Shocker!: Biased study finds people are biased
Aug 24, 2018 05:51:40 #
There are useless studies, and then there's this new research paper recently published by Royal Society Open Science, Perceptions of newsworthiness are contaminated by a political usefulness bias.
Researchers Harold Pasher of the University of California, San Diego and Gail Her**t of the University of San Diego School of Law teamed up to determine whether "people's perceptions of the newsworthiness of events [are] biased by a tendency to rate as more important any news story that seems likely to lead others to share their own political attitudes."
What they found shocked no one. The answer is yes…yes, a thousand times yes — or 569 times, at least.
To answer the question, they recruited 569 subjects from Amazon Mechanical Turk, a crowdsourcing internet marketplace run by Amazon that matches people to employers needing contractors to perform online tasks for pay. The subjects were promised a payoff for their participation.
They gave each of the participants a list of 12 hypothetical news stories consisting of "six pairs of stories relating (directly or indirectly) to the topics of welfare, affirmative action, military spending, police racial bias, support of gay rights and environment (species conservation). Pairs were constructed so that one news development seemed to provide obviously useful 'ammunition' for one side of a particular issue, while the other item in the pair provided ammunition for the other side. These are referred to as different 'versions' of the issue question. An additional eight filler items were included." (An aside, if you read the story choices you'll see a decidedly l*****t bent to them.)
Subjects were instructed to rate the stories by newsworthiness based on each one's importance the story would have for the readership of a city newspaper.
Researchers found that "judgements of newsworthiness — specified as importance to a hypothetical newspaper readership — are contaminated by an ideological bias: news stories that offer good 'ammunition' for the views of the rater are assigned a higher news value than those providing ammunition for the opposing view. The bias appeared slightly greater for those reporting an interest in politics and — for unknown reasons — slightly greater for those characterizing their political views as liberal."
No surprise there. And given that the majority of media figures have a decidedly l*****t bent and are vehemently anti-conservative — most have no understanding of conservatism at all, conflating it with the decidedly unconservative Republican politics — and are irrationally anti-Donald Trump and suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome, it's little wonder we get so much left-leaning f**e news thrown at us.
But we're supposed to believe that lefty reporters and editors are giving us unbiased and objective news. Riiiiight...
Researchers Harold Pasher of the University of California, San Diego and Gail Her**t of the University of San Diego School of Law teamed up to determine whether "people's perceptions of the newsworthiness of events [are] biased by a tendency to rate as more important any news story that seems likely to lead others to share their own political attitudes."
What they found shocked no one. The answer is yes…yes, a thousand times yes — or 569 times, at least.
To answer the question, they recruited 569 subjects from Amazon Mechanical Turk, a crowdsourcing internet marketplace run by Amazon that matches people to employers needing contractors to perform online tasks for pay. The subjects were promised a payoff for their participation.
They gave each of the participants a list of 12 hypothetical news stories consisting of "six pairs of stories relating (directly or indirectly) to the topics of welfare, affirmative action, military spending, police racial bias, support of gay rights and environment (species conservation). Pairs were constructed so that one news development seemed to provide obviously useful 'ammunition' for one side of a particular issue, while the other item in the pair provided ammunition for the other side. These are referred to as different 'versions' of the issue question. An additional eight filler items were included." (An aside, if you read the story choices you'll see a decidedly l*****t bent to them.)
Subjects were instructed to rate the stories by newsworthiness based on each one's importance the story would have for the readership of a city newspaper.
Researchers found that "judgements of newsworthiness — specified as importance to a hypothetical newspaper readership — are contaminated by an ideological bias: news stories that offer good 'ammunition' for the views of the rater are assigned a higher news value than those providing ammunition for the opposing view. The bias appeared slightly greater for those reporting an interest in politics and — for unknown reasons — slightly greater for those characterizing their political views as liberal."
No surprise there. And given that the majority of media figures have a decidedly l*****t bent and are vehemently anti-conservative — most have no understanding of conservatism at all, conflating it with the decidedly unconservative Republican politics — and are irrationally anti-Donald Trump and suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome, it's little wonder we get so much left-leaning f**e news thrown at us.
But we're supposed to believe that lefty reporters and editors are giving us unbiased and objective news. Riiiiight...
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