Why naming a bias is not refuting an argument

You would say that, you work for them. The observation may be entirely correct. It establishes an interest, not an error, and the figures on the page are unchanged by who brought them into the room.

What everyone sees

Identifying an interest feels like completing the analysis, since a biased source is unreliable and unreliable sources can be discounted. That conflates two different assessments. Provenance affects how much independent checking a claim warrants; it does not affect whether the claim is true, and only the checking can settle that.

What is actually happening

Walton’s analysis of ad hominem argument distinguishes the legitimate use — questioning credibility where a claim rests on testimony that cannot be independently verified — from the fallacious use, where evidence is available and the attack substitutes for examining it. Pronin, Lin and Ross measured the asymmetry that keeps the move attractive: people readily detect bias in others while rating themselves as comparatively objective, and they treat their own introspective sense of impartiality as evidence while dismissing the same report from someone else. The result is a device that feels like scrutiny while pointing away from the only thing that could resolve the disagreement.

Why it stays hidden

The gap hides because the accusation is usually accurate. The speaker really does have the interest named, so the statement passes as fact-checking and the audience registers a point scored. Meanwhile the claim goes unexamined and its status is recorded as refuted, which is a stronger conclusion than anyone actually argued for.