Tennessee's one of America's worst places to live because of a single new law? No wonder most Americans distrust 'the news'
Gallup reported Monday that trust in the news media has dipped to an all-time low. The polling firm found that just 16% of Americans have a “great deal” of confidence in newspapers, and even fewer — 11% — have the same degree of confidence in television news. That’s down five percentage points from the same time last year.
Is it any wonder? It’s becoming harder and harder to differentiate news from opinion, and Americans are increasingly fed up with it.
Consider last week’s story from CNBC, listing America’s 10 worst places to live in 2022. The list includes Tennessee.
CNBC is ostensibly in the business of reporting, well, business news. But its annual listing of the worst states in which to live was rife with political viewpoints. The outlet’s methodology includes a category that it calls “Life, Health & Inclusion,” where it includes such thing as “protections against discrimination and voting rights.”
The cable news network goes out of its way to point out: “That’s not politics, it’s business.”
Right. Except most Americans are smart enough to see right through that smokescreen, and recognize it for what it is: Pure ideology-driven politics, plain and simple.
CNBC ranks Tennessee as America’s ninth-worst state to live in. Why? Because the state legislature recently passed — and Gov. Bill Lee signed into law — a bill that bans transgender students from participating on girls’ sports teams in the state’s middle and high schools.
The outlet points out that Tennessee has “notched some impressive economic development victories lately,” which have led a number of workers to relocate to the Volunteer State. “But those workers are moving to a state that is chipping away at inclusiveness,” it adds.
Yes, you’re reading that correctly: CNBC says that Tennessee is one of the nation’s worst places to live and work because it passed a law stipulating that biological males cannot participate in girls’ sports. And, it claims, “That’s not politics, it’s business.”
Even if you think the transgender sports law is a terrible law — and very few people do — how could it possibly make Tennessee a terrible place to live when it affects so few people?
According to Gallup, 3.5% of Tennesseans are LGBT. But that’s an all-inclusive grouping that includes sexual orientation and gender identity. Sexual orientation has nothing to do with Tennessee’s transgender sports law.
There are no firm numbers on how many people in Tennessee identify as transgender, but studies generally place it as somewhere around 0.5% of all Tennesseans. Almost all of them are adults, and almost none of the school-aged children and adolescents who identify as transgender participate in sports.
In other words, an incredibly small number of people are actually impacted by Tennessee’s transgender sports law — placing the number at 0.1% would be very generous. That doesn’t mean that discriminating against a certain group of people is okay, just because they’re small in number. But is a law prohibiting biological males from participating in girls’ sports actually discriminatory, or is it protecting biological females who participate on school sports teams?
While you ponder the rhetorical questions, CNBC is telling us — with a straight face, presumably — that Tennessee is a terrible place to live for the 99.9% of people who aren’t affected by a transgender sports law.
But, hey, it’s not politics … just business.
Actually, it’s 100% politics. Mainstream news outlets like CNBC have an unhealthy obsession and distaste for social laws being passed by states that fall anywhere right of California and New York on the political scale, and they go out of their way to portray those states as being governed by homophobic, bigoted, closed-minded radicals who can’t get out of their own way. Not surprisingly, eight of the 10 states on CNBC’s list of worst places to live are states that voted for Donald Trump over Joe Biden in 2020.
To its credit, CNBC also lists crime as a reason for including Tennessee on its “worst places to live” list. And Tennessee’s crime rate is way too high; the Volunteer State has one of the nation’s highest violent crime rates.
Yet, Tennessee’s violent crime rate ranks well below the District of Columbia, which certainly doesn’t on the outlet’s “worst places to live” list.
Still, there are worse places to live than Tennessee — according to CNBC. Take, for instance, Texas.
You might be surprised to find Texas on the list, coming in at the second-worst place to live in America, considering that people are flocking to the Lone Star State in droves. The outlet admits that Texas ranks No. 3 for net migration of college-educated workers (behind only Florida and Washington), but claims that those workers are finding nothing but woes when they arrive: limited options for childcare and healthcare, “few protections against discrimination,” and voting rights restrictions.
People who are able to get past political ideologies when determining a place to live — and that would include most of us — realize that there are a lot of things that make Tennessee an attractive place to settle down. The cost of living here is very reasonable, and the overall tax burden is one of the lowest in the nation. Tennessee is best known for being one of only a handful of states without an income tax, but property tax rates in Tennessee are famously low, as well. On top of that, the economy here is strong and unemployment is low. The climate is one of the most comfortable in the country, with mild winters and long, warm summers. Some of the nation’s top hospitals are located in Tennessee, offering quality access to health care. Post-secondary education is solid. It’s hard to make any sort of reasonable case that all of those positives are over-shadowed by the state’s new law that prohibits biological males from participating in girls’ sports.
Little wonder, then, that Americans’ trust in the news media continues to plummet. Guided by their political ideologies and a lust to cram them down the throats of the masses, leading news outlets like CNBC can’t seem to get out of their own way in their rush to irrelevance.