At least that’s my theory.
Today’s cover headline: Blame the hipsters if city loses out on $2B
subhead: Officials say hipsters, among others, didn’t fill out census
That’s pretty damning stuff. First hipsters ruined facial hair and large swaths of Brooklyn, now they’re collectively responsible for the loss of federal dollars?
Article headline (inside the paper): Hipsters to blame for census losses?
Hold on–that’s in the form of a question now that we’re inside the paper, but it was stated as fact on the cover. What’s the article say?
Councilwoman Diana Reyna theorized that “hipsters” may be part of the cause for the inconsistency of the census numbers, stating that some of them “only want to be counted in their home state.” She also added that they might not participate in the census because it wouldn’t be “cool.”
So it wasn’t “officials,” as stated on the cover of the paper, but rather a single elected theoretician. And to be fair to the factually-flexible Diana Reyna, the paper may have quoted her out of context anyway. But if she really did say that, was she talking to hipsters about this? How did she know they’re hipsters? Did anyone tell her that hipsters don’t use the word “cool?” Was there a convention in Williamsburg (her district, along with Bushwick) that we missed? Perhaps there’s a hipster spokesperson who gives politicians talking points on hot issues. Hot issues like the census and artisanal raw-milk cheeses.
I’m no hipster, so I can’t speak for that homogenous group, but we got our census form in the mail and it took about 20 seconds to fill it out and send it back. I didn’t get a vibe anywhere on the cool-to-lame spectrum.
Back to the editors of Metro New York (who, I theorize, drink their own urine for “health” reasons): the article actually lists many more plausible reasons that the census might have been undercounted in NYC, including doormen not allowing entry to census takers, illegal immigrants not wanting to talk with government representatives, and illegal subletters under-reporting people living in their homes. Also, if a census taker was threatened, the property was listed as having only one resident. I think we all know that any of these might have committed to some severe undercounting.
So skimming the headlines isn’t recommended. Which reminds me, I’d better see what Pat Kiernan has to say about this…
