Bias Blindness Afflicts the Media

If one blatantly dismisses all accusation of bias as patently false when data would suggest otherwise, one will find little sympathy to accept one’s accusation of another as guilty of the same sin. Or to put it in more common parlance, it’s the pot calling the kettle black.

Robert Epstein of the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology, in the run-up to the presidential election, ran an experiment to determine just how biased toward leftist politics were the nation’s leading social media giants. As Frank Foer, a writer for The Atlantic, describes, “The social media companies are the gatekeepers. Whatever choices these companies make to elevate or bury information is very powerful and will have a big impact on what people read.” Epstein found that Google searches returned twice as many pro-Hillary Clinton news articles as did Yahoo. Even more disturbing was Google’s targeting tactic. Men in blue states saw more than double the pro-Clinton articles than did women in red states. Epstein charges that Google’s search algorithm ranked pro-Hillary articles ahead of any positive articles on Donald Trump.

Another study conducted by Nicholas Diakopoulos, a professor at Northwestern University, found that in December 2015 Google search results of presidential candidates showed seven out of every 10 articles were positive toward Democrats, whereas less than six out of 10 were positive for Republican candidates. We’re surprised it was that high. On election night, only 1% of 113 featured Google election-related searches produced articles from conservative news sources.

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