Fraudulent Gay Marriage Study Dupes the Media
The mainstream media have some egg on their face today after being forced to retract their reports on a gay-marriage study that was found to have been based on fraudulent research.
The study, which appeared in the December 12, 2014 edition ofScience, claimed that support for same-sex marriage among voters increased with the use of door-to-door canvassing, especially if the canvasser was gay.
Supporters of gay marriage, who were excited about the results, have now been brought back to reality after one of the authors of the study, Donald Green, a Columbia University political scientist, asked Science to retract the article. Green has removed it from his website after being contacted by two political scientists from UC Berkeley, who told him that they found significant irregularities when they tried to replicate the study.
A deeper look found that one of the study’s co-authors, UCLA grad student Michael LaCour, had more than likely falsified the data in the study.
LaCour has confessed to “falsely describing at least some of the details of the data collection.” He was scheduled to become an assistant professor at Princeton this summer, but that reference has disappeared from his personal website. Apparently Princeton has at least some ethical standards.
The liberal media fell for this study, mainly because of their support for gay marriage. I doubt they would have been as enthusiastic had the study shown the opposite results.
Don Irvine is the chairman of Accuracy in Media and Accuracy in Academia.
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Don Irvine
Donald Irvine is the chairman of of Accuracy in Academia (AIA), a non-profit research group reporting on bias in education. Irvine follows his father’s legacy, Reed Irvine, to critically analyze the liberal media’s bias and brings over thirty years of media analysis experience. He has published countless blog posts and articles on media bias, in context of current events, and he has been interviewed by many news media outlets during his professional career. He currently hosts a livestream weekly show on AIA’s Facebook page which discusses current events.
Irvine graduated from the University of Maryland and rose up the ranks to become chairman of Accuracy in Media until his transition to AIA.
He resides in the suburbs around the nation’s capital and is a proud father and grandfather.
