NBC News Brings Out the Big Guns Against Florida, Shoots Self in Foot

"Nobody goes to Florida anymore. It's too crowded." —NBC News, unintentionally doing its best Yogi Berra impersonation.

Citing "a perfect storm of soaring insurance costs, a hostile political environment, worsening traffic, and extreme weather," a weekend report from NBC left the impression — totally accidentally, you can be sure — that things have never been worse in the Sunshine State. That's according to "more than a dozen recent transplants and longtime residents who left the state in the past two years."

"There's no better data than anecdata" is the first thing they teach you in How to Journalism 101. 

Egads, there are guns, too! “Everyone is walking around with guns there,” one former Floridian told NBC. “I consider myself a conservative guy, but if you want to carry a gun you should be licensed, there should be some sort of process.”

Spoiler: He is not a conservative guy. 

Maybe my favorite summary of the NBC News report was provided by retired mainstream media reporter and talk radio host Jayne Miller:

"Contributing to their move was a perfect storm of soaring insurance costs, a hostile political environment, worsening traffic and extreme weather"
Florida lost 500,000 residents in 2022 https://t.co/9FbHAvWBgf

— Jayne Miller (@jemillerbalt) March 31, 2024

Miller is the Von Neumann Machine of cherry picking — she could go on forever like this.

MSNBC's Eric Michael Garcia took the same tack, tweeting, "Nearly 500,000 left in 2022, according to the most recent census data." That is indeed like claiming that a restaurant is losing customers by only counting the people who have paid their checks and walked out the door because more than 700,000 moved to Florida in 2022. It's the second-fastest growing state after Texas.

Then there are the folks NBC selected for their interviews. I had to laugh when I read this from Frankie de la Cretaz: "Every quote in this article on people moving to—and then fleeing—Florida is gold. 'False advertising' or not 'the utopia' they expected. Yeah, who would have thought Florida had *checks notes* hot weather, hurricanes, terrible traffic, and a political divide?"

Heh. 

Those drivers? Fuggidaboudit. Dave Barry warned us more than 30 years ago that "most Miami motorists graduated with honors from the Moammar Gadhafi School of Third-World-Style Driving (motto: 'Death Before Yielding')."

For a smart take, you can almost always depend on Mickey Kaus.

"[A]ccording to interviews with more than a dozen recent transplants and longtime residents who left the state in the past two years." More than a dozen!

Translation: MSM's still scared of @RonDesantis https://t.co/DfzvRJVfso

— Mickey Kaus (@kausmickey) April 1, 2024

And that's it, isn't it? DeSantis is out of the running for 2024, but the next election is always closer than you think. The mainstream media, as always, remains the Terimator of conservative character assassination: they absolutely will not stop, ever, until the target is dead.

Here in Colorado, we've been hit by inflation just as badly as Florida has been, which is to say, hard. We're among the worst states in the nation. Even worse than Florida since January 2021. And that's even though the influx of people moving to Colorado has slowed drastically since then.

While inflation is painful for everyone, prices in Florida are surging due to surging demand. Here in Colorado, we have Democrats in the state government waging a war against affordability on everything from eggs to taxes.

But you likely won't see that story on NBC News, where they'll try to convince you that a few dozen cranky, hand-picked former Floridians represent all of Florida.

Next time, NBC, take the L before it's handed to you by spiking stories like this one. 

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