February 23, 2024 - 6:00pm

→ Google News bias is getting worse

As if Google’s anti-white AI bot wasn’t evidence enough, new research has found that Google News’s bias also veers Left. The latest AllSides Google News bias analysis found that 63% of articles which appeared on the news aggregator over a two-week period were from liberal media outlets in 2023, marking a 2% uptick from the year previous.

In fairness to the tech giant, Google News doubled the number of articles from Right-wing sources this year from a whopping 3% to 6%. Now that’s progress!

 

→ Bill Ackman doubles down on Business Insider vendetta

Bill Ackman’s vendetta against Business Insider shows no sign of slowing down. After the publication produced a piece detailing his wife Neri Oxman’s alleged plagiarism, the billionaire hedge fund manager tweeted out several jeremiads (maybe that 240-character thing had a purpose) at BI and its parent company Axel Springer threatening legal action. Now he has written a 77-page demand letter that… threatens legal action if BI does not retract its article.

According to Ackman: “these individuals did not question that Neri and I had been defamed, but rather they explained that Axel Springer has been perhaps the strongest long-term supporter of the state of Israel of any media organization, and also an important advocate against antisemitism.” What began as a noble quest to address antisemitism on America’s campuses has descended into something rather petty. As one former PM might have said, it’s time for Ackman to put up or shut up.

→ Is the tide turning in British academia?

Here’s a ray of light for these benighted times in academia. Last night, Prof. Eric Kaufmann launched what he claims is the first explicitly non progressive-dominated social science research centre in Britain. The University of Buckingham’s Centre for Heterodox Social Science promises to promote open inquiry, viewpoint diversity and constructive disagreement in academic research — all of which is in painfully short supply at universities.

Past research by Kaufmann has found that one in three British academics would not hire a known Leave supporter for a job, and three in four conservative social scientists at elite universities self-censor. Perhaps this centre will go some way towards addressing that. We certainly live in strange times when it’s more acceptable to be a communist than a Leave voter at university…