They tried to bury DeSantis; instead, they buried the lede

Last week, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) suspended State Attorney Monique Worrell (D), the main prosecutor for the Orlando area, for dereliction of duty and general incompetence.

From the way major newsrooms told the story, you would think DeSantis had overreached the limits of his office simply to punish someone with whom he disagrees politically. But for the record, Florida’s governor has the legal authority to suspend state attorneys. It’s right there in the Florida constitution, Article IV, Section 7.

Also, for the record, Worrell is the poster child for that section of the state constitution, as deserving of the ouster as anyone ever was. Yet despite the legal and factual details of the case, the media majors are playing the suspension as an attack on democracy itself, not as the removal of a prosecutor whose manifestly lousy decisions have have made the people of Florida decidedly less safe.

CNN published the following news blurb: “Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis announced the suspension of the Orlando-area state attorney, the second time he has removed a democratically elected prosecutor whose politics did not align with his conservative views.”

The official CNN headline: “DeSantis suspends Orlando-area state attorney in second sacking of democratically elected prosecutor.” The story itself includes the line, “As a candidate, DeSantis has made reining in government overreach a top priority, a promise that his critics say is in conflict with how he has led during episodes such as Wednesday.”

NBC News published a headline that reads, “Ron DeSantis suspends second elected prosecutor as his 2024 campaign struggles.”

Worrell, for her part, has responded poorly to her suspension, alleging a political witch-hunt by the governor.

“I am a duly elected state attorney for the Ninth Judicial Circuit,” Worrell told reporters this week. “And nothing done by a weak dictator can change that.”

About that: As a “duly elected state attorney,” Worrell has a responsibility to explain why Daton Viel, a Florida man who was arrested while on probation in  March 2023 for sexual battery on a minor, was out on bond last weekend when he shot two Orlando police officers. His story is the actual story here.

Worrell must also explain why Lorenzo Larry, 17, was a free man in 2022 when he allegedly shot and killed his 20-week pregnant girlfriend and her unborn child, despite a previous arrest on multiple firearm charges, including possession of a firearm on school property and criminal possession of a firearm by a minor. 

Worrell should also be made to explain why her office chose in 2021 not to charge Keith Moses for drug possession, despite previous arrests as a juvenile for aggravated battery, assault and grand theft. This February, the still-free and apparently still violent-as-ever Moses allegedly went on to shoot five people, killing three, including a 9-year-old girl and a 24-year-old television news reporter. 

(Even if they can’t bring themselves to care about the child victims Worrell has endangered as a lenient prosecutor, wouldn’t you at least expect the journalists covering Worrell’s removal to have some professional empathy for a colleague murdered on the job?)

These three cases, by the way, are not a comprehensive accounting of Worrell’s many failures as a state attorney. They’re just a few of the high-profile examples that the governor’s office cited specifically this week as justification for Worrell’s suspension. In many publications, they were omitted altogether or buried dozens of paragraphs deep into the story.

Worrell herself has offered no satisfactory explanation for her office’s remarkable leniency toward violent repeat offenders. She used to deflect these types of questions by asserting that she didn’t want to engage in “finger-pointing” and “blaming.” But that was before her suspension. Now, it’s nothing but finger-pointing and blaming and all the same clichéd and overused rhetoric about threats to democracy.

“This is an outrage,” she said this week. “Elected officials are being taken out of office solely for political purposes, and that should never be a thing.”

She added, “There used to be a very high standard for the removal of elected officials. There used to be a standard that I would have had to be criminally prosecuted for something, ‘neglecting my duties’ meaning that I don’t show up for work and do my job, or that I had some sort of an illness that prevented me from doing my job.”

Oddly, the general tone and tenor of the news coverage of her suspension is identical in practically every way to her remarks. Then again, perhaps this weirdly slanted coverage is intended as an attack on someone else prominent.

Here’s a news blurb from the Washington Post: “Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) suspended the Orlando-area state attorney Wednesday. It’s the second time in a year that the governor, who is running for the Republican presidential nomination, suspended an elected Democrat from office.” The official headline reads, “Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis suspends another Democratic state attorney.”

“Ron DeSantis nullifies another Florida election,” reads the headline to the Tampa Bay Times’s Aug. 10 editorial.

Declared the Sun Sentinel’s Aug. 9 editorial, “From DeSantis, another direct assault on democracy.”

For the record, neither the CNN nor the NBC News nor the Tampa Bay Times nor the Sun Sentinel stories casting Worrell’s removal as an attack on democracy mention the Viel, Larry, or Moses cases.

Of the newsrooms cited above, only the Washington Post bothered to mention the Viel case, and the Viel case only, and then only in passing. (His name doesn’t appear until the report’s eighth paragraph.) It must’ve just slipped their minds over there at CNN, NBC News, etc., to include mentions of the incidents that DeSantis’s office cited specifically as justification for Worrell’s removal.

Let’s pretend for a moment these people understand DeSantis has the power to suspend state attorneys. If, for them, Worrell doesn’t clear the bar for dereliction of duty and incompetence, then who ever could?

Becket Adams is a writer in Washington and program director for the National Journalism Center.