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Conservative Media Bias, Sneaky, Not so Sneaky [1]

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Date: 2023-05-29

Analysis by Andrew Van Dam

May 26, 2023 at 6:00 a.m. EDT

The title is obviously favoring conservative states on a critical topic, implying that Red states are more economically healthy and growing the “business friendly” trope of conservatives. Studies show that 60 — 80% of people just read headlines anyway and only around 40% ever read entire articles. This “news” story as you read it gets so convoluted and stupid that by the end of it the author literally gives up on his own bullshit and asks the reader to do their own damn analysis.

Some highlights as the “news” story begins:

We ranked the 50 states by their hiring rates and were swiftly struck by a trend so clear that — if it holds up — should be front-page news: Republican-leaning states are hiring faster than blue states.

It was on your top page of your website so I guess it was “frontpage” news regardless.

Of the 17 fastest-hiring states, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 14 voted for Trump in 2020. The top two Biden-voting states, Georgia and Nevada, are probably best classified as purple (Biden-blue Delaware is the other). The 10 slowest-hiring states all went for Biden.

This concludes the opening by this time its clear conservatives rule the economy. Probably 90% of people stop reading here.

But wait:

More perplexingly, we found that faster hiring hasn’t translated to faster job growth. When we ran the payroll numbers, the typical red state wasn’t adding jobs any faster than the typical blue one.

You mean the numbers might not mean what they think you mean?

“It’s churn,” he said. Those red states weren’t creating jobs faster. They were just hiring more often because folks were bouncing around more. Red states don’t have more layoffs or job openings than blue ones, they just have more quits and hires.

So, Red States just have more job turnover? Why wasn’t THAT the headline?

It gets more interesting:

She urged us to look at wages and pointed out that, even within industries and companies, employers pay different wages across states, depending on what they can get away with. “One thing red states tend to have in common is that they are right-to-work states, have lower rates of unionization and have lower wages with no state minimum wage,” Edwards told us via email.

I’m sorry, so actually BLUE states would be better, economically, and more stable to live in?

All three experts also brought up the minimum wage: In many blue states, politicians help low earners get raises by hiking the pay floor. That allows them to see a higher paycheck while staying in the same job. In red states, raises tend to come only through competition. A worker gets a raise because their low paycheck pushes them to seek out a rival employer who’s willing to pay more. Logically, that would lead to higher job turnover, right? As it turns out, both approaches seem to lead to the same place: Wage growth in a typical red state is virtually identical to wage growth in a typical blue state. But one of them necessarily leads to a bit more job-hopping.

But wage growth is the same in both states — I’m sorry what was the point of this article?

In this line of work, spurious correlations are an occupational hazard. (No shit...) Usually we can ferret them out through thorough reporting, which typically uncovers a third factor we didn’t measure or an accident of history driving the association. But here’s an odd correlation we can’t get out of our heads: The age of a state’s housing stock is related to its hiring and quitting rates in a way that seems to transcend politics. The older the houses, the lower the quits rate. (My Emphasis and comment in parenthesis)

At this point the author is just pulling his own shit out of his ass and guessing at things that might be related or not. Correlation does NOT equal causation, ya moron.

Finally, it ends with this, they completely give up

And research has shown that younger workers are priced out of communities with tight zoning regulations, where there’s less new construction and houses are older. Now we’re kicking the question to you: What else might explain the relationship?

By the way the entire article is filled with scatter plots and charts that visualize every statistic so it LOOKS really detailed and thought out, very official and truthy.

Now, I love articles or stories that have plot twists don’t get me wrong, and I enjoy taking someone on a journey just to end up saying something like its all in the eye of the beholder or whatever.

But that’s not what this is, its a news story in a major publication specializing in politics and public policy. This story and it’s headline are totally averse; and that appears on purpose. The point of randomly finding correlations and shitting them all over the story was just to fill up space that justify a pro-Red-state headline. The funny thing is, I think the author knows it, and makes fun of himself and his paper in the rest of the article by showing how worthless these types of economic correlation conjectures really are.

Hey Washington Post, I got a headline for you:

We Don’t Know What the Fuck We are Talking About

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/5/29/2172013/-Conservative-Media-Bias-Sneaky-Not-so-Sneaky

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