeremy Redfern called out her use of the word “imprecise,” explaining that what she said was a lie and her apology was “not an apology.” Redfern asserted that the corporate media must not be permitted to “be the gatekeepers of truth.”
Press secretary Griffin said in a tweet that Mitchell’s so-called apology is “a typical non-apology” in which she doubled down on her “original lie.”
