Shocker! People are biased

Shocker! People are biased  By Jay Baker

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 Heriot 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

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 leftist 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 leftist 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 fake news thrown at us.

But we're supposed to believe that lefty reporters and editors are giving us unbiased and objective news. Right...

Leftists prefer illegals to Americans

Leftist politicians and media pundits claim to care more about America and average Americans than conservative (when you can find one) ones do, but two prominent stories of the week demonstrate that's a decidedly false notion, or, as we call it, fake news.

When Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents arrested an illegal alien taking his equally illegal wife to hospital so she could have her state-paid C-section, the leftist pundit and political class and social justice warriors on social media lost their collective minds.

For instance, The New York Slimes ran the story with this headline: ICE Detained Man Who Was Driving His Pregnant Wife to a Hospital.

ABC SNews sent out this Tweet:

Their story was initially headlined: ICE detains man taking pregnant wife to hospital to deliver baby.

In fact, most if not all the initial reportson this story from the fake news media omitted a crucial fact: The illegal alien taking his wife to the hospital was wanted for a 2006 murder in Mexico. And the woman was in good enough condition to drive herself to the hospital after her illegal husband was arrested. Which is something countless women have done when they've had to.

CBS even implied that ICE was changing its story and lying about the murder warrant.

Compare this to the leftists' treatment of Molly Tibbetts after her body was found and an illegal alien was arrested after allegedly confessing to the murder and taking authorities to the body.

The media, which had been running the story almost daily since her mysterious disappearance, went suddenly silent. And politicians like fake Indian Elizabeth Warren (Communist-Massachusetts) said that although she understood the outcome was hard for Mollie's family, we need to focus on "real problems" like illegal immigrants not being able to see their kids.

That's the trouble with leftists; they're always coming up false equivalencies and either/or propositions where none exist.

Another senator takes direct aim at the 1^st Amendment

We recently told you that Senator Chris Murphy (Big Brother-Connecticut) was subtly threatening Big Technology into functioning as de facto information gatekeepers of the world.

Now he's been joined by Senator Ron Wyden (Big Brother-Oregon) who is not just implying there will be consequences for Big Tech that doesn't crack down on contrarian thought, he's crafting legislation to punish them if they don't.

In an interview withRedcode, Wyden said any Big Tech platforms that go against "common decency" should face "consequences."

"What I'm gonna be trying to do in my legislation is to really lay out what the consequences are when somebody who is a bad actor, somebody who really doesn't meet the decency principles that reflect our values, if that bad actor blows by the bounds of common decency, I think you gotta have a way to make sure that stuff is taken down," he added.

Of course, "decency" is a subjective notion, and this sounds like another excuse to suppress unpopular or contrarian but sound ideas, also known as "conspiracy theories"; you know, positions like the Federal Reserve is destroying the U.S. economy, 9/11 was a false flag, there is no such thing as man-caused climate change, Barack Obama's birth certificate was a fake, the Deep State exists, Russians didn't hack the DNC and there's no Russian collusion.

Once government through its Big Tech arm takes control of the internet we can be assured we'll only get fake news.

Only in the District of Criminals!

Michael Cohen, the disgraced and now felonious and once-attorney for Donald Trump is being defended by attorney and Washington D.C. swamp rat Lanny Davis. And a smarmier pair you'll be hard-pressed to find.

Davis, you may recall, is a long-time grifter and toady of Bill and Hillary Clinton -- or, as the boss described him, a “Clinton ‘fixer,’ spokespuppet and bagman.” He also happens to be a registered foreign agent for Dmytro Firtash, a pro-Russia Ukrainian oligarch wanted by the U.S. government. But there's nothing to see there, I'm sure.

Although cable news was still in its infancy when Bill Clinton was shucking and jiving us about his dalliances with Monica and other women he'd #MeToo'd, Davis managed to help the CNN’s of the world fill their slow news days by telling us that Clinton was a great guy, a great president, was doing great things and, because he was so great, we should all ignore that he was a horndog serial rapist and sexual harasser and that what a president does in his personal life should stay personal and has no bearing on how he does his job... even if they involved cigars and fellatio under the Resolute Desk.

He spent untold hours in front of the cameras telling us that Bill's accusers were trailer trash — or worse — and just out for a buck or fame and fortune, and any notion that folks like Betty Currie or Hillary or other dark and shady characters were intimidating and threatening (subtly and overtly) potential "bimbos" from Clinton's sexual predatory past from "erupting" was preposterous, scandalous and part of the "vast right wing conspiracy."

Now Davis is telling us that Trump's bonking of porn actresses and swimsuit models and then paying them off to keep them quiet is the most dangerous thing our "democracy" has ever seen.

I guess Davis figures leaving dead animal carcasses, voice-scrambled phone call threats and slashed tires as messages is far superior to payoffs.

It just goes to show that if it weren't for double standards in the District of Criminals there'd be no standards at all. Sadly, same goes for the politician-worshiping hoi polloi.