This must be one of those times where ‘Democracy Dies in Darkness.’
Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin promoted a statistic claiming more people are moving out of the red state of Florida than are moving in, a declaration that was publicly and prominently debunked days earlier.
Over the weekend, Rubin penned a column about how terrible the Sunshine State is under Governor Ron DeSantis (R). In doing so, she cited a number supposedly from an American Community Survey showing a staggering 674,740 people had moved out of the state.
“DeSantis likes to brag that more people are moving to Florida than ever. Not so fast,” she wrote.
“‘An estimated 674,740 people reported that their permanent address changed from Florida to another state in 2021,” the column reads, quoting that survey. “‘That’s more than any other state, including New York or California, the two states that have received the most attention for outbound migration during the pandemic.'”
The problem is, that didn’t happen. It didn’t happen at all.
In which Jennifer Rubin writes a piece in the Washington Post on Friday that is based around the massive mistake that Business Insider made—and then corrected—on Tuesday. “Does she have editors?” was just emphatically answered. pic.twitter.com/HeigB7gL2c
— Charles C. W. Cooke (@charlescwcooke) July 15, 2023
Rubin Lies About Florida
Rubin’s outrageous claim about Florida is such an obvious mistake that one can only draw one of two conclusions – either she knew the statistic was false and published it as fact anyway, or she is a bumbling and incompetent hag who, in a better world, would resign in shame.
Perhaps it’s both.
A simple Google search would have helped her out. Rubin’s numbers are based on the very same statistic that the Business Insider tried promoting at least three days before she posted her piece.
“More people actually moved out of Florida than New York or California in 2021,” the Insider wrote on Tuesday of last week. “But while newcomers were hoping to get a piece of paradise, Floridians were moving out, newly released Census data shows.”
“An estimated 674,740 people reported their permanent address changed in 2021 from Florida to another state, according to the data,” they wrote, echoing the very same number and theme. “That’s more than any other state, including New York or California — the two states that have gotten the most attention for outbound migration during the pandemic.”
That column went viral because of how absurdly wrong the Business Insider was, and the fact that an outfit dedicated to reading and analyzing statistics and spreadsheets could have badly misread the data.
In fact, the number they were looking at signified the exact opposite.
These numbers are from 2021. Business insider had to retract their claim that more people were leaving Florida than California & New York. I’d love to see the numbers for 2022 & YTD 2023 pic.twitter.com/99giM5gGIA
— Texas Made (@Texas_Made67) July 12, 2023
The Business Insider had to issue an embarrassing correction on the matter hours later.
“We got it wrong,” the headline now reads. “Out-of-staters flocked to Florida in 2021, with some 674,740 people moving there.”
People make mistakes. Yes, it’s shocking that a business publication can’t read data. But to have the entire premise of an article blow up in a matter of seconds is next-level.
Rubin must have seen that and decided, “Hey, I’ll give it a shot.”
The archive of her post can be seen here. It wasn’t long before the Washington Post, likewise, was forced to issue a correction.
It really is jarring to see. When I’ve written for the Post and the Times, I’ve been fact-checked until I bled. I if wrote that there are 50 states, I was asked for a citation. That’s fine—good, even. But, as is evident if you read those papers, it only happens in one direction.
— Charles C. W. Cooke (@charlescwcooke) July 15, 2023
RELATED: Fake WaPo ‘Conservative’ Jennifer Rubin: More Republicans Will Die From Coronavirus
A Lot Of What Rubin Writes Or Does Is Fake News
The entire premise of Rubin’s takedown of Florida being torched should come as no surprise, since the entire premise of her being hired by the Washington Post was also fake. She spent years claiming to be a “conservative” when she very clearly was not.
During the pandemic, she had opined – almost wistfully – on the notion that more Republicans would die from COVID than Democrats.
Jennifer Rubin says that more Republicans will die of coronavirus than Democrats because President Trump and right-wing media have downplayed the threat pic.twitter.com/wmzMMPc3qZ
— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) March 15, 2020
Rubin is also the same woman who said the Republican party needs to be “burned down” until there are no “survivors.”
And she’s indicated conservatives deserve a “life sentence” of harassment in public by unhinged liberals.
Jennifer Rubin now maintains that people who work for the Trump admin should be harassed publicly as a ‘Life Sentence’ – she is also still described as conservative by the @washingtonpost https://t.co/jkbhgtTVMF
— Ben Domenech (@bdomenech) July 2, 2018
Perhaps next time Jennifer Rubin will do her homework when she decides to research population migration in states such as Florida. We doubt it, but maybe this embarrassing correction will spark a comeuppance.
If she so desires, she could simply read the pages of The Political Insider, where we’ve extensively covered how Florida is a dream destination for freedom-loving Americans of every stripe.
Looking at past coverage, the Washington Post could easily have learned that so many people are trying to get the hell out of California that they’re running out of U-haul trucks – not kidding – and that the top destination for those trucks was Texas followed quickly by Florida, Tennessee, South Carolina, and Arizona.
They would have learned that Texas and Florida have gained the most in Adjusted Gross Income (AGI) due to population migration while New York and California are hemorrhaging money.
And we’ve covered the fact that Florida ranked number six in the country as a top destination for black people to migrate in recent years.
Democracy dies in darkness, but it thrives here at the home of real news.
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