Are Google News biased in any way?

September 29, 2004

Danny Sullivan posted a thread at SEW forums named News Search & Biases, where he points to an article written at OJR.org named Balancing Act: How News Portals Serve Up Political Stories.

The article discusses how Google News seems to be favoring the conservative papers over the more left-wing, liberal papers. The logic is as follows: Do a search at Google News on Kerry and your likely to see articles that are in opposition to Kerry.

Now do a search on Bush at Google News and you will find news that favors Bush. How is it that Google News, an algorithmic search technology, can be a conservative over a liberal?

The article gives an excellent theory as to the answer to this question.

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They quote Ethan Zuckerman, former vice president of Tripod.com and now a fellow at Harvard�s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, who offers a possible answer to this question.

Basically, he says that the main stream (conservative) papers often, when discussing Kerry, put �Kerry� in the title of the article.

Whereas, the liberal papers do not. In addition, the liberal papers often use Kerry�s full name in the article content and if you do a search on John Kerry as opposed to just Kerry in Google News, you will find more liberal papers discussing Kerry.

Source: Barry Schwartz,
Search Engine Roundtable

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