False advertising
I'm always careful to distinguish between censorship — which is government suppression of speech — and corporate decisions to suppress speech. The latter may be irritating, but it's not classic censorship. What gets me is businesses that pretend that they don't have biases or that they don't engage in censorship. The classic example has always been the New York Times, which resolutely claims that it's an entirely impartial news organization. Only those who live in a certain zip code in Manhattan (plus residents of San Francisco and Berkeley) actually believe that. Sadly, a lot don't believe it; they just don't think about it all, and assume that their news is being delivered with admirable neutrality.
It turns out that the NYT illusory world of neutrality has been joined by another powerhouse — Google. Google has a news service that has apparently started refusing to provided any links to certain conservative publications. Each of these conservative publications has written materials critical of radical, jihadist Islam. In each case, the ezine was told that it was promulgating hate speech, and that the Google search engine would no longer visit the site. This means that, while Google purports to display at its news site all the news there is, impartially, it is in fact selectively choosing news that fits the liberal template. This may all be paranoid conservatism talking, but there is no doubt that Google's employees are heavily weighted on the Democratic side. [You can read more on this, with more details, more facts, and more analysis, at this American Thinker article.]
As I noted at the beginning of this article, I'm normally fine with businesses making decisions to slant or exclude material. What I'm not fine with is false advertising, and that's what Google News is doing. Google has presented its News site as a neutral purveyor of news, all of it gathered without any human intervention. The claim is that a computer simply runs a news-hunting algorithm, and the news found is presented, without human contamination, and presented to readers. When it turns out there is human contamination that fact too should be presented to the readers. That is, right under the Google news heading, it should say that the news presented here excludes news outlets with conservative leanings. Anything else is false advertising.
Talking to Technorati: Google, Google News, Media, Bias, False advertising
