I've said this before, but I do think a big change over the past 20 years, even if one which happened gradually, is that news gets entirely filtered through "political news." This is true of cable news (especially), of the major papers, of all of it. A big chunk of the day at CNN used to be just fairly straightforward rip and read style news coverage, now it's always 8 floating heads discussing What It All Means For Ron DeSantis.
An expanding consequence of this is that, filtered through the Both Sides coverage, things that were generally agreed upon as "bad" can no longer be portrayed as such as long as one political party says it's "Good, Akshually."
These people have had their life upended by DeSantis, and quite often the coverage just treats them as NPCs in the Politics Game. Ron DeSantis ruins 19 lives, how will this play in Tallahassee? What does this mean for 2024?
If Ron DeSantis straps on an automatic weapon and starts personally gunning down homeless people while flanked by state troopers, would the politics lens be put aside? Would The Two Sides Differ On The Legality dominate, "holy shit, Ron DeSantis just murdered a bunch of people."
I don't think this is an absurd example. It isn't actually in a different category from what he did with these people, just a bit more extreme.
