Lyrah and Madelynn did a good job on this topic in the latest edition of the Spectator P.M. podcast, but I did want to pass along a take on that very large, steaming turd of a “study” laid down by CNBC, which claimed that Tennessee and Texas are the two worst states in America to live.
The study itself is a big, fat nothing. It claims that Tennessee is the worst state in America to live, followed by Texas, Indiana, Louisiana, and Georgia to round out the bottom five. (RELATED: The Spectator P.M. Ep. 229: CNBC’s ‘Top States’ Ranking Is the Top Flop of 2026)
What are the top five states? Vermont, Maine, New Jersey, Minnesota, and Connecticut.
Oh, OK.
Here’s what CNBC’s article on the 10 worst states to live had to say about Tennessee…
Tennessee Republicans, led by Gov. Bill Lee, make no apologies for a rash of state laws targeting the LGBTQ+ community, including a so-called “bathroom law” requiring transgender people to use the facilities designated for their sex at birth. The state also explicitly bars localities from adopting their own antidiscrimination ordinances. To underscore the point, Lee signed a resolution earlier this year designating June “Nuclear Family Month.”
“The nuclear family, consisting of one husband, one wife, and any biological, adopted, or fostered children, is God’s design for familial structure and has been the bedrock of society since the creation of the world,” the resolution states.
Its sponsors deliberately timed the observance to coincide with the month when Tennessee’s more than 300,000 LGBTQ+ people celebrate Pride.
Inclusiveness isn’t the only area where the Volunteer State falls short. Tennessee also has one of the highest violent crime rates in the nation, according to FBI statistics. And it has the third-highest rate of drug deaths, according to the United Health Foundation.
Tennessee’s violent crime rate is almost solely a product of the historically out-of-control lawlessness in Memphis, something which has been greatly curtailed thanks to President Trump’s commitment of federal resources to pin down the criminal element in that city.
But militant heterosexuals interfering with Pride Month being a key factor in down-ranking a state which has been growing by leaps and bounds over the space of the past decade and more on quality of life doesn’t sound much like a scientific study. (RELATED: ‘Reverse Okies’ and Blue State Refugees — Another Wave Appears To Be Building)
But Scott Cohn, the San Francisco-based CNBC reporter authoring the listicle on the cable channel’s website, assures us that This Was Very Professionally Done, You Guys…
As more companies insist their employees return to the office, they know they need to offer something in return to attract and retain good people. That’s why finding a place where people will want to live is an increasingly important factor as companies decide where to set up shop.
“Quality of place, especially investing in quality of place, is the top thing you can do for talent attraction and retention,” said site selection consultant Larry Gigerich, managing executive director of Ginovus in Indianapolis, and chairman of the Site Selectors Guild.
CNBC is placing increasing emphasis on Quality of Life, one of the 10 categories of competitiveness in our annual America’s Top States for Business study. It is our annual ranking of every state’s business climate, now in its 20th year. Under this year’s methodology, the category makes up 11.6 percent of a state’s overall score, up from about ten percent last year.
To score the states for quality of life, we use hard data on factors like crime rates, air quality and healthcare. We also consider the cost and availability of childcare, inclusiveness of state laws, and reproductive rights. Some states offer exemplary quality of life. But these ten states do not make the grade.
Those are what Scott Cohn thinks are the important factors in quality of life? How easy it is for a woman to kill her unborn baby, and how friendly the local libraries are to Drag Queen Story Hour?
All of the top 10 worst places for Scott Cohn, a veteran legacy corporate media reporter out of San Francisco, to live are red states. Rounding out his bottom 10 are Utah, Missouri, Alabama, Oklahoma, and Arkansas. (RELATED: Y’all Street Is Eating Wall Street’s Lunch)
And they want you to believe this is credible.
Hilariously, four of the worst states to live, according to Cohn’s listicle, are in the top 10 of CNBC’s best states for business — Texas, Georgia, Tennessee, and Indiana. So the two worst states to live in America are among the top 10 best states to do business. Cool story, bro! (RELATED: Go South, Young Man, Go South)
It would have been a bit more believable if Scott Cohn had told you that these were the top 10 worst places for the LGBTQIA++ Alphabet People to live, or that they were the top 10 worst places for women wanting to have abortions — or men wanting to have wanton sex without fatherhood — to live.
But nope. Scott Cohn and his team of “researchers” at CNBC decided to impose San Francisco values on red states and found Tennessee and Texas to fail the biggest of all.
Imposing San Francisco values — which are the values real people are fleeing from all over the country — on places that don’t want to be San Francisco is what legacy corporate media has been doing for 50 years, and people are absolutely sick of it. (RELATED: What Migration Patterns Within the U.S. Tell Us About Policy)
What’s interesting about this study, if anything, is how little Cohn and the suits at CNBC who pay him seem to care about hiding any of this. There was a time when network news would work hard to promote the fiction that the propaganda they were offering was balanced and straight and objective. But that time is gone, and while they’ll blame it on Fox News and the internet segmenting the media market, that isn’t close to the whole story.
What’s really happening is that the boomers on whom the American media model was based have aged out of the prime demo, and the generations who’ve come after are far more cynical about mass media. Nobody under 60 really thinks the holy media miracle of Watergate was all that big a scandal, for example, at least compared to far worse behavior since then that outlets like CNBC treated with kid gloves. We all know that we’re being treated like mushrooms — the sanitized version of that old military analogy is that we’re kept in the dark and fed poop all day. (RELATED: A Defense of Generation X As Its Moment Approaches)
And eventually, people get tired of being treated like mushrooms.
Go to Scott Cohn’s website, and you’ll see a perfect example of how this works. He’s got two video reports he did for CNBC featured at the top of the page, displaying his work — one, from eight years ago, telling the viewer the shocking news that an Idaho prison is violent, and another, from 10 years ago, exposing Remington, the gun manufacturer, for product liability. And down the page, there’s Cohn as a guest on the awful John Oliver show, which somehow survives on HBO (at least, until the Ellisons get hold of Time Warner).
It’s classic 1980s-1990s “TV journalism,” complete with the hackneyed premises — “Water is wet! Film at 11!” — and overwrought propaganda designed to make soft people outraged.
Boring.
Scott Cohn has nothing to offer to anybody younger than a boomer, and so he’s reduced to writing stupid listicles to get clicks on CNBC’s website. And the stupider the listicle, the more clicks.
So pissed-off Tennesseans and Texans who shared that dumb survey with “get a load of this crap” messages attached probably did more for Scott Cohn’s flagging media career than anything else that has happened to him of late.
It’s pitiful. But it’s an immaculate rendering of what legacy corporate media has become and refuses to move beyond, and why it won’t last much longer in its current formation.
READ MORE from Scott McKay:
Yes, They’re Communists, and Yes, They’re Lying About It. For Now.
Let’s Be Honest — Why Is Poor Mitch McConnell Still in the Senate?
