“The Data” ain’t perfect. The lefty media’s bias toward tax receivers.
“The Data” ain’t perfect
Ah, “The Data”, that politician’s phrase, that definite article indicating a thing assumed to be common knowledge and agreed upon.
What if it’s not common or agreed upon? What’s worse, what if it’s something that’s been manipulated?
The Springs Taxpayers United post linked first below points to the City of Colorado Springs doing just that. They accuse the city of manipulating citizen survey data to better fit what they city workers think the results should have been.
Quoting with link intact:
“After all the Report Out Meetings [a series of public meetings held for citizen feedback and to report the progess made during the mayor’s first couple years in office] had wrapped up, the city published feedback summary reports for each district. When those post-meeting reports arrived in our email inbox, we took time to review the information. We knew something was wrong immediately. City public servants had intentionally adjusted the live polling data responses in the feedback summary reports to better align with their agenda.”
There is some more context in the post about details, but I’ll leave that to you to read.
In the interest of fairness, I reached out to the media contact for the mayor and city council for a statement about what Springs Taxpayers says in their post. I got a response back from the city that said they appreciated that Springs Taxpayers United found their mistake and that they’d corrected it. The link to the corrected survey results (courtesy of the city spokesperson) is second below.
I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again. Speaking up and putting this stuff out in the public matters. It may have taken the City from the 6th of November when Springs United put up their post until the 10th to fix the data, but fix it they did.
More broadly, this situation illustrates the problem with our recent habit of capitalizing data and putting a “the” in front of it. As I write above, it oversimplifies a complex issue.
Without imputing intent for anyone’s motives in the Springs situation or elsewhere, data should never be “The Data”, should never be an end-all, be-all.
There are a thousand ways data can be corrupted. It should, therefore, be a habit to skeptically receive, thoroughly review, and leave open discussion about any data on any topic in any field.
Returning finally to the Springs issue here, Springs United Taxpayers is doing a great job at skepticism. I’m glad they’re watching and calling it out; every reminder that “The Data” and the people producing it are not perfect is a reminder that we should all be skeptical.
The city failed initially at meeting the latter two points (reviewing and discussing). They did fix it, however. Their fix restores some of their lost credibility. Anyone wanting their actual data and analysis to be respected should make it clear that they’re open to review and follow up on that.
https://springstaxpayersunited.com/from-data-to-agenda-the-truth-behind-the-cos-report-out-community-tour/
https://coloradosprings.gov/document/district-2-2025-community-report-out-tour-feedback-classical-academy-n-campusupdated.pdf
The lefty media’s bias toward tax receivers.
I want to start with a quote from the first link below.
“In 2017, a Varkey Foundation survey of 20,000 young people across the globe found that 83% of respondents think that terrorism made them fearful for the future - more than any other factor, including climate change and war.”**
I’ve written a lot about how media coverage, whose stories get told and whose don’t, helps shape our perception of reality. The reason I added that quote at the top is because, while this book claims that young people strongly feared terrorism, many more of them (at least in the US) will die or be injured by more everyday means.
I remember this dynamic during COVID too. Imagine how things would have been different if we had daily counts and stories from the vast majority of people who were unharmed by the disease instead of the daily body count the media fed us.
Our perceptions about relative danger are shaped in part by what the media are showing us; they are shaped by the focus the media puts on one hazard, a focus usually shaped by how it grabs their sympathies or interest and not by how bad it actually is. Coverage favors splashy (mostly) acute dangers and not the slow drip of a chronic danger.
I think you can extend this to media coverage of the burden our government places on us all. Stories like the recent one from the Sun (linked second below) are common. We hear again and again the genuinely sad stories about people in need not getting help, the stories of how the government can’t keep up. This sells, this is what grabs progressive reporters’ attention.
What we don’t hear are the stories of families whose budgets and purchasing power continually erode because of increasing fees and taxes. Fees and taxes which cover an ever-expanding government and group of people who receive our taxes instead of paying them. Daily drip by drip bites out of a family’s budget don’t elicit responses from subscribers or reporters. They don’t grab as much. They’re not about a class of people lefty reporters consider victims.
Doesn’t mean that it has no impact.
Imagine how our world would look if the media covered taxpayers in the same way as they do tax receivers.
**The line immediately following this quote is “Many of the violent attacks we see playing out today are at least partly conceived with media coverage in mind.” The feedback loop between media and those that want to use them, a topic I’ve covered and will touch on again.
https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000380356
https://coloradosun.com/2025/11/06/local-government-budget-cuts-colorado-snap-federal/