Even in Florida, temperatures this time of year are a bit cooler, though ‘winter’ usually only lasts a few weeks. Even so, Congressman Max Frost has been engaged in an effort to turn up the heat by lighting matches under Governor Ron DeSantis on the topic of property insurance.

And seemingly in direct coordination with Frost, a handful of national and local journalists are wearing metaphorical mittens, as they can’t seem to type any hard questions for Frost on the subject, instead opting to simply cut and paste directly from his press releases and social media posts which criticize the governor but offer zero Democrat solutions.

It makes for yet another heartwarming scene of collaborative narrative-building between Democrats and the media, all skating gracefully together over the thin ice of journalistic credibility.

Frosty the Snowjob

Our story begins with America’s youngest U.S. Representative, Maxwell Alejandro Frost, holding a round-table discussion in Orlando last week in which he collected a handful of anecdotes about Floridians struggling with the high cost of property insurance. Frost was sure to include a list of the dreadful tales in a subsequent letter addressed to DeSantis, but somehow, copies of the letter were simultaneously delivered to the media – oopsie. Frost also issued a press release on his congressional website, announcing his “demand” for a meeting with DeSantis so that he could share his constituents’ concerns and “hear DeSantis’s plans” for a solution to the crisis.

Two things to note here: first, one surefire way to guarantee you’re never getting a meeting with DeSantis or any other self-respecting politician, ever, is to demand the meeting in a nasty letter while simultaneously providing a copy of said letter to the media. And second, Frost had just barely become a college dropout when DeSantis and Republican lawmakers started a series of rather drastic actions a few years ago to address the state’s crisis. So, we can forgive the young congressman since all that complex policy stuff started while he was still just an unknown progressive community organizer playing the timbales and racking up so much credit card debt that he had trouble finding a place to live when he finally made it to the big time in Washington D.C.

Speaking of credit, give the kid some, though, he knows how to play the media. Within days of his letter, stories were popping up across the country, from Newsweek to local television stations in Florida. The fake narrative has even made its way into legitimate insurance journals, too.

Frost is clearly an attention-seeking Gen Z’er who knows how to leverage coverage from a compliant progressive media. But when it comes to the ‘how’ of solving the crisis, Frost’s strategy to turn up the heat on DeSantis is based entirely on freezing out details and there’s zero interest in thawing some solutions.

Nowhere does Frost offer up a single idea – only complaints. His letter to DeSantis lists a litany of them, but fails to suggest even one policy fix to address the problems he’s identified. Quite literally, his “solution” is demanding a meeting with the governor that he (a) doesn’t really want, and (b) knows he will never get. It’s political theater, plain and simple.

The Media Blizzard

And…that brings us to the media, which knows all of this and is equally complicit. In a stunning display of hibernation from journalistic rigor, whether it’s journalists working at the once-vaunted but now completely laughable Newsweek, or the near-brainless TV newsreaders lapping up Frost’s political bilge like a thirsty kitten laps up milk, they’re all skating alongside Frost like a scene out of A Charlie Brown Christmas, turning a cold shoulder to the notion of asking him what he’s doing about the problem. Instead they all pretend his demand for a meeting is a legitimate “good faith” effort (Frost’s own words, taken at face value by a TV station) at solving the problem. Every tale of woe from Frost is met with a nod and an on-air readout, but nary a whisper or even a thought about what he proposes to do to solve the problem.

The official made-for-TV narrative seems to be: “Why, Maxwell Frost is demanding a meeting with Ron DeSantis, but DeSantis won’t give him a meeting! It’s all DeSantis’s fault that he won’t meet with Frost to solve the problem!”

You see, it’s all just a blizzard of headlines with zero visibility on solutions.

Also absent in this snow globe of coverage: any mention of DeSantis and Republican lawmakers’ radical reforms to the insurance landscape over the past three years – those facts are lost like a scarf in a snowstorm. Only Newsweek, through a frosty quote from DeSantis’ spokesperson, Jeremy Redfern, even hints at those existing efforts and that’s only because Redfern mentioned it. Newsweek, of course, buried it at the very end of the story, too. It seems the media’s snowplows are only clearing one side of the street.

As the media and Frost continue making synchronized snow angels, Floridians hoping for hard-hitting journalism are left out in the cold, forced to endure a winter wonderland of words, but not a single solution. It’s actually a cozy, symbiotic relationship, so don’t expect the legacy media to turn up the heat on snowflakes like Frost anytime soon.