Google News: Fruitless Searches!!1
Nothing funny has happened yet today, so let’s see what they’re up to over at NewsBusters. Busting some news, one would imagine.
Is Google Purging Conservative News Sites?
Posted by Noel Sheppard on May 22, 2006 – 09:37.Something frighteningly ominous has been happening on the Internet lately: Google, without any prior explanation or notice, has been terminating its News relationship with conservative e-zines and web journals.
At first blush, one can easily ignore such business decisions by the most powerful company on the Internet as being routine. However, on closer examination, such behavior could give one relatively small technological corporation (when measured by the size of its workforce) a degree of political might that frankly dwarfs its current financial prowess.
So the most powerful company on the Internet shouldn’t be making such unilateral decisions because it’s such a small and weak company. On the Internet.
[creaking noise, tiny footsteps, door slam, squealing tires, distant train whistle]
Excuse me for a moment, that was my brain opening a hatch on my head and jumping out with a hat and suitcase, then running out the door and speeding off in a little car, and driving to the train station and taking a candy-cane train with hoop ladder laugh widgets to EIEIO of sideways the at bonk snausages gz f klgg ook. I’ll get a new brain and we can continue.
At first blush, one can easily ignore such business decisions by the most powerful company on the Internet as being routine. However, on closer examination, such behavior could give one relatively small technological corporation (when measured by the size of its workforce) a degree of political might that frankly dwarfs its current financial prowess.
[creaking noise, tiny footsteps, door slam, gunshot]
Excuse me, my brain seems to have shot itself. Let’s try this again.
At first blush, one can easily ignore such business decisions by the most powerful company on the Internet as being routine. However, on closer examination, such
[marching band troupes through room playing Souza’s ‘Liberty Bell’]
Well, I just can’t concentrate here. Let’s skip to the… Oh no!
Jim Sesi’s MichNews.com was banished on April 12. In Sesi’s case, the three pieces provided as examples of “hate speech� were articles by conservative writer J. Grant Swank, Jr., all about – you guessed it – radical Islam and terrorism.
“In your eyes,
The light, the heat,
In your eyes
I am complete,
In your eyes,
I see the doorway to a thousand churches,
In your eyes,
The resolution of all the fruitless searches…”
If Google News doesn’t return the same Swank column at eighteen different conservative “news” outlets then the terrorists islamic global Chicks Dixie have won.
Fuck Sousa. In the ear.
At the site weeth amusingly integritudinous name “Dhimmi Watch”, thees racista frotacionada gave three examples of posts from “The New Media Journal” that were given by Google as examples of posts that qualified TNMJ as a hate-site.
The poster at Dhimmi watch deed no seem to theenk that TNMJ qualified as such.
Thees was the first example given.
Joo be the judge, eh?
So.
So if I am reading this correctly, the NewsBuster guys seem to be calling for the government to step in — in the form of the judiciary, at the moment, though one of their commenters wants DOJ to step in — to prevent a private corporation from taking actions that they disagree with politically.
They keep using the word “conservative”; I do not think it means what they think it means.
inconceivable!!
IHateMuslims.com isn’t a legit news organization?
Well, I’ll be plumb fucked.
The topic at hand reminds me of a great joke I’ve heard:
Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, George W. Bush, and the Liberal Media all see a twenty dollar bill on the sidewalk. Who grabs it first?
Answer: Bush. The other three don’t exist.
Gavin, you just shot me…right in the funny bone!
I love that comment because it sounds like I might be ironic, I do that to cover up the fanboy. It’s like a norbiz.
Swank is not a news provider, he’s a font of poorly considered and poorly conveyed opinion, why would he ever have been returned on the news search page? Fox is still returned, as is the Washington Times and others. MichNews doesn’t do it’s own reporting, it *only* posts wire stories, links to Fox news and commentary.
its. bleh.
Some “news” is like porn…hard to define exactly, but you know it when you see it.
We need a new word…something like Knews(TM). Then the sophisticated algorithm work Google does would be easier.
I really don’t see how they can classify Pastor Swank’s writings as hate speech. Hate sure, but speech?
This is FRIGHTENINGLY ominous. Other things they report on are just, you know, regularly ominous.
So Sheppard is saying that one ‘numerically small’ company shouldn’t have so much power? If he doesn’t like google, he can go start his own search engine – one that lists nothing but those haphazard “newsgatheringâ€? sites that consider Swank a heavy-hitter.
But maybe Sheppard is right on some level: just because the Swankster hates language doesn’t mean he’s guilty of hate speech. Those two things are, like, so totally different.
“…that frankly dwarfs its current financial prowess.”
Oh. Got it. He was told to use various Vocabulary Words in a meaningful sentence and got confused. He meant:
“that prowessly franks its dwarf financial current.”
Whew. For a second I thought it was me.
They posted about this over at World O’ Crap today, as well. And, I bet myself right there and then that Brad would post on this over here. So, I get here, and… Gavin?!?
[creaking noise, tiny footsteps, door slam, sound of riding lawnmower passing by, AIEEEEE!]
That was the sound of my brain tossing itsself under a riding lawn mower. I’d get a new one, but I am suddenly overcome with an urge to go read Renew America. Or Pastor Swank….
Jeebus! Where’d all the eye-talics come from?