The anit-right pres bias is getting even worse now. Just read this article which claims that Republicans are all racists. Apparently, a group of liberal scientists (and they all had donated money to Democrats) got together and did a test which they claimed showed people with “negative” attitudes toward blacks voted for Bush.
There are at least two things wrong with this off the bat. Firstly, the black vote is almost all Democrat (running about 80-90%). Since it is probably safe to assume that any black people in the test are not going to have “negative” attitudes toward blacks, it’s safe to say that many Democrats did not simply because they were black to begin with. (Notice, however, that this article does not even begin to test the opposite theory, which is how “negative” feelings towards whites affects voters.)
The second problem is that this is by far not a random sample. After all, we read this:
For their study, Nosek, Banaji and social psychologist Erik Thompson culled self-acknowledged views about blacks from nearly 130,000 whites, who volunteered online to participate in a widely used test of racial bias that measures the speed of people’s associations between black or white faces and positive or negative words.
Yes, see that. They “culled” views of whites and thus were already looking for racist people to begin with. Hardly a fair sampling of the data, and definitely not enough evidence to warrant the charge “We have 50 years of evidence that racial prejudice predicts voting. Republicans are supported by whites with prejudice against blacks.”
Well, we have common sense and enough evidence to see this is a biased study. If I can see that, what’s stopping the press from seeing it. Oh yeah, that little thing called BIAS
