Has Google News taken on a decidedly conservative bent?

Gerbil · by **Gerbil** » Fri Sep 07, 2007 1:02 pm

It seems to feature a greatly increased percentage of articles with a conservative/right wing bias lately to me.

sophicmuse · by **sophicmuse** » Sat Sep 08, 2007 11:45 am

I highly doubt it that there's any sort of conscious bias on Google's part. Google News isn't a news reporting service, just a search engine and a news aggregator. It would be difficult and unlikely for them to build in any sort of system favoring conservative news stories, and I can't see any reason why they would.

So, several possibilities:
1) News stories from liberal and conservative media will probably be phrased a little differently. Maybe whatever you're looking up is worded in a way that's more likely to be found in conservative media.
2) Similarly, the stories you're looking up might be covered more heavily by conservatives.
3) Search engine optimization allows sites to (some say unfairly) send their results to the top of search engines. Conservatives might be more adept at this.
4) There isn't really a conservative bias - either you're left-of-center enough that most things look conservative, or you're just being hyper-sensitive.

At any rate, if you're looking for more left-wing coverage, have you encountered the left-wing blogosphere? Sites like Daily Kos, Crooks and Liars, Talking Point Memo, and such are great for more liberal points of view. Or if you're looking for unbiased hard news, NPR and the BBC are usually good. Best of luck!