Home Cooking: Two Small Florida News Sites Loom Large with Friendly GOP Coverage

By Michael Lovito, February 14, 2023

The appointment late last month of Richard Corcoran, the former Education Commissioner of Florida and a staunch ally of Governor Ron DeSantis, as interim president of the New College of Florida, a small public liberal arts school, was big news. But the major political victory for likely White House aspirant DeSantis wasn’t broken by the New York Times or even a Florida paper like the Miami Herald. Instead, it was scooped by The Florida Standard, a conservative-leaning website that began operations just months earlier, in August 2022.

The Florida Standard and Florida’s Voice, another right-leaning news site covering the Sunshine State, aren’t just a pair of new publications catering to conservatives skeptical of mainstream media. They are two pieces of a larger strategy by Florida Republicans to reshape the state’s media landscape. Despite their professed independence, the sites appear to coordinate their coverage with DeSantis and other Florida Republicans in an attempt to portray the party and its members in a positive light.

It’s an approach that has garnered criticism from mainstream journalists, and one that may have less impact if DeSantis decides to run for president. For now, though, it’s helped burnish DeSantis’ reputation as the “anti-woke governor” and promoted the idea that Florida is not just a haven for conservatives, but a model for how a unified right would govern the country as a whole.

A Disillusioned Conservative

After receiving two journalism degrees from SUNY Plattsburgh, Florida’s Voice founder Brendon Leslie began his reporting career at Blue Ridge News 11 in Lancaster Country, Pennsylvania before eventually moving on to WINK News, a CBS affiliate in Fort Myers, Florida. A year into his three-year contract at WINK, Leslie says, he became disillusioned with what he believed was the station’s liberal bias.

“I quickly realized that corporate media has no interest in reporting the news and is focused on clickbait,” Leslie told TheRighting via email. “I covered county politics in Lee County. They have a great conservative board of commissioners. My producers wanted me to amplify the minority and radical left. Always wanted a ‘controversy’ – so, I quit in 2019 and built my own thing from the ground up.” (WINK did not respond to The Righting’s request for comment.)

Leslie’s “thing” was originally titled Florida’s Conversative Voice, and according to him it began with a fairly modest audience – only 500 followers on Facebook and 250 followers on Twitter. Today, the rebranded Florida’s Voice has over 50,000 followers on both major social media platforms, and, according to Leslie, it attracted approximately one million readers in 2022 and generated “hundreds of millions of interactions” on social media.

The site’s staff has grown since 2019, as well. In addition to Leslie, the current Florida’s Voice team includes editor-in-chief Lydia Nusbaum, an executive assistant, an assistant editor in chief, a production manager and four reporters.

Stolen Elections, January 6th and Lots of Allegations

Outside of written news and opinion pieces, Florida’s Voice also produces short videos via Leslie’s YouTube account. They mostly focus on criticizing the mainstream media and dissident Florida Republicans like former state representative Anthony Sabatini and Jacksonville mayoral candidate LeAnna Cumber. It’s also home to the Patriot Talk Show, an hour-long show hosted on the conservative-favored video platform Rumble that’s shot at Seed to Table, a large grocery store in Naples, Florida. Seed to Table is owned by Alfie Oakes, a Republican donor and prominent advertiser on Florida’s Voice who has repeatedly claimed that the 2020 and 2022 elections were stolen. In 2021, Oakes organized a group of protestorswho gathered outside the Capitol on January 6th, a group that included Brendon Leslie. Leslie entered the Capitol but claims to have done so only to document the unfolding events.

In addition to its cozy relationship with Oakes, Florida’s Voice has been dogged by allegations that it trades favorable coverage for advertising dollars and consulting fees. According to an investigation published by Thomas Kennedy in The Florida Squeeze, Florida Republican Party Chair Joe Gruters, who was accused of sexually harassing a male aide in 2021, paid a $5,000 consulting fee to BL Friends LLP, a business owned by Leslie, in April of that year. On July 21, 2021, Florida’s Voice published an article criticizing media coverage of the Gruters incident (Gruters would be cleared of wrongdoing by a third-party probe). While this payment alone doesn’t prove the existence of a quid pro quo arrangement between Florida’s Voice and the Gruters, Leslie’s willingness to accept money from a politician he covers raises questions about Florida’s Voice’s professed editorial independence.

“I don’t mind advocacy journalism. I don’t mind partisanship,” Kennedy, who has written for left-leaning outlets like Occupy Democrats and Latino Rebels, said. “I mean, I do that. I think it’s part of our First Amendment rights. My problem is that [Leslie] is taking money from corporate and political actors and he’s not disclosing it to his readers. That is just dishonest.”

Kennedy also claims to have obtained communications that show that Florida’s Voice is considered a “friendly” outlet by the DeSantis administration, and that they receive advanced notice of DeSantis press events along with other conservative outlets like The Daily Caller, The Federalist, and Breitbart.

