CNN’s Daniel Dale Compares Breitbart to New York Times

Monday on CNN’s “The Lead,” reporter Daniel Dale compared Breitbart News Network to The New York Times while discussing President Donald Trump’s tweet about Google.

Dale said, “He’s talking about a study by a psychologist named Robert Epstein and the problem with his tweet is that he’s not only referring to a study who whose conclusions are disputed he’s misdescribing the study itself. I spoke to Epstein, and he said he never alleged Google was manipulating votes, what he alleged is that bias in Google search results may have affected as many as 10.4 million votes between 2.6 million and 10.4 million votes in the 2016 election. He made clear he doesn’t have evidence these votes were affected but said it might be up to about 10 million. So the 16 million number was conjured up by the president. Now there are problems with the study itself. It is not just Trump’s description.”

“What Epstein did was ask people, a random selection of Americans, he crowdsourced this, to rate the alleged bias of the results that came up with they searched various election-related things on Google and Bing and Yahoo,” he continued. “So if it was pro-Trump, it would get a five and pro-Clinton it would get a minus five and then a calculation of alleged bias. The problem that as many political scientists have pointed out is that by this calculation, a search engine that featured many articles by far-right websites Breitbart for example which is pro-Trump would be rated as less biased against Clinton and more favorable toward Trump than a website that featured say The New York Times or CNN. And people who observe journalism, mainstream readers know that an investigative report by The New York times is worth more in informational value than a puff piece from Breitbart.”

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