In a pair of Tweets Tuesday morning, President Trump accused Google having “RIGGED” news search results “for me and others, so that almost all stories & news is BAD.”
The implication is that Google’s algorithms, which automatically generate links to news stories, are biased in favor of liberals and against Trump and other conservatives. In a statement, Google responded that “we don’t bias our results toward any political ideology,” adding “Every year, we issue hundreds of improvements to our algorithms to ensure they surface high-quality content in response to users’ queries. We continually work to improve Google Search and we never rank search results to manipulate political sentiment.”
Trump’s claims are based on a post by Paula Bolyard of PJ Media who did a search for “Trump” in Google News and found that, among the firt 100 results, “CNN has a disproportionate number of articles returned when searching for “Trump” — nearly 29 percent of the total. In fact, left-leaning sites comprised 96 percent of the total results.” Bolyard acknowledges that her tests as “not scientific.”
She wrote that “Not a single right-leaning site appeared on the first page of search results,” but when I did a search for “Trump” on August 29th, a Fox News video showed up near the top of the page.
Based on a chart
Her definition of “left-leaning” sites was based on a chart (below) from former CBS reporter and now conservative pundit Sharyl Attkisson, who ranked news sources based on her perception of whether they are left or right leaning. As you can see from the chart, most of mainstream media outlets, including the New York Times, Washington Post and major broadcast networks are on the left. On the right are a few major outlets, including the Wall Street Journal and Fox News but many of the outlets listed on the right are pretty obscure and some, such as Alex Jones Infowars, are extremely controversial.
The sites that had the most number of hits about Trump, according the the PJ Media post, included CNN, Washington Post, NBC and CNBC but, for the most part, these are sites that heavily cover President Trump and report on his statements and policies. They are also sites that use mainly original content, avoid repetition (at least on the web) and employ trained journalists. That is also true of some of the conservatives sites, including Fox News and Wall Street Journal, but not true of some of the others listed on both sides of Attkinson’s chart.
Boston Globe columnist Hiawatha Bray analyzed Attkinson’s chart and pointed out:
“On Alexa’s list of the world’s top 50 news sites, hardly any of Attkisson’s conservative sites make the cut. Fox News is seventh, but the Drudge Report is 19th, the Wall Street Journal is 20th, the New York Post is 23rd. Meanwhile on the left, CNN ranks at No. 3, trailing only Google’s own news page and, in first place, the popular Internet hangout Reddit. The New York Times is fourth, the Washington Post 10th, Bloomberg is 16th, and USA Today is 18th.”
I also question whether Attkinson is accurate in her assumption as to what is left left or right learning. It’s hard for me to see how Pew Research would wind up on the left side of the spectrum (its surveys are pretty down the middle) and it’s not clear that the news writers and reporters of the mainstream sites listed on the left have a liberal bias in their writing, despite the likely liberal leanings of some of their editorial boards or commentators. And I certainly don’t disagree that some, like MSNBC and The Nation, are clearly to the left of center.
From PJ Media