Who Speaks of Bias? By James Reed

     Two researchers investigated 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.” The absolutely ground-shaking conclusion was reached that this was the case. Who would have thought that?
  https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3225878

“Are people’s perceptions of the newsworthiness of events biased by a tendency to rate as more important any news story that seems likely to lead others to share their own political attitudes? To assess this, we created six pairs of hypothetical news stories, each describing an event that seemed likely to encourage people to adopt attitudes on the opposite side of a particular controversial issue (e.g. affirmative action and gay marriage). In total, 569 subjects were asked to evaluate the importance of these stories ‘to the readership of a general circulation newspaper’, disregarding how interesting they happened to find the event. Subjects later indicated their own personal attitudes to the underlying political issues. Predicted crossover interactions were confirmed for all six issues. All the interactions took the form of subjects rating stories offering ‘ammunition’ for their own side of the controversial issue as possessing greater intrinsic news importance.”

     Seriously though, don’t academics have better things to do with their time than investigating things that we all know from common sense to be true? This is just another example of pointless university research, and I could document this all day, but that would be pointless too.