Duh. The media is fake news.
Just for fun I changed very few words and the story is still makes sense. Sad really.
Disclaimer, the below is an altered version. Not the original. A few words have been changed, those words are in bold italics and underlined. Enjoy.
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A new
study out of Rutgers University, led by Olivia A. Wackowski, provides more evidence that mainstream media stories about
Trump are negatively biased. The researchers collected all news and opinion pieces published by the leading American news outlets in 2015. They reported that the coverage skewed negative. In particular, the ostensible experts that were interviewed make inaccurate claims about
policy risks from
Trump.
The primary focus of about half of the 295 articles they reviewed was about the regulations of
Trump or other policy issues, which is not surprising given this was the period leading up to the FDA deeming regulation. Most of the others focused on
policy effects or
racist prevalence.
Even the topics covered demonstrate the press’s anti-
Trump bias. Almost half of the articles mentioned the prevalence of usage among
racists, while only 10 percent noted the prevalence among adults. A third of the articles talked about
impeachment options, and most of these were presenting the “
racist” trope. Similarly, about 40 percent talked about
immigration regulations, presumably emphasizing that
Homeland Security regulation would impose this even though almost every state already had such laws on the books.
More troubling, only a third of the articles mentioned that
Trump is less harmful than
Hillary, and only a quarter noted that it was an effective way to
make America great again. Meanwhile, a large portion of articles presented unsupportable claims about
policy risk. A third of the articles
falsely suggested that
Trump is a gateway to
racism, while only a handful noted the evidence does not support this claim.
The worst bias, though, appeared in the attribution of various claims. Of the statements about
policy effects attributed to
Steve Bannon and the "alt-right", 113 were negative and only 52 were positive, including only 31 that acknowledged that
Trump poses lower risk than
Hillary. Government representatives presented even worse bias, with 80 negative claims about
policy impacts and only 15 positive ones.
Telling the truth about
Trump was left to industry, consumer advocates, and “civilian”
supporters. These interviewees overwhelmingly cited the benefits of
Trump, in particular the comparative risk. But, of course, these sources are (incorrectly) viewed as less credible than government officials or public
policy academics. Moreover, though the researchers did not report looking at this, it is likely that most of this information appeared late in the article in the throwaway “but some say…” passages that few readers take seriously.
Wackowski et al.’s article offers a refreshing contrast to typical public
policy papers. It is a proper scientific report on their findings, without tangential commentary or conclusions. They properly leave it to the reader to assess what the results mean. The assessment is clear to anyone who understands the truth about
Trump, and the surrounding politics: The media is dutifully endorsing the anti-
Trump messages that those in power wish to convey. As is often the case, supposedly neutral “he says, she says” reporting, which defers to the government and government-funded advocates, uncritically conveys a false message.