Should we feel concerned when national political figures limit themselves to friendly media outlets? Buried in this Semafor complaint against Ron DeSantis may well be a good question, but Max Tani’s lead makes it into a risible and nonsensical distraction.

Perhaps one can make a case that DeSantis should make an appearance on the Sunday talk-show circuit, or with newspapers of at least some arms-length standing. But using The View as a standard? Come on, man:

In August, a producer for “The View” emailed Ron DeSantis’ team hoping to book the Florida governor on the daytime talk show in the days before the midterm elections.

DeSantis declined the offer to chat with Whoopi Goldberg and Joy Behar. Instead, he sat down with Will Witt, the 26-year-old founder of the Florida Standard, a conservative website that launched just days earlier. The governor took the opportunity to complain about the mainstream media and tout his handling of the Covid-19 pandemic, under the heading: “EXCLUSIVE: Governor Ron DeSantis and Will Witt Interview.”

Over the last year, DeSantis has given just a handful of interviews. Almost all of them have been with Fox News primetime or morning hosts or major conservative podcasters. But he’s also carved out time for the Florida Standard and a similar site called Florida’s Voice, which launched in 2021.

This is an absurd framing to Semafor’s complaint. The View doesn’t offer dispassionate and unbiased coverage of politics. That platform is every bit as progressive as the outlets DeSantis has engaged thus far are conservative. The View is so badly biased, in fact, that it occasionally has to conduct nationwide recruitment efforts to find a lone conservative to act as a token, and usually settles on one that prefers to criticize conservatives.

Now, as to Tani’s broader point, should we worry when national political figures “create their own media”? Maybe, but again, that has to do with the quality of alternatives available to conservative politicians like DeSantis. We have just spent the last week or so revisiting the complicity of nearly the entire American media establishment in burying the story of Hunter Biden’s corrupt business dealings and its proximity to the man who was running for president at the time. Is that the “independent” media establishment that DeSantis is supposed to trust?

Or how about the media establishment that promoted Sam Bankman-Fried as a prophet of political activism and then treats him better than they do Elon Musk or DeSantis? Semafor might need to answer that specifically, given that the man behind the FTX-Alameda collapse helped fund Semafor in the first place. It’s amazing to see the contrast in coverage between Musk and SBF, considering Musk offers a free service that he bought with his own cash and the politically-connected SBF ran a business that allegedly defrauded thousands of investors out of billions of dollars. The former’s crime is that he wants freer speech on the Internet, while the other has media outlets beating a path to his Bahamian door to help him amplify the post-collapse spin.

In that kind of a media environment — of which Semafor is most definitely a part — DeSantis would have to be insane to trust establishment media outlets to treat his messaging objectively.

Besides, this is a category error in the first place. Politicians communicate with voters; media outlets are a means, not an end. If news organizations want to make a case for being a viable means for politicians to communicate, that’s up to them. Democrats grant tons of access because the media doesn’t do much filtering on their messaging, nor usually get very contentious in direct interviews. Republicans, as Christine Pushaw has noted repeatedly, have learned the hard way that they get treated much differently — so they look for other means to communicate to voters. That may mean favoring smaller grassroots outlets, or sticking with Fox News and Newsmax, or so on, but the strategy is the same as it is for Democrats — to get their messaging amplified to voters while avoiding as much interference as possible.

Semafor, Tani, and other media outlets resent that, of course, and so they try to make it into a crisis. It’s only a crisis for them, however. And it’s a self-inflicted crisis at that.