I used Google News for a long time. I have since blackholed it on all of my machines. By tailoring the news articles presented to be based on the interests that Google data mined from my Google profile, it became an echo chamber even worse than Facebook.
It became a very bad source of news: all of the articles were self-reinforcing each other with very very little actual diversity of sources.
I disagree with your sentiment about Google News. I think it does a great job of aggregating all the sources to a given headline. It even goes as far as labeling the sources as "Opinion pieces", "Highly Cited", or even "From ___" opposing entity sources (eg. From Saudi Arabia sources).
There is no easy answer to to display ONLY unbiased sources, because that would require an unbiased source to pull from. Which I don't believe exists. With Google News, responsibility falls on the reader to use the sources in front of them to formulate an educated opinion and gain an understanding of the story. If a reader chooses to only view either right-wing or leftist sources via Google News, then that's beyond Google's control.
We seem to be expecting technology to allow us to cast media literacy to the wind, but that's not going to happen. I don't happen to be a google news user, but it strikes me as providing the opportunity for the user to either remain in an echo chamber (for any given story, you can read the article from your outlet of choice, for example), or to diversify what you consume. Technology is one tool that people use to spread disinformation, propaganda, and bias, but it's just a tool. Similarly, technology is one way to fight it, but it's just one way—I think we could all use a reminder on how to be a savvy consumer of news media. Most people don't seem to appreciate the difference between an outlet covering a story versus breaking it, or how sourcing and citing work, the difference between opinion articles, analysis and reportage, and so on.
Well, offloading responsibility gets you nowhere. It doesn't solve the problem, it simply ignores it. What value is there in aggregation if there is no standard of quality?
I only used Google News occasionally, but these days I treat it as anathema. At some point I heard about an event I wanted to look up, tried Google News in hopes of getting the most current sources, and couldn't find it.
Whatever decisions were being made, it was preferring old articles on barely-related technology topics to something high-profile on every major news site. I don't know if it was my profile or simply a crappy algorithm, but having a major event 'vanish' like that made me permanently swear off the site. I didn't get the experience of a bubble, but I certainly got the sense that the content was non-representative, and curated for goals other than keeping me informed.
I purposely blocked all news of a certain sort, and they still get pushed to the top of my feed. I'm convinced that Google is using News to push its agenda, as evidenced by both my experience and Eric Schmidt's comments [1]
The best thing about Google News (the old Google news) was that it was like being able to search microfiche of all the old-school news publications (but digitally): articles written by journalists for publications that happened to also be digitized. You could scroll back and back to as many results as the engine could find on any given topic. As a research tool, it was unparalleled in its ability to help journalists link facts to unbiased sources and to multiple sources.
When they redid the design (yes, I know exactly what you are talking about) it was like ... murdering democracy: limiting results.
I had to stop using it all together.
Sure you can go search google.com, but items that would show up on news ( == important things) are somehow lost from google, and it's just not the same.
Sad day when we lost the old news.google.com. If what they're saying here is true, the first thing to do is to bring back the old news search. That will help journalists more than anything.
I know there are many people disagreeing with you, but I found the same as you. The news I was seeing was so hyper targeted that I was missing major events just because they were unrelated to the echo chamber that had been created around my past reads.
I had a similar problem. After I stopped using gmail & google search (for privacy reasons) and started using Duck Duck Go, it almost seemed random in what news it was trying to feed me because it didn't have enough data. I messed with the little sliders, banned fake news sources like HuffPost/WashPost etc, but I couldn't get it to deliver a news feed I actually wanted to consume... so... I just gave up on it.
Finally went back to a combination of InnoReader.com (RSS from sites I know I want) and News360.com (more subject based, varying sources). No need for Google News anymore, particularly after all the news of their censorship and bias has become more and more public.
> banned fake news sources like HuffPost/WashPost etc
Is the Washington Post considered fake news by most? Do you have examples of why you think it's fake? I'm curious because I actually pay for WaPo. I occasionally pull up fox news to see another side, but while I do consider WaPo liberal leaning, it seemed at least less biased than some other sources I've seen, and I would rather know the biases I'm consuming.
I agree...and more and more the same articles are being presented to me for days on end, maybe because they are a "match" to my interests.
But in fact my interest is have an unbiased/multi-biased news feed so I can properly survey the news-scape. It is how I can get a sense of the world,upcoming trends.I can choose, and quickly, based on text, whether an article is of probable interest. I do not want a bubble, and I do not want an algorithm deciding what is interesting to me. It is inefficient and false.
