[“The Ripley” officially entered the Ethics Alarms lexicon in August of 2021, signifying an ethics story that so outrageous it defies belief. Admittedly, events like incorrigible left-biased mainstream media outlets like the Washington Post undermining their own agenda by publishing information that makes Democrats look bad were not the intended topics for the new category, but when I have, in the past, awarded “Ethics Hero” awards to unethical news sources that unexpectedly told the truth, readers here have objected on the grounds that doing your job ethically and professionally should not be considered heroic. I have to agree, and so episodes like this one will now be eligible for a “Ripley.”]
Conservative news aggregator Citizens Free Press headlined its link to this story, “How did this get past Wash Post censors?” It’s a fair question. The Post’s feature is “Why are red states hiring so much faster than blue states?,” and it begins by pointing out what Al Gore might call and inconvenient truth, except that his inconvenient truth was mostly hooey:
We ranked the 50 states by their hiring rates and were swiftly struck by a trend so clear that — if it holds up — should be front-page news: Republican-leaning states are hiring faster than blue states.Of the 17 fastest-hiring states, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 14 voted for Trump in 2020. The top two Biden-voting states, Georgia and Nevada, are probably best classified as purple (Biden-blue Delaware is the other). The 10 slowest-hiring states all went for Biden.
The story is accompanied by this chart:
The story goes on: “Certain outspoken workers in those places often tell reporters that regulation-happy Democrats in Washington are stifling business. And they may be right.” Gee…ya think?
Then we are told, “But when we delved deeper, confusion seized our synapses. First, we found this isn’t just a matter of pandemic policies or a Trump-era triumph. This set of states has been hiring faster for the entire decade for which we have data.”
For the rest of the column, the Post reporter dutifully consults progressive and Democratic scholars who come up with various explanations to argue why Democrat-dominated states are better anyway—you know, more unions, minimum wages, more educated workers (indoctrinated in anti-Capitalism ideology). In reality, I think the headline was intended as clickbait, much like Robert Ripley’s most famous “Believe It or Not” cartoon:
Nonetheless, reporting facts that are unfavorable to the party you pimp for and then trying to explain why they really aren’t as bad as they look is still a lot closer to ethical journalism than hiding the facts entirely.
Ethics Alarms 
I’m surprised the Post ran that story, too, not for the reason you suggest, but because those statistics and the accompanying analysis are meaningless.
Assuming I’m reading this correctly. according to the chart, Alaska leads the way, with a 6.5% new hire rate. But they also have the most firings/layoffs and the most quits. Their net increase is thus 0.7%; meanwhile, blue state Nevada is up a full point in the net. Red state Tennessee is listed for its hires, but it only breaks even: as many people leave jobs as are hired. Focusing on just new hires is the equivalent of measuring an outfielder’s arm by looking only at his assists–if nobody is willing to run on him, he doesn’t throw anybody out.
These figures might show that there’s a little more mobility in red states (or, depending on how you look at it, more stability in blue states). An analysis of that phenomenon, assuming it plays out across the board, might be both interesting and useful. This is not.
I think the story adequately suggests that the statistics are at least ambiguous, and it automatically shows how such stats are confirmation bias fodder.
Still, knowing as they and we do, that so many readers never get past the headline, its the opposite of the Post’s usual MO. I’d rather have careful readers like you point out the problems with facts than have a biased interlocutor decide at the outset to bury them as, just to pull a hypothetical out of the air, Russian disinformation.