24
May
Your Constitutional right to be a Google News source
Right-wing bloggers are in a huff because some of their colleagues have been dropped as Google News sources, in at least one instance for authoring what Google calls “hate speech.” They’re also upset because Michelle Malkin’s blog isn’t a source, nor Charles Johnson’s Little Green Footballs (which is due to Google’s policy of excluding blogs with only one writer from the news aggregator, not to an ideological bias).
Atrios wonders what the big deal is. The answer is that the news site can drive substantial traffic to a site — on slow days, the great majority of our visitors arrive via Google News — and it’s what Stuart Smalley might call a life-affirming experience: “I’m on Google News, just like the New York Times! I’m good enough, I’m smart enough and doggone it, people like me!” And getting a headline spot on the front page with the Times nested underneath can just flat make your day; it did mine, anyway (see graphic at left).
That said, the right-wing reaction to Google dropping the sites in question is a tad disingenuous. I read one of the offending posts at a site, New Media Journal, carrying what Google describes as hate speech and defenders of the blog describe as “a particular viewpoint toward Islamic radicalism,” which turns out to be something of an over-broad characterization.
Muslims are true victims of Islam. However, they fail to realize that Islam is a cult, and the prophet was a demon, possessed by a huge sexual appetite. Yes, true Muslims firmly believe, that those who die in the act of killing the infidels (Christians, Jews and other non-believers) will not only gain entrance into heaven, but will be greeted by 72 virgin women–most likely, Seventy-Two 9 year old girls.
Reasonable people will agree, I think, to the propositions that calling “true Muslims” demon worshippers and pedophiles qualifies as hate speech and that the right to publish one’s opinion is constitutionally protected. But Google, despite occasional appearances to the contrary, isn’t the US government and doesn’t have any obligation to provide demented bigots a soap box.
Atrios, on the other hand, has a constitutional obligation to link this site more often than he does and I’m considering a lawsuit. I’ll bet I can get all the other sites he doesn’t mention often enough to join in and go all class action on his ass. And if the ones he never links are nice to me, we’ll let them in on the deal as well.
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Well, at least Google is now consistent about its policy. A couple of years ago, it removed Indymedia.org from its list of spidered sites because of a single, grossly anti-Semitic posting, even though site moderators said they had caught it themselves and removed it under their own editorial guidelines.
Now that Google has a both a blog search engine and a news aggregrator, I personally wish it would make a better effort to distinguish the two.
By all means, let them cross-reference them, and by all means, there are online publications that have a news mission rather than an opinion or advocacy mission.
I think Google should publish clear guidelines on what they consider a news source for the purposes of their crawl.
Perhaps they could put out a list of eligible, machine-readable codes of journalistic ethics that bloggers and news organizations could tag their sites with to certify that they were news-oriented rather than political marketing-oriented.
That would give users and Google editors something to benchmark against when they complain about the content of this or that Google News source.
I’m just tired of getting the chocolate of opinion in the peanut butter of my news … though not necessarily vice versa.
May 25th, 2006 at 7:53 amWhat is News?
A twist on the old gospel story: What is truth? What constitutes news?
Perhaps Google could put out a list of eligible, machine-readable codes of journalistic ethics—something like the CC license—that bloggers and news organizations coul…
May 25th, 2006 at 8:04 am