A new “study” finds the New York Times does not have a liberal bias in its reporting and is completely fair in its coverage of President Trump. The study was conducted by researchers at Columbia and Rutgers Universities.
The study must have come as a surprise to the former editors of the New York Times who have gone on the record admitting the newspaper is biased towards conservatives and President Trump. Margaret Sullivan, former editor of the Times, admitted the newspaper has a liberal bias. Jill Abramson, another former Times editor, also admitted to the liberal bias and the anti-Trump stance of its reporters. Besides, conservatives have been documenting the liberal bias and unfair reporting of the New York Times for years.
According to Business Insider, “In order to conduct the analysis, researchers collected 1,058 New York Times articles published over 38 days and paired each with a story from Reuters about the same topic published within the same 24 hours. ‘We chose Reuters for this purpose since it is an international news agency with a policy of neutral writing and a customer base of media across the entire political spectrum,’ the researchers wrote in the study.”
So one problem with the study is it compared the coverage of The New York Times to other biased coverage from Reuters. What this study proves is that Reuters is just as biased as the Times.
“Reuters had a few more positive Trump stories than The Times,” Dalal, a professor at Columbia University’s applied analytics program and statistics department, told Business Insider. “’Reuters is slightly positive, but when you're comparing thousands of articles there's going to be some randomness in there,’ he said. ‘There was no resounding media bias we could find.’”
The study employed a “code package” to scan for favorable words, like “happy, “satisfactory,” and “good”, and unfavorable words like “not happy,” and “failure,” which, in the researchers' minds, would somehow capture all the possible liberal bias and anti-trump hatred at the Times.
Instead of just reading the New York Times for five minutes and reaching the obvious conclusion that everyone else has, this "study" wants to turn reality on its head.