Letter to the Editor: The arts section of this paper shows a lamentable bias toward movies and against local theatric...

Emil-Kunkin on March 19, 2023

Hi, I can take a stab at this one.

The author argues there is a bias in favor of movies over plays in the papers reviews. As evidence, they cite the fact that the paper has published 5x the number of movie reviews ad they have play reviews.

Let's try to attack that. To be biased, they would have to be ignoring plays in favor of movies. However, we have no idea how many movies and how many plays there are. If there were 100 movies and 10 plays, and the paper reviewed 50 moves and 10 plays, then the paper would actually be biased in favor of the plays, not against them, as it would have reviewed 100 percent of plays and only half of the movies.

The main flaw here is that the author assumes that the volume of reviews is the best proxy for bias, rather than the percent of each medium that is reviewed.

B gets at this flaw exactly.