Tuesday, April 4, 2017

Press release journalism, innumeracy, and ideology all in one article.

This is a great example of why the traditional mainstream media struggles to crack single digits in trust and is so open to fake news mockery. From Uber finally releases data on employee diversity, and the results aren’t pretty by Steven Overly. The lede is:
Uber employs a relative dearth of women and racial minorities, particularly in technical roles, the company said Tuesday — another example of the lack of diversity that persists across the technology industry.
This is a simple, checkable claim. Uber employees fewer minorities than their proportion in the labor force. Let's set aside the problematic issue that Hispanic is not a race. Let's give Overly the benefit of all his unstated assumptions without contesting them.

OK, let's check the claim. The US Census bureau has the US population in 2016 as:
White (not Hispanic) - 62%
Hispanic - 18%
African-American - 13%
Asian American - 6%
Others - 1%
For Overly's claim to be true that Uber under-employees minorities, then their workforce must be less than 38% minority and more than 62% white.

From Overly's article the numbers are:
White (not Hispanic) - 49%
Hispanic - 6%
African-American - 9%
Asian American - 31%
Others - 1%
So Uber has 49% of its workforce who are white versus an expected 62% and they have a workforce which is 49% minority instead of an expected 38%.

How do you get to publish such nonsense where the very numbers you publish contradict the claim you are making? It is an almost Orwellian doublespeak.

Actually, we know how because the SJWs are doing it with all the tech companies in order to blackmail them into paying diversity money. SJWs, just as with their race-obsessed predecessor the South African apartheid regime up till 1991, are defining Asian Americans as effectively "honorary whites" in order to sustain their racial victimization cult.

Uber is clearly, from the numbers, a highly diverse company. If you accept the SJW supposition that any variance from the national averages is solely a function of active corporate discrimination, then clearly Uber is discriminating against whites because whites are underrepresented at Uber by nearly 21% (62-49/62) compared to their presence in the population.

I am not seeking to defend Uber, a company with other serious problems (instances of hostile work environment). My attack is on Overly for 1) failing basic numeracy, 2) peddling false narratives of discrimination, and 3) failing to comprehend how his own postmodernist ideology blinds him to reality as other people live it.

If one were to assess the trustworthiness and reliability of the Washington Post solely on this one article, clearly it would be a failing grade. Their numbers don't support their argument, it is press release journalism, it is ideologically skewed journalism, and factual statements are simply wrong.

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