Study Finds Google News Unbiased
Brad Hill reports on a study which charts Google News and determines that it is unbiased.
Devising a study whereby articles were scraped from both Google News and Yahoo! News during the 2004 pre-election period, then analyzed sentence-by-sentence for their political slant, Ulken concluded that both news services are unbiased…
This study could not be more flawed. Analyzing sentences for political stance is completely useless. Media bias does nto normally come from outright biased articles, but from coverage.
You won’t see the New York Times saying “Bush is a moron and can’t do anything right”. What you will see is the Times putting an article on the cover detailing a Bush mistake, accompanied by one of those “wacky” photos of the President wearing a windbreaker and smirking, and then find on page 18 an article about Bush actually doing something. Or it’ll be Fox News doing the exact same thing, relegating Democrat victories to a 30-second blurb, most of which is devoted to a reaction quote from the White House.
Now, I’m not talking about Google News, but about the nature of media bias. During the election, the New York Times was found to be unbiased, because it had an equal number of pro-Bush and pro-Kerry articles. Yet you would have to be a fool to actually believe that sort of thing. Numbers of articles don’t matter, but placement makes a big difference. If Google News puts pro-conservative articles at the top of the page, and pro-liberal articles at the bottom, that would be bias.
Of course, Google News is constructed by an algorithm, so this is all just silly. Could we keep the media bias studies to mainstream media, which does such a terrible job reporting impartially?
“Of course, Google News is constructed by an algorithm, so this is all just silly.”
I couldn’t disagree more. Algorithms can (and likely do) contain biases. See:
http://michaelzimmer.blogspot.com/2005/03/more-on-googlenews-sources-bias.html
Comment by Michael Zimmer | May 20, 2005
For my news site, I use Google a lot, as the news there is so open on sources it is the best I have found. While Yahoo promotes mostly the liberal, which is the major number of news sources today, google you will find major to minor sites that have news reports and from any view perspective.
Comment by Dan Richards | May 20, 2005
Oh, dear. I believe I may have deleted a comment. I deeply regret it, especially since I think it was a good one. I am still getting used to Wordpress 1.5, and I am sorry, whoever it was. I will try to restore it.
Comment by Nathan Weinberg | May 20, 2005
Ya. Google news is unbiased. Lets see whether Yahoo News or Google News wins.
Also check http://news.kify.com - News Aggregator similar to google news. Google has lot of options.
Comment by Suresh | October 5, 2005