Going deeper on recent headlines.
One of the things I try to do in this column is look beyond the headlines — past the sound bites to understand what’s really going on.
So that’s what we’re doing today with a trio of stories.
Headline :“Frank Artiles and Republicans Have Worst Week Ever After Racial and Misogynist Slurs.”
The quick take: This headline from the Florida Democratic Party was dripping with giddiness. Democrats were thrilled that a South Florida senator was caught using the N-word and forced to resign. And pundits everywhere began predicting Dems would pick up this blue-district seat. The rest of the story: What some onlookers overlooked was the sheer incompetence of Florida Democrats, who have won only one statewide race in the past decade. Seriously, these folks could lose a 100-yard dash if you gave them a 99-yard head start.
In this case, Democrats quickly began crowing about the prospects of Democratic State Rep. Daisy Baez winning the race to replace Artiles.
Except then the Miami Herald started digging and learned that Baez didn’t even appear to live in the district in which she was running. So Baez — the Democratic Party’s great, new hope — ended her campaign 19 days after she launched it.
Democrats have other candidates they can field. But to assume this pickup is a slam-dunk is to ignore that Democrats are often their own worst enemies, capable of losing coin tosses even if you spot them both sides of the coin.
Headline :“Orlando Area Remains State Leader in Job Creation”
The quick take: That led a press release from Gov. Rick Scott’s office last week. And at first glance, it sounds like boffo news.
The rest of the story: Not included in that release was how much these new jobs pay. And that’s where things get ugly.
As the Sentinel found, the largest job gains — more than 13,000 of the 42,000 total — came in the “leisure and hospitality” sector, where the average job pays $26,409.
Such jobs actually drag the region’s average private-sector paycheck of around $43,000 — already one of the lowest in America — even lower.
The second-biggest gain — 8,800 jobs in “trade, transportation and utilities” — also featured below-average jobs, paying $38,326, according to the state Department of Economic Opportunity.
Now, Orlando did add some high-paying jobs as well — 1,600 manufacturing jobs with an average salary of $62,097 and 4,800 financial-sector jobs that average $62,532. But even when you add those two sectors together, they don’t even account for half the low-paying tourism jobs we added.
This is Orlando’s story. It is
why we have more working poor than most of America, why we have waiting lists at the free clinics, why we have an affordable housing crisis, why our ERs and nonprofits are strained and why our welfare rolls are swollen.
And until we start focusing more on the wages we’re growing, that problem will continue.
Headline :“Florida sets tourism record, but Gov. Scott fears decline after Visit Florida cuts”
The quick take: The headline from the South Florida Sun-Sentinel celebrated Florida’s new record number of visitors, but also carried warnings that the numbers will plummet if the state’s marketing budget is cut from $78 million to $25 million.
The rest of the story: The numbers here are a mix of guesstimates and pure fiction. As the Orlando Sentinel’s Sandra Pedicini reported, visitation numbers are an inexact science, but one that at least uses data-driven methodologies. The prediction about plummeting visitors — based solely on cuts to Visit Florida’s budget — however, is major malarkey.
Why? Because, when asked what formula Visit Florida relied upon to predict that visitor counts will drop by more than 30 million people if their budget is cut, Visit Florida said it simply decided use the visitor counts from the last time it had a subsidy of only $25 million … in 2007.
What nonsense. In 2007, there was no Harry Potter. No Aquatica. No Pandora. No Volcano Bay. Disney had four fewer resort options. Universal had two. The cruise-ship industry was about half its current size. Both the state and nation had a smaller population. But to hear Visit Florida tell it, none of that brought in a single solitary soul. It was all because of the additional $53 million in tax dollars it spent on marketing.
The bottom line here is that, whenever you hear a brow-raising claim, remember the journalist’s mantra: If your mother says she loves you, check it out.