Is there some feedback feature or something you use to get a helpful range of stories?
My experience with Google News isn't so much bias or a bubble as uselessness. Source quality, comprehensiveness, and coverage depth seem totally irrelevant, like I'm just getting a feed of every news site a bunch of people clicked on recently. It's the same stuff as Facebook's trending bar, at about the same level of shallow and unfocused.
And occasionally, it seems like a major story is incompatible with my profile, or has a keyword collision with other topics, or something, and so disappears almost completely.
I tried Google News and Google Now with real eagerness, but my experience with both of them was just shockingly low quality.
You can weigh your news sources. I intentionally give a little more weight to sources I don’t always agree with but aren’t obviously biased. Things like fake news spreaders, conspiracy theorist, government propaganda machines, or fair topical sites that simply don’t interest me (mostly Celebrity News and Gossip) get black holed.
You can find those sliders in your settings. Also they ask you periodically on the desktop homepage.
Pro tip: if you hate the mobile or new UI as much as I do, set your user agent to iPhone and go to google.com/nwshp. For whatever reason that magical incantation gives you the classic home page (with the sliders I mentioned in easy access/obvious places). I’ll be really excited if someone knows how to just set that globally in settings. I haven’t found it.
This helps if you love/hate a few sources; not if you want a wide range of non-garbage sources; and especially not if you want the non-garbage stories from one source like CNN or WaPo or FoxNews that has some very good news and a lot of hot-button middlebrow-opinion-masquerading-as-news trash that bubbles to the top of the dungheap.
Thanks for this, I actually didn't know about that. Might be a product I'll like once I put a bit of effort into cleaning it up.
I'm worried I'll share kolpa's problem, where sources I use for certain like CNN are also full of absolute dreck I don't want to see. But with a bit of luck I can put together a "news of the day" feed, and I'll just go to those touchier sources directly when I expect a specific piece to be usable.
No it just happens. But at times I get a dialog of "is this card valuable to you". Which pretty much for everything I answer yes.
But the default is a mixture. Plus I use Google services a lot and for a long time as I try to keep all my data at Google instead of spread around. So everything from DNS, to TV as we have YouTube TV. We have Google Homes, etc.
Wish we could use Fi but I have a huge family so not financially practical. That would keep my location data away from my wireless provider.
Can't tell you why get both sides but do. Love last week I had back to back articles
1) Kid suspended from school for not walking out during the gun walkout.
2) kid spanked in Arkansas spanked for walking out.
About perfect. I am more center left but like to hear all aspects. Does drive my wife crazy when she walks in the room and I am watching Fox News. Do then turn off and put on MSNBC.
This. The impression of vanilla Google News is that searching for an event will give you stories/opinions from publications of random type/quality/bias/nationality/age randomly grouped (and even more randomly regrouped when you click "view all") and so weakly classified it sometimes surfaces compilations of reader comments as "in depth" articles. It doesn't even seem to bother highlighting paywalls anymore.
There's a lot more to 'news diversity' than the basic "left-wing" vs "right-wing" opposing views on hot-button controversies of the moment. The topic selection is as important as the bias selection.
I've had the same experience. For some reason Google thinks I want bi-daily reports on Trump's bathroom schedule, or what utensil he ate with. Which I can almost understand why I get that because so many people apparently want that, but that is literally ALL I get from them. And believe me, that is not figured out by skillful mining of my data.
I understand the temptation to interpret people's comments that way, but users are far too quick to jump to conclusions about astroturfing or PR, and cross into personal attack in the process. That damages the community at least as much as what you all are insinuating, if it's true—and it's usually not true. For example, I doubt that a shill would write about their Cobol programming experience.
This perpetuates the misconception that there is a such thing as objective newsworthiness. If I only want to read stories about endangered species and polka musicians, that's no less valid than someone who wants to read about school shootings and the Olympics.
The issue is that I don't want to only read about school shootings and Olympics - but because I spent 3 weeks following the latter closely and 2 days actively investigating the former now it dominates everything that I see and it isn't obvious that this is happening.
If I open a newspaper and skip through most of the pages to the celeb gossip one, at least it's a conscious choice. Out of sight out of mind and all that
You can just tell Google News you're not interested in those topics. Believe me, you won't miss them. I only read news about topics I've explicitly said I'm interested in.
