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To: connell

You're right - the headline makes a claim that you don't even come close to supporting.

What it says is that you're looking too hard for a bias that doesn't appear to actually be there (since you cannot support it with anything other than suppositions).

In other words, you reveal your own bias through insisting that someone else is biased.


11 posted on 06/07/2006 7:14:34 AM PDT by highball (Proud to announce the birth of little Highball, Junior - Feb. 7, 2006!)
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To: highball
Yes, the "neither should you" part is something for which I do not provide adequate support. In an effort to maintain high standards, i.e., to avoid the kind of headline sensationalism I find reprehensible in the MSM, I have altered the headline at the site.

That said---bias is often hard to identify beyond suppositions. Many members of elite media somehow manage to maintain just enough "plausible deniability" to keep intact their patina of objectivity... and yet lots of us see right through it. We know it's there, and yet we are never actually given enough evidence to form an iron-clad case that would, for example, stand up in a court.

In the case of Snopes, I suspect that that the facts will eventually create enough of a case to indicate that they lean left. As I mention, I have seen other indications, but I didn't document them, so I am now going to have to go back and do more research. But it is not much of a stretch, in general, to assume that they lean one direction or the other (there are very few people truly in the center). They may be, of course, or they may be politically iconoclastic or uninterested, but the odds are much better that they either lean generally left or generally right. So, let's give them a 40% chance that they lean left. Those are decent odds. Something I believe very strongly is that there is virtually no one alive who is able to keep their bias out of their work, when that work involves politics.

On the subject of my bias---I never tried to hide it. I am a center-right conservative, a partisan Republican, and a staunch opponent of left-of-center ideas in almost every form they have ever taken. We on the right are far more likely to be open about our biases. Those on the left, especially in the MSM, try so hard to hide their partisanship, while cowering behind a less-than-convincing veil of objectivity.


Congratulations on the birth of Highball, Jr.
14 posted on 06/07/2006 7:33:26 AM PDT by connell (Christopher from ModernConservative.com)
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