PolitiFact's Yacob Reyes set the bar for fact checker incompetence back in February of this year when he attempted to fact check Maria Bartiromo’s statement that “We have doubled our oil imports from Russia in the last year.” He rated the claim mostly false, stating “The U.S. did not double oil imports from Russia in the last year.” Then, two paragraphs into his article, Reyes writes that “The U.S. did double the amount of crude oil imported from Russia last year. But Russia accounts for only about 3% of overall U.S. crude oil imports in 2021.”
In Reyes' latest work, he attempted to criticize Governor Ron DeSantis' handling of Hurricane Ian, rating a statement from the Governor that Lee County wasn't inside the hurricane's cone zone "mostly false."
The justification for the “false” rating was that one largely uninhabited barrier island with fewer than two dozen private residencies (many of which are rentals) named Cayo Costa, which is (barely) part of Lee County, falls inside the storm’s path. If we were to assume an average 3 people per residence on Cayo Costa, the island’s population would account for roughly 0.008% of the population of Lee County (760,822) as of the 2020 Census.
But even that would be an overestimate, as Governor DeSantis' Press Secretary Christina Pushaw pointed out that the island was completely uninhabited at the time.
Fact Check: Cayo Costa is an uninhabited island. Almost the entirety of Lee County *where people actually live* was outside the cone. Governor DeSantis was right, again. And @PolitiFact cannot handle it, again. https://t.co/RRLkojzC9r pic.twitter.com/s2llVo2Sw8
— Christina Pushaw 🐊 🇺🇸 (@ChristinaPushaw) October 5, 2022
The population of Cayo Costa is not mentioned at any time by Reyes.
Matt Palumbo is the author of The Man Behind the Curtain: Inside the Secret Network of George Soros
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