At first I was afraid of missing out on "general interest" news until I realized: there isn't any such thing. General uncategorized news is just a collection of topics chosen by someone else. You don't need it.
I think all of google search results are increasingly becoming more and more "filter bubbly" too, I have to anonymize completely or I know I'm just going to get bullshit results.
This announcement is hilarious, their products harm journalism bigly. It's like McDonald's putting a nice little leaf drawing about the environment on their cups.
I use google to look up rules from a game pretty frequently. I find that for some pretty vague search terms it is giving the results I want, from the particular game I want, at the top of the search results. Aside from the significant privacy concerns, this is useful...until I try to search for something else...then my results get screwed.
I wonder whether you got downvoted for your choice of words. I'll try using bigly in a sentence when it can happen organically and see whether the same happens to me.
As someone who runs a regional newspaper, I very much doubt that the future of healthy journalism is in the hands of a big company such as Google. We are already thinking hard what to do with the Facebook monopoly, we would be crazy to voluntarily stick our neck into another one.
It’s not much of a choice if we can’t easily change our minds later. It’s more like a long-term investment, and if we are to make a long-term investment, we’d rather invest in a direct relationship with our readers.
But can you explain how having another choice is dangerous?
Don't forget that Google also tracks online behaviour on an industrial scale. It doesn't matter if that information is only collated in aggregated form or "anonymised" (a meaningless term), we don't know how that information could be mined with AI or machine learning either now or in the future.
In fact, I suspect that even Google hasn't figure all the possible uses of the enormous quantity of user behaviour it has captured and continues to capture. And that ubiquitous data capture starts right from school, where millions of students use a cloud-based OS called ChromeOS that records everything they do.
The tech community's response to Google's online tracking and data capture is not scrutiny or questioning, but silence (or a rush to defend them).
> Barry Lynn, formerly the director of the antitrust-focused Open Markets program at New America, charged Wednesday that Google pressured the think tank to fire him and drop his program after he wrote a statement in June praising European regulators for fining the search giant $2.7 billion for abusing its market power. In that statement, Lynn said Google's "market power is one of the most most critical challenges for competition policymakers in the world today."
> After Lynn published the statement, Eric Schmidt, chairman of Alphabet, Google's parent company, contacted New America, and "communicated his displeasure," Lynn told the New York Times on Wednesday.
> "Google is very aggressive in throwing its money around Washington and Brussels, and then pulling the strings," Lynn told the Times. "People are so afraid of Google now."
Think tanks are basically lobbyist/pr firms in disguise. While I am not necessarily disagreeing with your main point, I don't think this particular incident is all that controversial. When companies hire lobbyists, they expect them to represent their interests. Same goes for think tanks.
Based on the blog article, it seems like the main thing they're trying to solve is the payment system (use Google payment to easily subscribe). If that's true, it's a much different and less exciting offer than the OP's linked page which seemed like a much larger initiative.
The subscription system sounds like it's one part of this initiative. And if it is indeed the "main thing" then I think we should give Google some credit for being serious with this initiative. A payments system is a boring problem but it is the one most core to news organizations' current existential problems. It's not as sexy as using NLP to categorize news archives perhaps, but it's the most important to news orgs' survival.
I just wish they would bring back the old patron system, where I didn't see ads and some small amount of money went to the sites I visited, without a subscription. Because I want to support good journalism, wherever it is found, but there's no way I'm ever going to sign up for $3/mo for the Miami Herald to read three articles a year.
Google probably accepts the most forms of payment of any single company in the world (just a guess), but which forms of payment are accepted on any given product under Google will vary. For example, Adwords[0] has the list of supported forms of payment by country. While in Play we things like Paypal, direct_carrier_billing, and gift cards.
I have no clue what the News Initiative is supporting, but I could guess it will be credit/debit cards from around the world.
Google has built a LOT of payments projects. Some have definitely failed, but there are many that you don't notice because it will be supporting specific flows in specific countries or products.
And not a single one of them supports SEPA payments.
I had to get a CC just for the Google Play Developer fee.
CCs are very uncommon in Germany, everything – including Amazon.de – supports SEPA payments.
But Google does not.
So, the "Google probably accepts the most forms of payment of any single company in the world (just a guess)" statement may be technically true, but it doesn’t help at all.
> There is no such thing as fake news, there is only inaccurate news.
