The filings of plaintiff Dominion Voting Systems in its defamation suit against Fox News make plain that some of the network's stars aren't stupid enough to believe their own bullshit, but they are venal enough to shovel it out to their nutty prime time viewers in order to enhance the bottom line—the network's and their own. Text messages show that Tucker Carlson thought many of the bizarre conspiracy theories advanced by Trump lawyers were fantasies and that Fox fact-checkers who said so should be fired before they dragged down the company's value.
"Fact-checkers" at Fox News? It appears they are hired in order to be ignored. And then fired, if Tucker gets his way. Seems Fox could be a leaner corporation if they just didn't hire them in the first place.
People like Hannity and Ingraham and Carlson are a problem, to say nothing of Trump himself, but we wouldn't have to know about any of them if it weren't for the large and ravenous audience to which they're serving up the slop. Did this audience recently come into existence, or is the means of converting mass delirium into dollars a recent discovery? I tend to think it's more the latter than the former, but what I know for sure is that, when subjected to the output of these media organs, I always wonder whether mental fog or bad faith accounts for the inanity. John Hinderaker, of the accidentally hilarious Power Line blog, was a top-flight trial lawyer, which tempts me to believe he can recognize a bad argument. So why does he make so many himself? Here he is, highlighting a Wall Street Journal piece that compares New York to Florida, "by the numbers." According to Hinderaker, the chart he reproduces "tells us pretty much everything we need to know about the relative merit of conservative and left-wing governance."
If you follow the link, you'll see that "pretty much everything we need to know" is captured in just nine points of comparison. Oddly, two of the nine relate to Medicaid enrollments and expenditures in the two states. I don't think this is commonly regarded as a key indicator of the general welfare and was not surprised to see that relatively few Floridians are on Medicaid: the state has a huge senior population, and there's usually no reason to be on Medicaid if you're on Medicare. The chart doesn't compare Medicare enrollments and expenditures, but it does reveal that New York has both a state income tax and state sales tax, whereas Florida has only a sales tax—which is higher than New York's. Other included comparisons are more transparently, laughably lame. For example, another line item, of the nine, shows that Florida's GDP grew by 17% over the period 2016-21, to just 8% for New York. Maybe wildly different base lines could have something to do with it? (If you start at 1 and grow to 2, that's a 100 percent increase, but going from 10 to 12 is only 20 percent growth.) Along this line, I'll just note that the nine points of comparison did not include GDP per capita, perhaps because of the 50 states Florida clocks in at #40 while New York is tops in the country. The 10 states below Florida include—I'll just name the bottom 5—the left-wing bastions of Mississippi, West Virginia, Arkansas, Alabama, and Idaho.
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