Regardless which side of the political spectrum you may find yourself on, there is no shortage of commentary when it comes to truth and media. So how do you know when you are being bamboozled by the press and it’s time to call bullshit? Take this story from KTVU out of the San Francisco Bay Area.
While no doubt the Golden State is beautiful and there are many nice places to visit, this article struck me as odd given my first hand knowledge of Concord, CA and the fact that no one I have ever known in the Bay Area ever spoke of the place with this sort of reverence.
As I read through this article, here are three things that stood out to me.
The first thing I noticed was that no one seems to want to be associated with writing this piece, rather it is simply written by “staff”.
The other thing that stood out was that they try to use familiar and impressive companies to gain credibility. As the article states, “Using Microsoft’s face recognition program, analysts from HouseFresh looked at Instagram selfies from 100 of the biggest U.S. cities to see which were the happiest places to live.”
Unfortunately this just comes across as a failure of the tech and leaves me to consider another more accurate piece of software for analysis. However, you can’t put all the blame on Microsoft, I’m sure they were just producing results based on available data; which brings us to our third point.
This article has a field day with the term “study”. In the article it states they used selfies, i.e. staged photos of fake fun, from 100 of the biggest US cities. Apparently these cities were not chosen by any logical order and they fail to explain the biggest what? Population, area, place where people take selfies? It’s difficult to know but a quick Google search reveals that Concord has a population of 129,000 people; whereas McAllen TX is ranked as the 200th most populous city in the US with a population of 144,000.
All KTVU has done with this article is give the skeptical more reason to question the credibility of the media and given comical fodder for anyone who’s actually been to Concord, CA. I’m thinking this article has to have been a paid ad for HouseFresh or the Concord Chamber of Commerce.
