I have recently been accused of having a conservative slant in what I choose to cover and I will admit that this has been the case lately. This is only because of the fact that the lack of coverage on liberal missteps has been so evident lately that it has become a bit difficult for me to focus on other things. This is what happens when a political shift happens in the United States. However, I recognize that I have been focusing on one side a bit too much and the whole idea behind me starting this blog was to not pick sides - so i'll go in the other direction.
This next story comes from Breitbart and I promise it is a real article and that the title has not been altered by me. The story itself is not dumb, it is actually very revealing and interesting. However, the editor over at Breitbart maybe should have had second thoughts about where to go with the headline.
To be fair the statement was an exact quote from Milo Yiannopoulos, who has actually made a name for himself by saying shocking things like this. But Breitbart doesn't focus on the fact that these are Milo's words until the very end of the article that those are actually his words not their own and they didn't put it in quotes. Breitbart isn't some bastion of impartiality, we all know this, but they really were poking the bear with a stick with this article and it ended up enraging feminists all over the place. This may have been their intention in the first place though, who knows. At the end of the day it is a dumb decision on the editor's part to use that as the headline, even though I have to admit that it is eye-catching and clickbait type titles do seem to be necessary these days.
To try to be as fair to Breitbart as I possibly can be I will say that they later changed the headline to include the word "Milo" in the title and this all kind of makes me think that the exclusion of it in the first print might have been intentional in order to direct more attention to their news site.
As someone who was an editor of a small paper for over a year I can say that this sort of intentional mistake would not be tolerated when I had my job, regardless of how many clicks it was able to generate. I would have been reprimanded and probably demoted because of it.
The article iteself is actually quite interesting as it involves a study that was designed to eliminate gender bias from the interview process by using voice altering software to conduct interviews for real jobs. The employer would not see the person and would have no idea whether they were male or female. The idea behind the experiment, which was organized by an unnamed feminist organization was to showcase that when gender-bias is eliminated from the equation, that women perform much better in interviews and are only denied positions because of their gender.
Unfortunately for the feminists who were hoping to expose this, exactly the opposite happened. Women underperformed in the interview process even moreso than when the interviewer is aware of their gender. This revealed something that feminists definitely didn't want to admit: That women are perhaps hired because they are women and not for their abilities.
I am getting away from the point here though and that is the fact that it was colossally stupid for Breitbart to publish this headline and because they did so, the information that was contained inside of the article (which I believe is actually very important information to debunk the theory of hiring bias) was all but completely cast aside and instead, the intentionally hurtful headline was the only thing that was focused on.
The end result was liberal outrage even though they likely didn't even read the article and confirmation bias for conservatives, who likely did read the article.
I do feel as though liberal outlets are far more guilty of bad headlines and overall reporting than conservative ones are, but this could have a great deal to do with the fact that there are so many more liberal news outlets than there are conservative ones. Breitbart is very far on the right as far as the political spectrum is concerned and because of this they kind of eliminate themselves from being any sort of source that is taken seriously. They are the CNN of conservatives: Readers know the conclusion they are going to come to without even reading the article.... every....damn....time....
But this is the world we live in now, for every CNN Yin there is a Breitbart Yang and all of them have gone too far at this point to return to being objective, if they ever were.