Ron DeSantis Will Start Giving Interviews To Mainstream Outlets: Report

As his poll numbers continue to drop, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is reconsidering the blackout of traditional media that has defined his campaign so far, reported The Wall Street Journal in a wide-ranging piece on DeSantis’s flagging presidential run.

“DeSantis has largely avoided talking with the mainstream media, in line with his frequent confrontations with the press as governor,” WSJ reporters Alex Leary and John McCormick wrote Saturday. “But his campaign, in a sign of strategy shift, is planning to do interviews around a series of policy proposals he will lay out in the coming weeks, according to people familiar with the plans.” The Journal didn’t say what those policy proposals were likely to be.

For over a year, DeSantis’s media exposure has been defined by what Axios dubbed his “safe space strategy.” He announced his presidential bid on a disastrous Twitter Spaces call with Elon Musk, and has generally confined his media exposure to Fox News, Newsmax, and other right-wing outlets. He’s made a point of turning down interview requests from major shows like The View, while at the same time providing unprecedented access to a tiny, recently founded local right-wing outlet led by a conservative, pro-DeSantis influencer.

“I’m not going to sit there and humor them and treat them as some neutral arbiter,” DeSantis told libertarian John Stossel in May. By then, however, DeSantis was already hearing calls from GOP insiders to adopt a “less antagonistic approach to legacy and mainstream news organizations,” The Hill reported.

No one has embodied DeSantis’s pugilistic attitude toward mainstream media more than his former press secretary and current campaign rapid response director, Christina Pushaw, who became notorious for dragging reporters on Twitter. “It has come to my attention that some liberal media activists are mad because they aren’t allowed into #SunshineSummit this weekend,” Pushaw tweeted last summer after several mainstream outlets were barred from a Florida GOP convention. “My message to them is to try crying about it.” At that event, DeSantis told the right-wing Daily Wire that he wanted to avoid “a bunch of left-wing media asking our primary candidates a bunch of gotcha questions,” Vanity Fair’s Charlotte Klein reported.

DeSantis’s reported about-face is just another sign of his campaign’s struggle to connect with voters. Yet it’s unlikely that a DeSantis more open to speaking to mainstream media outlets will be a friendlier DeSantis: In a Thursday interview with Fox News, he blamed “corporate media” for his struggling polling numbers. “If you look at the people like the corporate media, who are they going after?” he said. “Who do they not want to be the nominee? They’re going after me.”