Is Google News biased?
Friday, 20 May 2005, 11:57
A new study (PDF) by Eric Ulken of the USC Annenberg School of Communication looks at political bias in the Google News aggregator.
The results?
… the findings … may be of interest given the ongoing debate about the quality of Google News’s sources. While my analysis does not indicate an overall conservative or liberal slant, it does confirm Lasica’s suspicion that non-traditional news sources are injecting ideologically biased articles into Google News search results.
…
…almost all of the additional bias in articles returned by Google News searches can be attributed to the site’s use of non-traditional news sources. In other words, if we consider only sources affiliated with old-media companies, the average bias scores for articles on Google News and Yahoo News are virtually identical.
If, like me, you use Google News a lot, you will also be interested in Private Radio’s study of Google News’s notoriously secret list of news sources. The source list for Google News UK is here.
Entry Filed under: Blogs
1 Comment Add some more of your own
1. Waatching Them, Watching Us | 20 May 2005 at 1646
Bias is in the eye of the beholder.
Try following some topics using the
http://www.newsnow.co.uk
news aggregator,which claims to be
“Automatically searching 20188 news sources every 5 minutes”
It is very instructive to watch the same “story” obviously based on a public relations press release or briefing or leak, being repeated, word for word, by many “sources affiliated with old-media companies”, often without attribution.
“Non-traditional news sources” like blogs do seem to add more comment or analysis to these same stories if they pick up on them.
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