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“My way, or the highway,” was, at one time in the not-so-distant past, quite a popular phrase to associate with American dads. Cockburn recalls his fellow classmates invoking the maxim as evidence to their fathers’ strictness. “My dad is tough, man, he always says ‘it’s my way or the highway.’”
On the contrary, Cockburn would respond, that statement shows your father to be quite reasonable, pusillanimous even: “Ahh, you’ve got it easy, then; your dad gives you a choice. Mine doesn’t allow the highway option.”
Having a choice is what differentiates a command from a recommendation. Not terribly complicated — yet this simple fact apparently evades a great many in our media class.
At a news conference in South Florida yesterday, Florida governor and social media brain-breaker Ron DeSantis told the group of high-school students present for the event that they were not required to wear the face masks obscuring their faces.
“You do not have to wear those masks. I mean please take them off,” said DeSantis to student laughter. “Honestly, it’s not doing anything. We’ve gotta stop with this Covid theater. So, if you want to wear it, fine. But this is ridiculous.” Several of the students removed their masks; others retained them. DeSantis then began his scheduled remarks.
NEW: @GovRonDeSantis annoyed with USF students—
"You do not have to wear those masks. Please take them off. Honestly, it's not doing anything. We've gotta stop with this Covid theater. So if you wanna wear it, fine, but this is ridiculous."https://t.co/7j1Pb2hV53 @WFLA pic.twitter.com/ZIOyTHLOh3
— Evan Donovan (@EvanDonovan) March 2, 2022
DeSantis’s words to the teenagers were part-reminder, part-editorialization: he was informing them that they were not required to wear the masks they were presumably wearing at the behest of some other adult in authority over them. He was furthermore making his position on the issue clear, to these students, the media in attendance and a wider audience — continued masking in such situations is nothing more than kabuki theater, and he’s had enough of it.
As video of the exchange makes clear, the governor’s demeanor was polite, his volume even and normal. There was palpable annoyance in his words, and in the heavy sigh at the podium following them, but one akin to the loving annoyance of a parent whose child has gotten into the paste again. A tirade, this was not; the governor might think it dumb, but nevertheless he offered the highway.
Young children — even Cockburn, eventually — can suss out which directives are mandatory and which are optional, even without being told so in such plain English. Even some lesser-evolved animals possess the ability to differentiate between threatening and non-threatening auditory behaviors.
Not so, sadly, for Chrisses Cillizza and Hayes. “Ron DeSantis just yelled at high school students for wearing masks,” Cillizza wrote at CNN, while MSNBC’s Hayes claimed the governor had “publicly berate[d]” them while telling them “absolutely” what to do.
Still worse than C. Beavis and C. Butthead were the click-hungry journalists, like the Washington Post’s Amy B. Wang, who specifically sought to find and interview the students involved. “Long shot, but if you were one of those students standing behind DeSantis (or a parent of one of those students) who wants to talk, please DM me,” she tweeted.
A well-ordered Fourth Estate would have rules against seeking out minors, Fagin-like, to use for politically motivated fodder in national news stories that are little more than concern trolling; at the very least, you’d think newsrooms would remember the settlement the Washington Post paid to Nick Sandmann before going out of their way to editorialize about more high school students.
But like peace in Europe, a responsible media is a utopian pipe dream, and we are left instead with our Chrisses, our Washington Posts and Cockburn staring blankly at the sorry lot of them.