I'd be the first to agree that "fake news" is a term thrown around too loosely, and that fake news is one of the hardest problems for algorithms to attempt to solve, because it's just as hard for humans. For instance, pushing the story that Bill Cosby has been accused of rape would've been considered by many journalists to be "fake news", either because they didn't think it was true or because they thought it was old news that was settled. Cosby's biographer was a well-regarded CNN senior editor but chose to omit rape details because he thought they were all old allegations [0].
But to say that there is literally no "fake news" is ignorant of what we've already seen come to pass. One of the better known examples was the "El Chapo escapes (again)" story that was created by a site deliberately designed to look like ABC News by stealing its trademarks and mimicking its domain: abcnews.com.co [1]. You don't think there's a distinction between "inaccurate news" and outright intentional fakery? Seriously?
> You don't think there's a distinction between "inaccurate news" and outright intentional fakery?
No, I don't. When you call news fake, all you're doing is calling into question the motive of the author or outlet in addition to calling it inaccurate; You're saying, "This news is inaccurate, and the author intentionally made it so." The first part is a statement about the article itself, the second part is a useless ad hominem attack. So when something is said to be "fake news", it's only indirectly about the news itself.
I'll happily concede that some organizations are objectively kept at higher standards than others, ie: that El Chapo story is clearly just fabricated for advertisement dollars. I am not arguing that it is wrong to ever judge an author or organization for past inaccuracies-- denying news organization reputation would be absurd. But given that what we're really talking about with "fake news" is the reputation and intentions of the organizations, what I resent about the "fake news" label is that it presents this false dichotomy where there are organizations that intend to mislead, and then there are the pure and good ones. There's this implication that a story can only misrepresent something by serious omission or the insertion of something that is totally false and separate from reality, but it's not like that, it's a continuum. All journalists and organizations have some inherent bias, and I don't see why it's reasonable to expect readers to understand the inherent biases of particular outlets and to draw the truth out from mixing and considering them in proportion, whereas if they're exposed to one "fake" website that presents one overtly inaccurate statement, it's assumed to be completely fatal to their reasoning -- overtly false information is simply too powerful for the feeble minds of the masses. And nevermind that what's "fake" is rather subjective, and tends to be ascribed more commonly to the new disruptive media rather than the old and entrenched media conglomerates.
There's far more danger in centralized curation than there is with people being exposed to inaccurate statements on the internet. I do not understand how anyone could think otherwise.
In your eyes, what's the difference between fake and inaccurate news? What makes some inaccurate news fake, and other inaccurate news not-fake? If it's based on gauging the intent of the author, wouldn't you agree that it's practically useless?
Inaccurate news is news based on outdated or incomplete information.
Fake news is fake information passed off as "news", for whatever reason.
Stories, as they are reported, are constantly evolving and changing in the details. For example, in the Uber AV fatality story, news outlets initially reported the driver as a man named Rafael. The driver's actual name is Rafaela, and she is a woman. The news outlets were wrong but they got their info from a police spokesperson.
To continue reporting the story and say that it involves a driver named Rafael would be inaccurate. But the intent is not deliberate or malicious. Fake reporting would be to say Uber's driver was a 12-year old illegal immigrant, and making that fact up out of the blue.
In regards to reporting on public issues and officials, libel law gives First Amendment protection to reporting false information. A defendant is only culpable of libel/slander if gross negligence or actual malice is found: https://www.rcfp.org/category/glossary-terms/actual-malice
What is "fake information"? The word 'fake' has been transformed recently to mean something that is not well defined. Everyone knows that a 'fake' watch is a counterfeit watch, and the same goes for a 'fake' id. It's fraudulent, and that usage is well established. Past that, lines get blurry. A "fake" person is someone who is superficial and cares a lot about appearances. Where does "fake" information fit in here? If we photoshop freckles out of a photo or slim down a waistline, we might call that a "fake" photo, but the picture is still mostly accurate.
Does true information that has been stretched or selectively omitted fall under "fake"? Does it have to be completely made up?
> [...] But the intent is not deliberate or malicious. [...]
So it comes down to intent of the author in your mind? Wouldn't you agree that calling some news "fake" is primarily a statement about the author, then? You're saying, "the information is inaccurate, and the author did so with intent."
What does Seth Rich have to do with any of this? Surely you have better examples of stories under-covered by the media, especially when Fox News retracted its story and is currently being sued by Rich's family?
It's a pretty incredible resource if you know the date/place of an event but if you wanted to research a little more broad it's a tool with incredibly untapped potential.
