RUTHFULLY YOURS

Talk about stupid.

Jennifer Rubin wrote a column in the Washington Post, absurdly claiming that Florida was so badly run and so “cruel” its residents were fleeing, basing her entire article on this errant premise, and forcing the Washington Post to issue an embarrassing correction.

According to Fox News:

Rubin published the column Friday in which she claimed, “DeSantis likes to brag that more people are moving to Florida than ever. Not so fast. ‘An estimated 674,740 people reported that their permanent address changed from Florida to another state in 2021.’” Those numbers are wrong and the Post, in a correction on Saturday, admitting the column “mischaracterized” the stats.

She originally added, “’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,’ according to the American Community Survey released in June tracking state-by-state migration.”

The statistic she cited came from some dingbat at Business Insider who mixed up the inbound numbers of Florida residents with the outbound numbers of Florida residents — a pretty elementary error.

Business Insider had to correct itself the following day.

But Jen liked that first story better, so she cited that in her own column, going lemmings-like off the Business Insider cliff, and forcing the WaPo to run a correction — which kind of scuppered the entire point of the piece. They actually should have pulled the column.

More humiliatingly, Rubin’s error was first corrected by readers on Twitter, at least one of whom actually went into the statistics Rubin should have gone into and found the problem. The WaPo had to issue its correction afterwards — and who knows if they would have, had the Twitter correction not been so loud and out there first.

What an embarrassment. It’s not just that Rubin should have known better than to get her statistics from Business Insider (or any outlet full of cub reporters on their first jobs out of journalism school), instead of original sources. It’s that intuitively, she should have been skeptical, as the preponderance of news stories do cite the tremendous success Florida has had in drawing residents, based on its low-tax, low-regulation, pro-family, pro-freedom policies, brought in by Florida’s excellent governor, Ron DeSantis. She also throws in an attack against President Trump, or rather, his MAGA movement, for good measure. See, she’s got this all worked out.

Jen Rubin read one piece from Business Insider and she instantly believed its silly claims because it said something negative about DeSantis and by extension, President Trump? What a gullible doofus

What we have here is ideology destroying what should be a natural skepticism about weird statistics. When normal reporters run into one of those, they double-check, they look for an original source, as well as a second source; they go over how the statistic was put together.

Not so Jen Rubin — and her leftist editors. They hear something bad about Ron DeSantis and jump right in to use whatever weird thing they just heard to attack him, pathetically covering themselves with the sludge of error — and sometimes irredeemably so.

Nothing clouds a reporter’s judgment quite like extreme prejudice and hate.

Now we see it in Jen Rubin, who is incapable of skepticism when the prospect of discrediting a Republican is put in front of her. That’s doubly so for her editors, who should have fact-checked her and questioned her strange premise. And maybe one of them did — and got overruled, knowing what I know about how newsrooms operate. That could have happened, too.

Bottom line here, the Post’s research and credibility has been exposed as just a little skeezy with Rubin’s kind of whopper.

What a bunch of fools.