We all know the media are trash.

But that doesn’t mean it’s unimportant to point it out. It’s even important that those of us who know this to keep getting reminded, since we can be taken in by their hoaxes if we aren’t wary.

One such hoax is the media frenzy about a questionnaire given to female athletes in Florida. The media and the Left have been playing it up as some horrible transphobic invasion of privacy intended to pry into the private lives of young girls to root out fakers.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

When I saw liberals in the media freaking out about "Florida requires girls to give menstrual information" I looked up the athlete-health forms of the first two liberal cities in Dem states I thought of. Sure enough, NYC and SF require exactly that info. https://t.co/yhIfVwSjXT

— Tim Carney (@TPCarney) February 3, 2023

There was a total freakout on Twitter when someone revealed a “secret” and new form for female athletes that asked them about their menstrual cycle. It was portrayed as a dystopian invasion of privacy intended to usher us into a new era of sharia law or something.

It turns out to be standard practice, because such information is necessary to ensure the health and safety of teenage athletes. Don’t ask me why. Not my area.

Tim Carney of the Washington Examiner smelled a rat, so he did something no MSM journalist seems to do: poked around and did some research on the matter. And what he found tells you everything you need to know about how the Left operates in trying to stir up the ignorant against conservatives.

It didn’t take much. Not a deep dive into athletic medicine or anything. It didn’t even require a phone call to find out this was total BS.

He just went to the most liberal cities in America’s websites and looked to see what they did. And it is precisely the same thing as is done by the Florida High School Athletics Association.

Here are screenshots from the forms of New York City and San Francisco, hardly conservative hellholes bent on forcing young girls to churn out fascist stormtroopers.

Still, Twitter was ablaze with rage because…Ron DeSantis. Who I feel pretty confident was totally unaware of any of this.

None of this has anything to do with the wisdom or necessity of the policy, although I saw a few women on Twitter explain that it is vital information to ensure health and safety. How would I know? Not my area of expertise, and given how insane the freakout is I feel no need to go beyond knowing that getting this information has nothing to do with the ideology of the people involved. If it doesn’t make sense then the parents and policy makers should hash it out.

It has never been an issue before though, and the only reason it is now is to feed into a bogus narrative.

I can easily imagine some centrist who never looked into this reeling in shock, assuming that this was some new and radical invasion of privacy based upon the fake outrage. And that is the intent. Prey on the fears of low-information voters by ginning up a fake controversy, a la the Steele Dossier, and just keep pounding a false message.

This is how the Left works, and how the commentariate aides them.

We have to point it out every time. No one instance will convince anyone to mistrust the media, but the accumulation will devastate their credibility. It is a long game–they built up credibility over time, and it will take time to destroy it.