SAN FRANCISCO, CA - JULY 22: A worker cleans a sidewalk outside of a McDonald's restaurant on July 22, 2013 in San Francisco, California. McDonald's stock slipped in Monday trading after the fast food giant missed analyst expectations for second-quarter earnings with profits of $1.4 billion, or $1.38 a share compared to $1.35 billion, or $1.32 a share, one year ago. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images) (2013 Getty Images)
Among the most oft-cited agonies of those of us on the right side of politics is the uphill battle we face against media bias from the nefarious left. The response from the leftward side ranges from abject denial of the bias, to asserting the opposite, but mostly it centers on acceptance and ridicule. I suppose if Hollywood, academia and major news outlets happily spouted out my political agenda, I'd be pretty obnoxiously smug about it too.
I'd rather think I'm above such things.
However, at least for the foreseeable future, I won't have an opportunity to be smug about having the major institutions of American culture propagandizing my fellow Americans into what I assert is politically true.
Why is this? Because I'm a conservative.
I saw hundreds of tweets claiming that those greedy Romneys at McDonald's only had to raise the dollar menu by 17 cents, or a Big Mac by 63 cents, and a new Aquarian Age of Elysian utopia would reign on mother Gaia's countenance.
Let me give you a glaring example of the media bias that set my right-wing extremist white Hispanic hairs on end this last week. It has to do with fast food and the people, legal and otherwise, who prepare it for me.
In anticipation of Obama's “pivot” to the economy (apparently after five years of ignoring it?), leftist jackboot-lickers at Huffington Post ran a story making the remarkable claim that McDonald's could double the wages of all its workers, including the CEO, merely by adding 17 percent to the price of each food item on the menu.
Now I've been around the block a few times. I've been chased around the ghetto block by gang-bangers in my youth. You have to get up pretty early to pull a fast one on me. Also, I understand elementary math and economics.
Those last two are especially useful.
After some criticized the story, including a certain masked anonymous Mexican blogger, it came out that it was written by a university student. Citing a study from a “research assistant” that wasn't really a research assistant. But just another student. That didn't produce the study.
Others ran the numbers on why the threadbare description of the original assessment didn't take into account the franchise nature of much of McDonald's revenue, or the elasticity of pricing that might drive consumers to other restaurants and make the company less profitable.
Huffpost at first corrected the “research assistant” mistake, and then took the entire article down, replacing it with a write-up of the error under the headline, “Errors in McDonald's Wage Analysis” and had the original author's name stripped from the article.
While we were hashing this out with the hacks at Huffpost, the statistic went viral. I saw hundreds of tweets claiming that those greedy Romneys at McDonald's only had to raise the dollar menu by 17 cents, or a Big Mac by 63 cents, and a new Aquarian Age of Elysian utopia would reign on mother Gaia's countenance.
What really galled me is that none of these people actually questioned where the numbers came from – I never saw one tweet asking why the supposed “study” wasn't linked. I myself ask that for studies that support my Calvin Coolidgian political point of view – out of a mixture of intellectual curiosity and half-hearted attempt at honesty.
Why did none of these people have the same impulse?
For whatever reason this really irked me, so I began demanding retractions from Forbes, Business Insider, ABC, and Think Progress, among others, who had sourced that article and hadn't pointed out the contemptible flaws in the reporting.
To their credit, Forbes issued a retraction. It was so cut up it looked like it had gotten into a drunken brawl with a knife-wielding crackhead binging for the first time on bath salts.
Much to their discredit, an editor from ABC debated the issue with me on the twitters, but only corrected a minor point in the article, leaving the dishonest headline intact.
Even more to their shame, Think Progress continues with the fictional and debunked calculation. So does Business Insider. So do the pendejos at Alternet.
After being alerted to the fact that the source of their headline source was utterly falsified, none of these news outlets took them down.
Even now if you search on Twitter for key terms relating to McDonald's and wages, you'll find mindless leftists propagating a completely discredited “statistic.”
So don't ask me why I'm bitter about left-wing media bias.
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