No, that’s not a typographical error in the headline: The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their objectivity. I use the term ‘journolism’ frequently when writing about media bias.

Linda Blackford’s biography blurb with what my best friend used to call the Lexington Herald-Liberal states that she “writes columns and commentary for the Herald-Leader. She has covered K-12, higher education and other topics for the past 20 years at the Herald-Leader.” You’d think that someone who has lived in and around Lexington for at least twenty years would be somewhat familiar with the Bluegrass State.

But, when the Williams Institute of UCLA’s law school reported that Kentucky had the highest percentage of homosexuals and transgendered people in the country, 10.5%, Mrs Blackford reacted with glee, and jumped right into a celebratory column. Unfortunately, that column is no longer available, because she had to issue a correction, using the same url:

It turns out Kentucky is NOT the gayest state in the U.S. | Opinion

by Linda Blackford | Friday, December 8, 2023 | 6:44 PM

Late Friday, the Williams Institute at UCLA issued an apology for a data error that said Kentucky had the highest rate of LGBTQ adults in the nation.

“We made a mistake, and we apologize to Kentucky and to you,” the release said. “We know there is a growing and thriving LGBTQ community in the Bluegrass State. But our report issued earlier this month incorrectly stated that Kentucky had the highest percentage of people identifying as LGBTQ. That percentage is 4.9 percent instead of 10.5 percent and in line with the national average of 5.6 percent.”

The apology said the Williams Institute researchers had used Centers for Disease Control data that had been corrected in July, but the correction had not been incorporated into the data. The study’s co-authors are Andrew Flores and Kerith Conron.

I also owe my readers an apology for taking data that seemed like good news and writing about it without enough due diligence. We have often cited Williams Institute data on LGBTQ data, and I can assure you that will not happen again.

Note that Mrs Blackford stated that she took “data that seemed like good news” at face value, and jumped into a story on it, but it has to be asked: why would believing that Kentucky had the highest percentage of “LGBTQ” people in the nation be considered “good news”?

I questioned the study right off the bat, noting that none of the states bordering Kentucky showed a homosexual/transgendered population percentage within four percentage points of Kentucky’s reported 10.5%, and that even the second highest state, Oregon, with 7.8%, was still 2.7 percentage points lower than Kentucky’s reported 10.5%. That difference was so stark that even a freshman taking a statistics class would have questioned it. But, I suppose when part of your politics is to celebrate sexual deviancy, a professional journolist, rather than actual journalist, would rather than run with the story.

Of course, Mrs Blackford wasn’t the only one ignoring an obvious error due to bias. The Williams Institute, in issuing their correction, said:

Did we question when Kentucky came up as the top state? Yes, of course. But we know the number of people who identify as LGBT is growing in all regions of the country. So, our research team questioned the data, as we always do, but ultimately, we trusted it.

The Williams Institute is not an unbiased organization, but one which supports homosexuality. In 2011, they released a guesstimate which claimed that 3.8% of Americans ‘identified’ as ‘LGBTQ’, which they’ve updated to 5.6% at the same url. But the Centers for Disease Control conducted the National Health Institute Survey in 2013, after the Williams 2011 estimate, and found that only 1.6% of the population are homosexual, with another 0.7% bisexual, and another 1.1% either stating that they were ‘something else’ or declining to respond. That’s a total of 3.4% not being sexually normal. The study not conducted by a biased private organization found a lower percentage of homosexuals and transgendered, which raises the obvious question of whether the Williams Institutes’ numbers have bias built in.

Yes, the data seemed obviously wrong to me, because they were simply out-of-line with everything else. But the data presented seemed obviously wrong to me for another reason. I grew up in Kentucky, went to college here, and lived in Lexington until I was 31 years old. Then, after 33 years in Virginia, Delaware, and Pennsylvania, my wife and I retired back to Kentucky in 2017, and I certainly never noticed a substantial homosexual or transgendered population. Perhaps Mrs Blackford, living in the Commonwealth’s second most liberal city, saw more of what she wanted to see, but if that’s the case, she really needs to get out more.