The New Yorker's Nick Lehman, who served as dean of Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism, was righter than he thought when he lightheartedly told a group of us alumni in Los Angeles several years ago that he knew why we became journalists -- because we couldn't do math.

You'll never see a better example of it than in a piece from my old colleagues at Issues & Insights, exposing just how true that was.

According to I&I:

A headline in Axios over the weekend carried this scary warning: “An increasing share of American adults are going hungry.”

The “shocking data point” comes, the story says, “at a time when the stock market is hitting record highs and President Donald Trump just signed a bill slashing food benefits.”

But take a look at the chart Axios published in that tear-jerking story, which is based on data from Morning Consult. Notice anything?

Morning Consult started tracking “food insecurity” in 2021. And, sure enough, it was on the rise – the entire time Joe Biden was president.

Look at what has happened since Trump has been in office. It’s back down to where it was nearly two years ago and appears to be moving sideways

Axios was promoting the sob-story narrative that Trump was cutting food stamps at a time of rising hunger, when in fact, the chart showed that Trump had brought hunger down and the hunger curve had flatlined.

What the chart really showed was that it was during Joe Biden's term that hunger spiked sharply -- the product of Bidenflation brought on by massive govenment spending, including, on food stamps.

As Thomas Sowell once said: You can have all the poverty you'd like to pay for.

Yet Axios built a whole story around the idea that Trump had created hunger by slashing food stamps in his Big Beautiful Bill, which was mostly a fraud-fighting measure. 

Sure, the press is probably dumb on math (and statistics) as Lehman joked. But more likely, they are ideological. A good editor should have caught the embarrassing picture presented by the reporter with that misread chart, but didn't. Ideology was too important. 

The old sob stories to promote a narrative that Trump was "mean-spirited," something we have seen from this crew dating from at least the Reagan era. Any time any government spending is cut, the media is right on it with this narrative, which is one reason why change has been so hard to accomplish in Washington.

Issues & Insights did a yeoman's job of exposing this phony, tired narrative, memorably good. Fact is, the chart showed that Trump reduced hunger and Joe Biden spiked it. That's the story they missed. They should be embarrassed.

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