Salon shows it doesn't understand science, or it's lying to us

Salon posted an article on 1/5/2020 with the title of:

Not fake news: Major study finds no "liberal bias" in media — but there are other problems

The only problem is that the study doesn't prove anything.

While the Salon article says that the article proves that there is no media bias it actually only claims to prove: 

“There is No Liberal Media Bias in the News Political Journalists Choose to Cover.”

Actually it doesn't even prove that but even if it did prove that all that shows is that which stories journalists cover aren't selected in a biased way not that the coverage of those stories isn't biased.

See what Salon did there?  It said that a that study showed no bias in story selection into a study that said  no bias in what the journalists produced.

After all we'd expect that journalists of all stripes would cover the same breaking news stories but that the bias would be in how they reported what was going on. The #FakeNews media covered the Soleimani story but they're doing so in a way that blames rather than praises Trump.  Hence what matters isn't what stories reporters choose to cover, though the #FakeNews media does lie by omission a lot, but what is written about the stories.

What the study did however isn't look into what journalists actually do but rather perform a poorly designed experiment.  The study sent a bunch of journalists emails from a fake candidate and varied whether the candidate was a leftist or a conservative.  Based on how reporters responded the study said that if leftist reporters were equally willing to cover both conservative and leftists candidates there was no bias.

That's downright unintelligent.  Leftist journalists would be just as eager to cover conservative candidates as leftist candidates so that they could attack and try and bring down the conservative candidate while extolling the leftists candidate.

Hence the experiment doesn't show anything unless the nature of the report published by the journalists is taken into account.  Something that wasn't done in the study that Salon is talking about.

In fact the Salon article is a great example that disproves the study.  Salon distorted what the study said to advance a leftist agenda even though there are conservative elements of the study.

Salon admits that the study also shows that reporters are incredibly biased towards the left but then crows that the study shows that reporters don't let that impact their actions which as we've seen above isn't true.

However the study's methodology for defining if reporters are leftists or not is actually more viable than their experiment. Basically they look at who the reporters are connected to on Twitter.  Here's the result of that analysis:

Even Salon acknowledges that this is a huge problem for anyone who says that the media is unbiased.  Essentially all reporters are far to the left of Mitt Romney and about a sixth are to the left of Ocasio-Cortez.

Clearly if the chart was biased the other way with almost all reporters more conservative than Mitt Romney Salon would be screaming bloody murder about bias.