I wish they would spend more time providing tools for people to consume information in powerful ways rather than trying to 'tailor' experiences.
> I wish they would spend more time providing tools for people to consume information in powerful ways rather than trying to 'tailor' experiences.
Power users are a very, very small number, probably sub-million, generate zero revenue, complain a lot and want features that cost a lot of money. There's no reason why Google would target them.
But I'm sure you can find a professional service that does that, allowing for powerful search of historical news. Probably costs a lot, though.
Empowering users to become more and more power users is literally the reason humanity bothers with science and technology. It was the reason shared by many people who started now successful software companies. It's sad to see profit motive distract people away from that core reason.
> Empowering users to become more and more power users is literally the reason humanity bothers with science and technology.
Quite the opposite. Technology allows users to become less and less power users.
> It's sad to see profit motive distract people away from that core reason.
Not sure I got that part, are you complaining that other people are not leaving their jobs and living aside to build the product you want for free with no pay?
> Quite the opposite. Technology allows users to become less and less power users.
That seems pedantic. Technology allows users to become "less and less power users" by giving them the tools to solve problems they were not advanced enough to solve before, or that were too time-consuming or difficult to solve before.
That's exactly the same point the OP is making -- Google has the potential to build a tool which would allow people who otherwise cannot make use of these archives to do so.
> That seems pedantic. Technology allows users to become "less and less power users" by giving them the tools to solve problems they were not advanced enough to solve before, or that were too time-consuming or difficult to solve before.
Exactly, today a regular user can do what a power user could do years ago.
Create a full website with good design, structure, functionality? You had to be a power user, but not anymore.
Drive a car? You had to know how to use a clutch, shift gears, etc. Not anymore.
Access the internet? You had to buy a modem, configure it, connect, etc. Not anymore.
And so on.
Technology removes burdens, and allows regular users to do what only power users could before.
People don't want to be power users. People don't even want to be users. People want to listen to music, move, read.
I don't agree-- I don't think most people want to be power users nor do I think science and technology is supposed to produce more power users. People want hard and complex things to be done easier for them.
There used to exist Google News Archive Search, and it really worked. I was able to search for the name of an obscure person who died in 1910, find obituaries of them and create a Wikipedia article about them, etc.
Then in 2011 it was shut down, and also the number of newspapers hasn't grown, it has actually become smaller.[1][2] It's claimed to be back in some form, but those who used to use it earlier aren't really satisfied.[3]
I agree. Similar situation with the Google Books interface, which as far as I can tell has changed little or at all since it was launched in 2005.
Admittedly, I'm a niche within a niche segment for them (professional historian) but if Google improved the functionality of their newspapers and books services, it would translate to increased research productivity for my entire field (and for anyone else who uses archival book and newspaper scans regularly, like investigative journalists). It's a relatively intangible change but one that isn't inconsiderable, especially in terms of generating goodwill among students and researchers.
The subscription services are a complete mess at the moment, analogous to the state of for-profit academic publishers in general. Google has a golden opportunity to establish itself as an alternative to the predatory publishers who generally run digitized newspaper and article archives.
Correct me if I am wrong, but isn’t the reason the Google Books interface is so limited due to a court decision? Essentially the book publishers threatened to sue Google into the ground due to the copyright infringement of making full scans publicly available without a licensing agreement.
I find the omission in the current engine somewhat frustrating. If you are looking for original references, this timeline was very helpful -- a lot of times, the current search pulls up more modern references that aren't necessarily as useful if you want perspectives from the past. There are ways to search the current archive by date, but they are not terribly intuitive (https://www.thoughtco.com/search-tips-for-google-news-archiv...).
(My memory is that the previous search engine gave better results as well, but unfortunately it's difficult for me to prove whether that's correct one way or another.)
Any search at google is N mapreduce jobs away from a keyword search.
In theory, having a really nice search engine for this news would be rather easy for Google (/any Googler with a few weeks of time and access to this data).
This is essentially what every new employee at Google has to do in the orientation week.
I recently got a subscription to newspapers.com to get access to archival data. Surprised no one has mentioned them. It's not super cheap, but I think it's worth it for the amount of information available. TBH I don't use it much for some reason but when doing research it will let you access sources most people ignore, because it's not google or facebook.
What do you expect? They're just an advertisement agency. They don't have the tools or skills required to perform advanced searches in a large, unstructured data corpus.
