An absolutely incredible report by 60 Minutes over the weekend is the latest example of the media, whether they know they are or not, building the next GOP presidential candidate. And, if 2016 is anything to go by, they are not going to like the results.

Over the weekend, the CBS news show aired a segment attacking Florida Governor Ron DeSantis for a “pay for play” scheme in which Florida gave the grocery chain Publix a contract to distribute vaccines after the chain gave $100,000 to his campaign. During this segment, they aired a heated exchange between DeSantis and one of their reporters.

"What you're saying is wrong," Gov DeSantis tells Sharyn Alfonsi in response to a question about whether the Publix grocery store chain gained influence through a campaign donation on his behalf. "It's wrong. It's a fake narrative," he says. https://t.co/gyrW9hYPTg pic.twitter.com/5rBq7v5VOA

— 60 Minutes (@60Minutes) April 4, 2021

Except, this exchange was deceptively edited, omitting a massive amount of information that DeSantis provided the reporter, who was indeed attacking him with a false narrative. You can see here the 60 Minutes version and the full version, with the latter providing a lot of context.

This is wild. Watch Ron DeSantis’s full answer on Publix, Walgreen’s and CVS vaccine distribution and look at the edited cut 60 Minutes used: pic.twitter.com/FqTRgOZS9Z

— Clay Travis (@ClayTravis) April 5, 2021

It’s little things like this that are just so obvious and so easy to identify through which the media is going to continue to alienate a large chunk of its potential audience, driving more of them to Fox News, Newsmax, or One America News. And as those numbers and ratings rise, the mainstream news networks will attack them as ignorant conspiracy theorists when, in reality, most of them are just looking to see their worldview represented.

DeSantis is a fascinating study in the media attempting to paint him as something he isn’t. They want him to be an anti-science, corrupt, Trump-like politician, but if you look at the numbers in Florida, he’s actually doing a lot better as governor than most.

The Publix issue is just strange. You have independently-elected Florida Democrats coming out to attack the 60 Minutes piece as dishonest, yet the national press is just running with it. The facts are simple: DeSantis didn’t choose Publix, they donate to a ton of Democrats, Walgreens and CVS were busy working on long-term care missions, and local community leaders felt that Publix was the best option since most people in Florida live within minutes of one.

The attacks on DeSantis have been nonstop, and while most of the Florida press understands what’s going on, the national press is trying to cast him as some villain. That is going to drive a lot of Republicans to him because he is not shying away from the media’s attacks and is, in fact, taking them head-on.

But… he is not doing it in a way that resembles Donald Trump. He is his own person, able to shut them down without resorting to many of the anti-media antics Trump took during his time in office.

One of the reasons the national press dislikes DeSantis, though, is their own guilt. The national press’s adoration and cult-like worship of Beto O’Rourke in 2018 caused them to ignore black candidates like Stacey Abrams and Andrew Gillum, the latter having been DeSantis’s opponent for Governor.

This white guilt from the mainstream media has led them to give an extreme amount of over-coverage to Abrams and completely ignore a drug- and sex worker-related scandal that would have taken down many other politicians. They despise Brian Kemp of Georgia and DeSantis of Florida because both men have been successful governors after the media left their black opponents out in the cold while they ran breathless coverage of O’Rourke.

And now that DeSantis dares to push back on their narratives, they are absolutely enraged and desperate to take him down. They aren’t going to succeed, and they are likely to make him look that much better to Republicans across the country if he were to make a run in 2024.