There IS a Left-Leaning Media Bias—So Where Do We Go From There?

At Politicon last year, I attended a panel nebulously entitled “Fake News vs. The World.” In a contentious moment, a panelist going by the name “The Roaming Millennial” (né Lauren Chen) badgered reporter Annie Linskey about an article Ms. Linskey had just published entitled “Elizabeth Warren Releases Results of DNA Test.” The brouhaha was over a math error in the first version of the article: Linskey originally reported that Senator Warren’s DNA test concluded that she was between 1/32 and 1/512 parts Native American, when in fact the test showed that she was between merely 1/64 and 1/1024 parts Native American.

To the conservative Ms. Chen and to other right-leaning pundits and outlets, Linskey’s mistake was an obvious instance of media bias: the liberal media, represented in this case by Ms. Linskey, was aware that Warren’s claim to Native American ancestry was miniscule, but still managed to fudge the numbers in a way that made it seem that Warren has more Native American blood than she actually does, so that Warren’s well-known publicized claims of Native American ancestry would not appear to be entirely ridiculous. It looked, that is, like the liberal press manipulating facts in order to protect a viable presidential candidate from total embarrassment. Given the ridicule Warren faced from all sides after the rollout, and her current paltry polling and fundraising numbers, if that was the media’s intention, well…it didn’t work.