This wasn't the reason given when the 2011 announcement was made regarding the end of the project. But since then, the archive has faced copyright issues as newspapers sign contracts with other archive services: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160825/10114535344/newsp...
I got fed up with Google News a year or so ago, over the echo chamber that the news site has become. It motivated me to create https://statesreport.com, with no ads and no tracking.
BTW, the CSS for 'p' has 'sans-serif-light' but I don't have that (or the others) on Chrome/Debian, which results in my default (which happens to be Serif).
Nice site! Big fan. Out of curiosity, are you monetizing it in any way? Expect increased traffic after this HN post? How are you making sure we don't empty your pockets?
Interesting, I just opened your site and it has nearly the exact same list of articles/headlines/sources that my Google News page has. I wonder what is different about my settings and the settings of those who feel their news feed is highly edited.
Generally for news I prefer Blendle, and no I don't mind paying per story although I think some papers are pretty extreme in what they think their journalism is worth.
I’d never heard of your site but I just checked it out. I’ve got to say it looks really nice. I’ll bookmark it and try to use it. Thanks for making it!
The server is written in Go. The news scraper is written in python. I don't have the full list of sites offhand, but I'll try and get back to this comment!
You wrote elsewhere that your output HTML is highly optimized. I viewed the source of the page and I can see that it contains the CSS inside <style> tags and images embedded as base64 encoded text - what software do you use to generate this output?
The python scraper base64 encodes all the images, so that data is prepared for the web server. The python library being used is PIL. The CSS is hand-written in a Go template. The goal was to have all the rendering done in a single request, so I choose to embed the CSS and relax the CSP on styles.
Given the bias inside of Google and the fact they have already demonstrated that they are not a neutral arbitrator, the last thing I want to have is them being the arbitrator of who or what news is seen. This is more of an attempt to consolidate their power, what you can and cannot see etc.. Hard pass.
Google continuing to host Alex Jones may not be be 'in the name of free speech', they may not want people to go to other platforms to get their content. They can lead users to other videos from any video ( using the side bar ) and make money from those videos which does contain advertisements
There is really not competition for Google with YouTube plus they now have over 1.6 billion hours consumed a day. So getting rid of Alex Jones content do not think would hurt YT in any manner.
Google does not have to play the cost for more left leaning content like they have to do with alt right content.
> There is really not competition for Google with YouTube plus they now have over 1.6 billion hours consumed a day. So getting rid of Alex Jones content do not think would hurt YT in any manner.
Current dominance != future dominance. Read the concept behind innovators dilemma
Have read innovators dilemma. There is little chance for YT to be distrubted at this point.
The problem for a competitor is YT was built during a period of time it was possible, barely, to do this. I say barely as in Google had a ton of engineering challenges.
Not sure if technical but serving over 1.6 billion hours of video a day is really hard.
But now with all the content in one place it is impossible to compete.
Wife and me talking about Marsha getting hit with a football. Just turn around and ask the Google Home to play it and it plays a video of the scene. Same with Mary laughing at clowns funeral.
I have 8 kids and ALL of them are organizing here this morning with friends to go an march. I have never seen them do that with anything besides rock concerts.
This is the future and where Google needs to be aligned. The NRA members will die off.
Facebook will be overjoyed to learn that they are not allowing a right-of-center voice into the process. You should probably bring that to the attention of British and US authorities; they'll be eager to know, given the recent news.
Don't be hyperbolic and put the word "enemies" in my mouth. They are biased sources, though. Those who align with the left typically don't see it, because the organizations align with their biases... and because people rarely read beyond the "truth gauge" at the top of their articles.
Politifact will regularly find a small technicality with a right wing politician and use it to label something "untrue", but give a pass to left wingers. They are run by the Tampa Bay Times, whose editorial board endorses almost exclusively Democrats.
Snopes is just a mom and pop shop whose editorial team has about as much accreditation as your average blogger. The only reason they have any presumed credibility is because of how long the site has been around.
>Those who align with the left typically don't see it, because the organizations align with their biases
Are you sure it's not the opposite? That you don't agree with them because they don't align to your biases? Again, based on your comments here, your viewpoint seems to be far more than "slightly" right of center. By comparison, if I were a hardcore socialist, I would find objections with much of the center-left/center/center-right news sources too, because they did not agree with my viewpoint. That doesn't make them less reliable, nor does it make their facts any less factual.
