Jennifer Rubin humiliates herself using data from retracted story

Last week an author at Business Insider wrote a story about the large number of people leaving the state of Florida. The story was based on newly released census data which had been published as an excel spreadsheet. It was clear from the thrust of the story that the author’s interest was in taking a shot at Gov. DeSantis and simultaneously defending the honor of California and New York, blue states which have been losing population.

An estimated 674,740 people reported their permanent address changed in 2021 from Florida to another state, according to the data. That’s more than any other state, including New York or California, two states have gotten the most attention for outbound migration during the pandemic. The dataset, which was released in June, tracked state-to-state migration through responses to the American Community Survey that year…

The data also undercuts the narrative that people are leaving states like New York and California more disproportionately than other highly populated states.

That story was published last Tuesday but fairly quickly the author realized she’d made an embarrassing mistake. The number she presented as people moving out of Florida was actually the number of people who moved to Florida. So within a matter of hours, the story had been completely rewritten and had a new headline: “We got it wrong: More people moved out of New York and California than Florida in 2021.”

In addition to a complete rewrite, an Editor’s Note explaining the error was added to the top of the story. “This story has been updated to correct an error regarding Census data. In 2021, an estimated 469,577 people moved out of Florida, while 674,740 people relocated to the state. An earlier version of the story switched those numbers.” Again, all of this happened on Tuesday and by Wednesday the whole thing had been forgotten.

Well, almost.

It seems there was one high profile author at the Washington Post who missed the memo. On Friday, Jennifer Rubin wrote an article reusing the wrong numbers from the first draft of the story. Rubin’s version had the delicious title “Florida might pay for MAGA cruelty and know-nothingism.” All of the snark that was subtext in the Business Insider story was shouted out loud by Rubin.

DeSantis’s stunts frequently fail in court and cost taxpayers money. But his MAGA war on diversity and tolerance might be negatively impacting the state in other ways.

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. 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.

Moreover, Florida already is one of the states with the oldest average populations, and the MAGA culture wars risk alienating young people and the diverse workforce the state needs. In February, USA Today reported, “Florida may be the most moved to state in the country, but not when it comes to Gen Z. They are the only generation that chose to exit Florida, with an outflux of 8,000 young adults, while every other generation moved in.”

As I said when I wrote about the Business Insider story last week, everyone makes mistakes. In this case, Rubin got fooled by a reprint of the Business Insider story at a site called bix.crash.net. I don’t know if they had permission to post the story or just scraped it but their version never got corrected.

I don’t have any sympathy for Rubin’s mistake and here’s why. One paragraph after citing the erroneous data she quotes a USA Today story which contradicts the claim she just made about Florida’s population. How do you go from saying people are leaving Florida “more than any other state” to, in the very next paragraph, saying “Florida may be the most moved to state in the country” without even noticing that your sources contradict one another? The hint that one of these stories had to be wrong was right there in her own piece. A quick Google search would have turned up the correction. And yet somehow it didn’t register. Unfortunately for Rubin, other people noticed.

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

Again, we know how this happened. She relied on a version of the Insider story that didn’t get corrected. But how do you publish something like that at the Washington Post without someone catching it. Don’t they have editors and fact-checkers there?

As so often, @iowahawkblog put it best. https://t.co/7XGQXSzDA5

— Charles C. W. Cooke (@charlescwcooke) July 15, 2023

As of now, Rubin’s story about know-nothingism on the right has a big correction at the top:

A previous version of this article mischaracterized Floridians’ state-to-state migration in 2021. According to the Census Bureau, more people moved into Florida than any other state that year. This version has been corrected.

As for the story itself, the whole paragraph about Florida’s population was just deleted.

Apart from the specifics of how this happened, I think we all know why this happened. A left-wing hack went looking for anything that served an attack on Florida and Gov. DeSantis and found it. This is a game the press has been playing for years. It how Rebekah Jones became a minor left-wing celebrity. This is resistance journalism in action. The Washington Post should be ashamed that one of their top authors can’t do better than this.