Tuesday, August 28, 2018

Only the chatter

One of approximately two known photographs depicting Donald Trump using a computer, from Motherboard. He seems to think one plays it by waving at it, like a theremin.


For the record, Donald J. Trump did not Google himself; he still doesn't know how to use a browser. This morning's terrifying tweets (which he entered at some incredible hour like 3 or 4 AM, and then deleted, redoing them, or having somebody else redo them, as a properly constituted threadlet, a little after 8:00)—

—are based on a piece by Paula Bolyard in PJ Media, datelined 25 August,  after she Googled "Trump" in the news tab, nominally showing that Google's algorithm is darkly influenced by Democratic math I should say a lot of sources suggested this, but none of them gave s link, so I'm not going to try to credit them):

I expected to see some skewing of the results based on my extensive experience with Google, but I was not prepared for the blatant prioritization of left-leaning and anti-Trump media outlets. Looking at the first page of search results, I discovered that CNN was the big winner, scoring two of the first ten results. Other left-leaning sites that appeared on the first page were CBS, The Atlantic, CNBC, The New Yorker, Politico, Reuters, and USA Today (the last two outlets on this list could arguably be considered more centrist than the others).
Not a single right-leaning site appeared on the first page of search results.
But it got much, much worse when I analyzed the first 100 items that Google returned in a search for news on "Trump."
CNN, by a wide margin, appeared most frequently, with nearly twice as many results returned as the second-place finisher, The Washington Post. Other left-leaning outlets also fared well, including NBC, CNBC, The Atlantic, and Politico. The only right-leaning sites to appear in the top 100 were The Wall Street Journal and Fox News with 3 and 2 results respectively.
I just got three Foxes (all in the top 20) and one The Hill. Plus five CNBCs—don't know how that thing counts as "left-leaning". Let alone CNN, NBC, or The Atlantic.

I also looked at the Fox News home page, and find that there are just two headlines mentioning Trump, one on football great Jim Brown's support for the president, and one on golf great Tiger Woods insisting on respect for the Oval Office, in comparison to six on CNN (including "Fox anchors: Trump is not telling the truth") It's likely that Fox just doesn't cover the president very well, for some reason. And Trump doesn't realize it because he doesn't watch the news himself, only the chatter, where his name is more likely to come up.


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