It is completely possible to hold opinions that don't align with facts. That doesn't mean those facts are untrue. It also doesn't mean your opinions are less valid, only that they're just opinions. The more extreme your views get to one side or the other, the more you're going to find reality seems to be biased against you. So if you find that reality seems to be biased against you and that troubles you in any way... you may want to reevaluate how close to center your viewpoints actually are.
What have I said that's solidly right? I've only stated that other organizations show bias. The irony is that you're applying your own biases to someone whom you've never met while denying bias.
I don't agree with most of what comes out of right-wingers' mouths. I'm a center-leftist that's tired of having half of the viewpoints "filtered". When Politifact labels something Trump said as "Pants on Fire", then buries the fact that he was 95% correct at the bottom of the article, I call that bias.
I'm not here to judge how you self-identify politically. I'm here to debate the idea that Facebook and Politifact and Snopes (for some reason? Does anyone actually take them seriously?) and everyone else is biased against the often-maligned center-right, but there's some conspiracy where no one can talk about it unless they're far-right which of course no self respecting liberal would believe. And even Spotify is pushing liberal playlists, and Twitter never bans David Brock's bots, and everyone is out to get those center-right guys instead!
The idea that the mainstream media is biased against conservatives is an argument that just won't go away. At some point people who read the NYT or WSJ and say it's far too liberal may have to accept that their definition of "center" is skewed. And people can make mistakes or have opinions without there being any inherent and insurmountable political bias involved.
I apologize for assuming you were conservative, I didn't realize you identify as a liberal. It was a judgement based on the fact that you're claiming the very-much centrist mainstream media is too biased toward liberal news, and Facebook is too biased towards liberals with the very-much centrist mainstream media outlets, and YouTube is too biased against center-right figures without mentioning they demonetize controversial left-leaning channels, too. It sounded exactly like many far-right extremists I've talked with in the past, and again I apologize for that inference.
I don't think this conversation is going anywhere productive and we're getting dragged from the original topic, so I'll just finish by re-stating my point that if everyone is biased against your completely centrist and moderate viewpoints, your viewpoints may not be as centrist and moderate as you thought. This applies to both sides of the aisle.
> everyone else is biased against the often-maligned center-right, but there's some conspiracy where no one can talk about it unless they're far-right
Perhaps the issue is that people talking about it, regardless of their actual beliefs, are labeled "far-right". Hell, even Stephen Pinker has been called "alt-right" at this point.
> At some point people who read the NYT or WSJ and say it's far too liberal may have to accept that their definition of "center" is skewed.
Or perhaps the Overton window on what is considered "progressive" has moved left. For example, ten years ago, senators Clinton and Obama voted for a border fence.
> the very-much centrist mainstream media is too biased toward liberal news
Did you read the Podesta emails? It was example after example of mainstream journalists going out of their way to curry favor with the Clinton campaign. Once again, I think the Overton window of "mainstream progressive" views has shifted. For example, where are the Blue Dog Democrats anymore?
Unfortunately, most articles pointing this out come from right-wing outlets, because they're the ones incentivized to put in the work. I don't think that negates the facts (pun-ish unintended), because you can investigate the claims yourself. Here, though, is a Forbes article detailing how they engage is coverups of their own political punditry: https://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2013/12/27/in-200...
Isn't that convenient? The only sources that document this widespread, omnipresent bias against right-wing are far-right "news" organizations who themselves engage in endless propaganda.
BTW, that forbes article doesn't show any kind of determined bias on behalf of Politifact. I don't think you really grasp what the problem is when we talk about bias in journalism. Newspapers can make mistakes. Newspapers can even report totally incorrect information. What's important is that mistakes and erroneous reporting are acknowledged, discussed, and critiqued. It's like science -- peer review is the key. When an organization like Politifact makes a claim and is then subjected to legitimate critique and then it responds to such criticism -- that is the process working. This is very different from what happens with the far-right news complex though, isn't it?
Just for the sake of everyone reading this, I'd like to point out the The Federalist is a far-right publication that until recently had a section devoted to "black crime" and just a few months ago published an article defending a politician who was accused of the sexual assault of several underaged girls.
I would take their claims of bias with a grain of salt.
It was the first result on Google. Regardless of what you think of the site as a whole, their statements in this specific article hold up well enough in a vacuum and they provide enough evidence and give good justification for their reasoning. The examples given are particularly damning.
