Kerby Anderson

Recent studies of media bias in the last election are a reminder that we need to have discernment when we read, hear, and watch the news and visit websites. A number of studies for the last two years confirm that a majority of Americans are concerned about fake news. Today and tomorrow, I want to discuss two studies of media bias and their impact on the 2020 election. It isn’t much of a surprise that a recent study has now concluded that Google bias may have shifted at least 6 million votes to Democrat Joe Biden. The surprise in the study is that it came from Dr. Robert Epstein, who is a Harvard-trained Democrat. The researchers collected 500,000 election-related searches and concluded that “conservatives got slightly more bias in their search results than liberals did.” He wondered how you could account for that and found what he called a “smoking gun.” He “found a period of days when the vote reminder on Google’s homepage was being sent only to liberals—not one of our conservative field agents received a vote reminder during those days.” When Epstein went public with his findings, Google apparently shut off that manipulation that night. For the next four days before the election, they were showing vote reminders to everyone. Epstein and his team concluded that the manipulations they discovered so far “could easily have shifted at least 6 million votes in just one direction.” That is the bare minimum. To calculate the maximum, they still have much more data to examine. He has also made it clear on more than one occasion that he is NOT a Trump supporter, but he is a “supporter of democracy.” He may have wanted Biden to win, but he wanted this election to be fair. Yes, we all want our elections to be fair, and so I commend him for his research.