California lost roughly 216,000 residents in the year ending July 2025, and Gavin Newsom says the media is to blame.
Campaigning in South Carolina, the governor told the San Francisco Chronicle that California’s battered reputation is the product of “lies” spread by conservative media outlets. Critics, he argued, “come after California” because the state’s success disproves their worldview. It is a bold theory. The people packing their boxes, however, are not consulting cable news to pick their next zip code. They are watching moving-truck rates.
The core problem with the media-narrative argument is that the most uncomfortable numbers come from government sources, not from a cable chyron. According to a report, IRS data shows that departing Californians skew toward higher-income households, the exact taxpayers a fiscally strained state can least afford to lose. California also lost a congressional seat following the 2020 census and is projected to lose several more after 2030. Reapportionment tables do not bend to spin. Either residents left or they did not. They did.
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There is an honest sliver of Newsom’s argument worth taking seriously. San Francisco crime actually dropped significantly in 2025. Homicides hit a multi-decade low, and property crime fell sharply according to SFPD’s own data. The portrait of a city spiraling into lawless collapse, a favorite frame for some conservative commentators, is genuinely overstated. Critics who insist otherwise are using the same selective approach they accuse the press of applying to them.
That concession, though, does not carry Newsom very far. A single year of improving crime statistics does not erase years of documented retail theft, open-air drug markets, and sustained quality-of-life complaints that residents filed in real time. It also does not address California’s second-highest unsheltered homelessness rate in the country, its 17 percent poverty rate, or its standing as the state with the nation’s highest gas prices.
Pointing to one bright metric while waving away the rest is not a rebuttal. It is a press release. A governor can highlight genuine progress on a specific indicator without pretending the broader picture is a fabrication invented by political enemies. The residents still living through the housing costs, the homelessness, and the economic squeeze deserve better than being told their experience is a lie manufactured by Fox News.
California has real problems. It also has real improvements. Acknowledging both simultaneously is not ideological surrender. It is just honesty, and it is the one thing conspicuously absent from a governor who wants national attention but cannot quite square his campaign message with the migration data his own state keeps generating.
