The Top Story on Google is Proof Media Bias Really Does Exist
One of the big stories of the day on Tuesday was an allegation that Google News uses a biased algorithm that causes fewer links to conservative news sites to show up in top story results.
Well, the top trending story listed in the results that day certainly didn’t do much to help dispel those concerns. It was a story from CNN defending Google News.
Yeah. No bias here at all. Nope.
When readers went into Google, clicked “news,” then clicked “top stories” in the U.S., the No. 1 link was a CNN article headlined “Trump slams Google search as ‘rigged’ — but it’s not.”
The piece lays out what President Trump has said about reports of Google bias, then provides a platform for the search engine to deny, deny, deny.
“Search is not used to set a political agenda and we don’t bias our results toward any political ideology,” a Google spokesperson told CNN. “We continually work to improve Google Search and we never rank search results to manipulate political sentiment.”
The hilarity came after PJ Media conducted an informal study on Monday and found that liberal news outlets appear in Google News search results far more frequently than conservative outlets, which are often completely missing. When searching “Trump,” for instance, CNN had “nearly twice as many results returned as the second-place finisher, the Washington Post.”
Advertisement - story continues below“Other left-leaning outlets also fared well, including NBC, CNBC, The Atlantic, and Politico,” PJ Media reported, adding that the “only right-leaning sites to appear in the top 100 were The Wall Street Journal and Fox News with 3 and 2 results respectively.”
After the PJ Media story emerged, Trump got in on the act, writing on Twitter: “Google search results for ‘Trump News’ shows only the viewing/reporting of Fake News Media. In other words, they have it RIGGED, for me & others, so that almost all stories & news is BAD,” the president proclaimed. “Fake CNN is prominent. Republican/Conservative & Fair Media is shut out. Illegal? 96% of results on ‘Trump News’ are from National Left-Wing Media, very dangerous. Google & others are suppressing voices of Conservatives and hiding information and news that is good.”
President Trump was none too happy with all of the fervor concerning Google and ended up sending a warning to social media platforms saying they are “treading on very, very troubled territory and they have to be careful.”
The president spoke to reporters after a meeting with the president of FIFA, saying “Google has really taken advantage of a lot of people and I think that’s a very serious thing and it’s a very serious charge. They better be careful because they can’t do that to people.”
What kind of consequences Trump could be alluding to in both statements is unknown at the time, but the fact remains that these companies have crossed over from simple, private online businesses to being premiere sources of the dissemination of information in America.
This means they act more like media and news distributors than they do social networks, thus, the rules that apply to journalistic outlets may have some bearing on them as well.
Source: Daily Wire
