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Comments by YACCS

 

Media bias demonstrated

A recently-introduced feature of the search engine Google is a news search engine. Google gathers the most prominent headlines from around the web, sorting them by story, so you get several choices for most prominent events. Since Google displays them by headline, one of the cute features is that you get to see how different sources describe the same story. It struck me as worthy of comment today, as I happened to see the following headlines relating to a study about pesticides on organic food:

• Organic produce has pesticides, too, but far less than conventional food, study finds - Boston Globe
  
• Pesticides less evident in organic food  - SJ Mercury
  
• Organic produce not pesticide free  - Salt Lake Tribune
  
• Study Finds Far Less Pesticide Residue on Organic Produce  - NY Times
  

(Note that this is a snapshot at a given moment; the google page and/or the stories themselves may change by the time you read this.)

Note the different slants that different sources choose. The Globe and Times choose the most pro-organic spin, describing the food as having "far less" pesticides. The Mercury declines to editorialize, saying merely that the organic food has "less." And the Tribune takes the opposite approach, focusing on the negative side of organic food, that it isn't pesticide "free".

I don't know what was going through the minds of the editors who wrote those headlines, but it's hard to imagine that it's just a coincidence.
posted by David Nieporent at 5/08/2002 08:03:00 AM |