It was a journalist’s worst nightmare, and it couldn’t have happened to a better gal.

Last Friday, Jennifer Rubin, an erstwhile marginally conservative columnist who years ago became consumed with Trump hatred and has since been writing anti-Republican screeds for The Washington Post, wrote an article that reused incorrect data from a Business Insider piece that had since been corrected.

It was bad. Really bad.

The title of Rubin’s piece tells the story: “Florida might pay for MAGA cruelty and know-nothingism.”

The thrust of the article was that people were leaving Governor Ron DeSantis’s Florida in droves and that the Sunshine State was losing more people than even California and New York. The only trouble was, it wasn’t true. Not even close. Rubin had found and cited information from a Business Insider piece that had used recently released U.S. Census data but had mistakenly transposed the state’s in-migration number and its out-migration number, producing a net-negative migration result for Florida when it should’ve produced a net-positive result.

Within a day, Business Insider had corrected its mistake and done a complete rewrite of the piece. The new headline read, “We got it wrong: More people moved out of New York and California than Florida in 2021,” and it included the following retraction: “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.”

Alas, poor Jen never got the memo. Neither did any of her fellow Democracy Dies in Darknessers at the Post. So she gleefully and erroneously wrote the following in her column:

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.

Ouch.

Eventually, the Post was forced to issue its own delicious retraction at the very top of the Rubin article:

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.

What, no “We deeply regret the error”? How could all the hard-lefties at the Post be so stupid? Florida has been on an in-migration roll, and everyone knows it. How could they look at those numbers and not immediately think, This can’t be right?

Anyway, this is the danger of agenda-driven journalism. As John Sexton put it at Hot Air: “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.”

We mention all this because yet another story seems to have been befallen by a similar problem. As Jack Elbaum writes in the Washington Examiner: “Last Friday, CNBC released a ranking of ‘America’s 10 worst states to live and work in for 2023.’ It is just as out of touch as one may expect. The list is filled exclusively with red states, including Florida, Tennessee, Alabama, Arkansas, South Carolina, and, at the very bottom, Texas.”

Elbaum continues:

This is quite odd, as data show those states are actually where more people are moving than anywhere else. In 2022, 318,000 more people moved into Florida than moved out, which is a greater number than any other state. Second in terms of net in-migration was Texas, where more than 230,000 people moved in than out. Fourth was South Carolina, and fifth was Tennessee. Alabama was ninth, and Arkansas was 12th.

In other words, six of the top 12 states in terms of net domestic migration were listed in the top 10 worst states by CNBC. Moreover, not a single one of the states listed had more people move out than move in. Each one had net positive domestic migration last year.

How could this be? How could so many economically vibrant “destination” states be so unpopular? Answer: They’re not unpopular. What we have here is yet another piece of agenda-driven journalism. According to the CNBC piece, here are the 10 worst states to live and work in for 2023: Florida, Arkansas, Tennessee, Indiana, Missouri, Alabama, South Carolina, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and — the worst state of all — Texas.

Do you notice a pattern here? Any common thread among all 10 of these states? Perhaps something related to their political affiliation? Yep, every single one of these states is a red state, a Republican state.

What are the odds?

In this case, CNBC doesn’t use data to drive its story and its conclusions; instead, it uses feelings. It uses criteria that might be important to some people — such as “voting rights,” “reproductive rights,” and “inclusiveness” — but clearly not to others.

As Elbaum writes: “CNBC does not even take economic conditions into account on its list, for example. As such, no variation on the word ‘economy’ is used in the piece as a way of actually assessing the states, even though economic considerations are often quite important when people decide where to live.”

It’s a simple and commonsensical truism: People tend to move to where the jobs are. That’s why, for example, some six million southern blacks made The Great Migration northward and westward from 1916 to 1970: because that’s where the jobs were. And it’s why, according to Census data, black Americans have been embarking on a New Great Migration for the past 50 years, returning back to the Sunbelt states where economic opportunity is now greater than it is in, say, the Rust Belt and the New England states.

You might say the South has risen again.

Unfortunately, leftist journalists these days are so hell-bent on pushing an agenda that they refuse to let the facts get in the way of their stories.

Now more than ever, when it comes to the news: caveat emptor.