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HN tends to bias towards pro ApplePossibly the most reliable phenomenon I've observed as a mod is that people believe HN is biased against what they like and in favor of what they dislike. This shows up most often with politics - for a recent example see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35734307 ("HN leans left") followed by https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35734354 ("HN leans left?") and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35734392 ("You're completely delusional if you consider HN to be left leaning"). For an amusing (to me anyway!) set of examples see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26148870.
But it works the same way with other things, like $BigCos. Each $BigCo has a fanbase and a foebase. Each fanbase feels like HN is biased against "their" $BigCo and in favor of some other $BigCo.
No doubt the same mechanism makes sports fans feel like the refs are biased against their team. The feelings of a sports fan determine not only the direction of perceived bias (no fan ever thought "the refs are consistently biased in our favor") but also its intensity (the more passionately a fan is devoted to $team, the more strongly they are persuaded about the refs' "bias").
Readers with no particular passion on a topic are less likely to perceive bias or feel much about it either way.
I believe that the way this works is that if we feel strongly about $foo, we're much more likely than the median reader to notice posts about $foo, especially ones we dislike (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...), and to weight them much more heavily. What starts as a feeling in us thereby turns into a perception about the world, often one that is very intensely held and impossible to dissuade.
This is not to say that the community, the refs, the mods, or what have you, aren't biased! Just that the existence or quantity of possible bias can't be decided by this mechanism, which is the mechanism that drives online discussion. In fact, the primary concern of any serious attempt to decide or quantify bias would have to be making sure that it wasn't distorted by this psychological mechanism, which is so powerful.
(This is a bit more than I set out to write about this! it's a hobbyhorse of mine, as it makes moderation moderately more complicated...where by moderately I mean extremely)