The first article is hardly “liberal bias,” since it is simply an announcement of fact. Your cavil with the “vows” statement is sheer stupidity since it is an important element of the story. (Dean has made a number of statements through the last two months that suggested he would not support Kerry because of Kerry’s vote on Iraq. It is news that Dean has decided to support the nominee regardless of who that person may be.) (And the use of “vows” is simply the method of news headlining that has been in place for over 100 years, choosing short, powerful verbs over multisyllabic nuanced verbs. Even the WSJ and Washington Times do that.)
The “economic team under fire” story was, indeed, news on that particular day. It is the event that occurred (or came to a head) at that time.
(If you want to show bias, your silly attempt to claim bias based on employment is a clear demonstration of Right-Wing bias both by the news service and you: the (re-)employment figures, while up, are lower than expected for the fourth straight month and they continue to show declines in manufacturing–a point that the Right would like hidden.)
Unless you have some secret information that demonstrates that only the Right supports peace in Cyprus, your second rating is just throwing numbers out for the sake of pretending you gave some though to this.
So, basically, you threw numbers at the wall in order to pretend you had actually had a point to make while clearly demonstrating that bias (and failure of honesty) has occurred only at the Milum keyboard.
While you slackers have been amusing yourselves with light
self-serving humor, I have been busy. I called Yahoo on the
telephone to ask them about their sinister practice of selecting
left-leaning news reports to headline. After listening to seven
options given by their artifical operator and discovering that
I was on a closed circut loop I hung up and wrote them a letter.
Here is the letter…
Yahoo Inc.
Terry S. Semel CEO
Jerry Yang Director
Gentlemen,
Many of my good friends who subscribe to the
Straight Dope Message Board are curious about
your policy of selecting, phrasing and prioritizing
your News Headlines with a liberal bias.
Will you please outline the method and guidelines
that Yahoo has in place for insuring the continued
non-biased integrity of Yahoo’s News headlines in
The future.
Thank you,
Milum
PS: Enclosed is my mailing adress. I tried to reach
you by Yahoo Mail, but Yahoo Inc. doesn’t seem to
want to give out their E-mail address. Thanks again,
and if either Terry or Jerry can prioritize a response
it would be most appreciated.
I will post here the answer to my letter when I get it.
Y’know, I’ve already reported one post this morning to the mods; I don’t want them to think of me as a whiny little crybaby. But if I may be so bold, you may want to be careful about sending letters that may look like you’re speaking on behalf of the Straight Dope.
Especially when they’re lies. What do you mean, many friends who subscribe to SDMB are curious about this policy? Only one person has agreed with you in this thread, IIRC, and they were shown to be blatantly mistaken.
And if you think an illogical, misleading, misled letter like this is going to garner you a response from Yahoo’s top two honchos, you’re sadly mistaken. You’ll be lucky to get a form letter response.
You’ve ignored and lied about the responses you’ve gotten in this thread. Is there a reason why anyone should take you seriously?
Holy Cow, Milum, your missive has already had an effect! Look at the latest Yahoo headlines, scrubbed clean of any liberal bias:
Of course that’s just my unprofessional opinion; we won’t really know until you apply your Floating Point System[sup]®[/sup] to reveal the sneaky tactics of the liberal lackeys at Yahoo.
The above is a blatant falsehood, unless “many” means one or two. What nearly everyone who has bothered to waste their time responding to this silliness has been curious about is when the OP is going to make some sort of statment about his methodology for determining “liberal bias”. Likewise, the OP has utterly failed to show that any such “policy of selecting, phrasing and prioritizing” headlines by Yahoo News exists.
This thread started out in somewhere beyond the right-field wall, and now seems headed at light-speed for Pluto. Just what the heck, other than Suicide by Mod, does the OP think he is accomplishing here?
Milum - I urge you to print out your posts in this thread - never mind the others - and show them to someone you trust (a family member or longstanding friend). I strongly suspect that your passions are threatening to overwhelm your reason. This is not a flame or a joke.
Not to mention unspeakably cruel! Here are a couple of mere cyber-billionaires, shuffling meekly along, and you threaten them with the awesome power of the SDMB and the thunderous Wrath of The Cecil! They probably wet thier Armani slacks and had to throw a couple more stacks of $100 bills on the fireplace to dry them.
Just wanted to parse this still-puzzling statement: I think Milum is saying that our liberal “media” really have no better idea of what’s going on in the world than five-dollar psychics (mediums), and that they’re similarly trying to bilk a gullible public with outlandish, patently false, claims.
Fortunately, I have access to raw wire reports. Hopefully a comparison of Yahoo headlines to the suggested headlines in AP reports might settle this:
And for good measure, some Reuters headlines:
Unfortunately, I can’t come to a decision if this constitutes evidence of a high-level liberal bias. I have not yet applied my discretionary, floating point system. I’ll let you know of the results when I get them back, but my preliminary conclusion is that Tom Ridge should put out an advisory for folks to stock up on tin foil.
Thanks, Ravenman, at last I think I get it. Yahoo, under the guise of keeping its headlines to fewer than eight words, sneaks liberal bias into them by…by…uh…sorry, seem to have lost my train of thought there. I was almost drunk last night. Oh well, you all know what I mean, right?
Ravenman, that’s interesting and perplexing. When I searched on certain keywords from yahoo’s headlines, I got dozens upon dozens of hits of articles with exactly the same headline – in fact, there were more matches with exactly the same headline than there were matches with a variation. Does AP also issue an alternate, abbreviated version of their headlines? Could it be that this is what Yahoo uses?
In fact Google the words +“supreme court” and +“dirty bomb”, and you get 517 hits. Sort them by date (to get the ones from today’s feed first), and of the first thirty (as far as I looked), 27 use the exact same phrasing as that used by Yahoo. None of them used the phrasing that you said was on the raw AP feed, although some came closer to using that phrasing.
I encourage other people to try similar experiments with the other headlines. Me, I gotta go home and then go over to someone’s new house to celebrate her first homebuying by getting liquored up.
What a funny word, “mull”. It wasn’t there in the AP headline, so it was must’ve been inserted by Yahoo’s editors. Now what’s the first thing that comes to mind when you think of “mull”? That’s right, Mulholland Drive, the 2001 movie featuring steamy lesbian sex scenes.
Who else but a craven liberal would put references to homoerotic filth in a perfectly normal news story about Bush’s valiant attempts to protect us from freedom-hating enemy combatants? Don’t those Yahoo editors realize that children turn to them for news?
One of two reasons: either Yahoo uses a news provider (which is a company that does nothing but get the raw xml feed from the various sources, such as AP Online, Reuters, etc and puts them all into a common xml format) and gets their news from them along with dozens of other online subscribers, or Yahoo does the more expensive route and gets its news from multiple feeds from multiple sources; one from AP Online, one from Reuters, etc, and does the work itself of putting them all into one format (that being rss in Yahoos case), and the results you saw were all sites getting their news feed from Yahoo.
Thanks heaps, Milum.