In an email to TheRighting, Leslie dismissed Kennedy’s allegations.

“If you quote Thomas Kennedy, a man on the [Florida Department of Law Enforcement] watchlist, complete and total Democrat [sic] shill working for Occupy Democrats, then you and I have nothing more to discuss,” he said. “Do not amplify a crazy person who has no following.”

Joe Gruters and Chris Hall did not respond to TheRighting’s request for comment.

Easy Access, Murky Origins

The Florida Standard’s origins are a bit murkier than those of Florida’s Voice. The site was only a day old when it made a splash last August, landing an exclusive interview with DeSantis shortly after the governor turned down an appearance on “The View.” According to Max Tani of Semafor, the site was able to gain access to DeSantis because The Florida Standard itself is “the brainchild of pro-DeSantis donors in Florida, who wanted to start a right-of-center publication to push back against what they saw as unfair legacy media coverage of the governor.”

On February 9th, Jason Garcia of the Substack newsletter Taking Rents published a report that seems to provide evidence that the DeSantis administration coordinated with The Florida Standard to stoke negative coverage of Andrew Warren, the Hillsborough County state attorney suspended by DeSantis for refusing to enforce the state’s 15-week abortion ban. TheRighting has not independently confirmed the claims made by Tani or Garcia.

The Florida Standard’s editor-in-chief is Will Witt, who began his career in conservative activism when he joined the University of Colorado’s Turning Point USA chapter while an undergraduate. According to an article in Rolling Stone, Witt dropped out of Colorado and became a fulltime TPUSA employee, touring college campuses across the country to protest affirmative action and political correctness. In 2018, Witt joined conservative education non-profit PragerU, where he worked as a social media manager and conducted man-on-the-street style interviews meant to ridicule liberal college students.

Unlike Florida’s Voice, which  rarely reports on stories beyond the state’s borders, The Florida Standard casts a wider net. In January, editor Jonas Vesterberg concluded a five-part series titled “The Death Protocol” critical of the nationwide COVID-19 response. The site continues to publish articles critical of the safety and effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines.

The Mainstream Media Awaits, Mistakes and All

Complaining that the media displays a liberal bias has been a hallmark of conservative rhetoric since Spiro Agnew described the Nixon-era press as “nattering nabobs of negativism.” But DeSantis’ status as a potential 2024 contender has attracted a level of national attention to Florida state politics that even some mainstream journalists concede is not always healthy.

“We’ve had national media sort of parachute into Florida and write what were intended to be critical, aggressive, accountability stories about the actions of Governor DeSantis, and they’re terrible pieces,” said Ted Bridis, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist who currently serves as a lecturer at the University of Florida’s College of Journalism and Communications.

Bridis has taken particular issue with a “60 Minutes” piece that alleged, without hard proof, that supermarket chain Publix was given a contract to distribute COVID-19 vaccines in exchange for campaign donations to DeSantis. This kind of speculative reporting, Bridis says, lends credence to Florida conservatives’ otherwise dubious claims of media bias.

“It makes the job harder for those of us who are trying to hold his administration under a microscope,” Bridis said. “So, you know, when DeSantis stands up and says, ‘I’ve been treated unfairly by ‘60 Minutes,’’, well, yeah, he kind of was in that case.”

Of course, a few sloppy pieces by legacy media outlets don’t justify Florida’s Voice or The Florida Standard’s apparent deference to the DeSantis administration, nor does it necessarily make them effective. According to Andrew Selepak, another professor at the University of Florida’s journalism school who specializes in social media, no matter how hard either side tries to control the narrative, news consumers will inevitably be exposed to opposing viewpoints.

“Nobody has it where 100 percent of their friends and family all have the same political views, so they’re still going to exposed to the other side on social media,” Selepak said. “And you can say that you’re the voice of Florida, but how many people in Florida are consuming this content? Maybe a large part of your audience lives outside of Florida, in which case, who are you really speaking too?”

A run for the White House will force DeSantis out of his media comfort zone. Sooner or later, if he decides to seek the presidency, he’ll have to leave behind Florida’s Voice, The Florida Standard and other friendly conservative outlets and engage the national media. But as Bridis pointed out, the red wave that failed to wash over the country in the 2022 midterms did in fact make landfall in Florida, where DeSantis won re-election by nearly 20 points and Republicans picked up four House seats. As long as Florida Republicans get results like that, they’ll be hard put to abandon their strategy of courting conservative media.

“I think that this strategy of press management will continue as long as it’s deemed necessary,” Bridis said. “And when it’s not successful anymore, they’ll have to invent a new way to try and stymie fair coverage.”

Michael Lovito is a Brooklyn-based reporter and critic whose work has appeared in Salon, Brooklyn Magazine, Pavement Pieces, and The District. He also serves as editor-in-chief of the politics and pop culture website The Postrider.  @MLovito

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