Google and traditional media as well are in the business of selling advertisement. I feel that when your money comes from selling your readers attention to the highest ad bidder, one incentive becomes to sensationalize and do other tricks to increase viewership. This incentive can be at odds with the incentive to inform truthfully and completely, as some of the important information would invariably be boring, resulting in less sales. I've experienced this at Twitter as we optimized the product for engagement.
I hypothesize that this incentive to lock-in reader groups, has led to fragmentation of media and creating a lot of "info bubbles", or "interest based magazines". I think this is exacerbated by the dropping cost of information ( I have some thoughts on the process at http://dimitarsimeonov.com/2017/10/27/the-shifting-sweet-spo... )
I don't believe it is in Google's _strongest_ interest to provide truthful media, as Google doesn't make it's money from telling you truth.
I am optimist though.. and think in the future we'll have journalist's job be to aggregate a lot of that narrative and collect some micro-payments. And we'll have a lot fewer journalists, as there is less money in making these narratives.
A huge consequence of the prioritization of clicks is the loss of quality reporting. Those shuttered newspapers who went the way of the dinosaurs carried with them hundreds of years of journalistic experience. A lot of it didn't transfer to modern news sites. Now we're paying the price with young, inexperienced "journalists" pumping out junk articles with poor sourcing, missing or wrong facts, etc. I can't find it now but one of the better modern journalists (Glenn Greenwald or Bob Woodward maybe?) had a great piece on this. He lamented how mainstream media is failing to maintain their journalistic standards because they're too biased and they haven't been taught how to be good journalists.
I think Google should focus heavily on this, but their PR doesn't mention it much. Quality journalists first, then quality tools.
A journalist was an employee of a large entity who wrote articles and made videos that complied with the reality and perspective the company they work for wanted to promote. (There are still a few of these employees left working for what's left of these entities)
'News' was selective packaged information to influence and inform the broadest reach, with a goal of selling accompanying advertising messaging based on that reach.
I hardly think that journalism and news are outdated and unnecessary. Where else would people get long-form updates on what's happening in the world? We can do better than corporate/government propaganda, but it's unclear exactly how to avoid biases generated by your funding. Funding news and paying journalists (even for unpopular and unprofitable articles) is the real problem we need to consider.
All I want is a resource like "google" for all newspaper articles ever that we have stored anywhere.
Whenever I'm studying a topic, I'll often look up very old or contemporary newspaper writings to see how our perceptions and attitudes regarding the issue have changed over time.
I did this with the civil war and slavery at one point and recently with artificial intelligence. I would highly recommend it for comparing and contrasting your current perspective on a historical event or issue with that time's perspective of the same event or past times' perspectives on that same issue. Its really interesting too to see how the modern perspective is formed slowly over the years up to the current day.
"The future of journalism depends on all of us working together."
Translation:
"Your future as a new organization depends on you working well with us here at Google and finding ways for us to quietly tax part of your prior earnings"
The real problem that Google doesn't want to talk about is its monopoly (with FB) of the digital ad market, to the tune of something like 85% of the total market. As a result, from big to small publishers, specialty publishers, regional publications, etc are all struggling. Here's a read: https://www.medgadget.com/2018/03/google-serfdom-publishing-...
Plus, of course, those other 15% of the market, to be even more precise. Not to mention that online advertisement to a certain degree is the same market as other forms of advertisement.
Look, there is a reason there are active investigations of Google's and FB's effects on the news media in U.K., Australia, Korea. They are duopoly and their effects reverberate through the entire internet, stifling creation of new websites and new media sources. There's a reason that VC investment in news media on the internet is nonexistent.
I bet you they are going to push AMP plus their Newstand App which sucks. The Newstand app is great for finding news., but not great for reading cause AMP butchers the content so often I ended up clicking on "view in browser" all the time. and dare you try to copy and paste text!
> Google allowing video on YouTube they can't monetize kind of saids it all about Google and free speech.
Huh? You mean video that doesn't contain ads? If those videos attract users to YouTube, then those users are more likely to start watching some videos that do contain ads. Seems pretty straight forward, and says basically nothing about whether or not Google can be trusted.
"The future of journalism depends on all of us working together."
Actually the future of journalism depends on media companies to stop working like tabloids trying to attract eyeballs to shiny controversial crap.
Seriously, I've had to turn off every Breaking News alert and e-mail that I have because 9 times out of 10 it's something stupid or scandalous relating to Trump. Scandal or "shocking political developments" are not breaking news, especially when they happen every day. It's not world news, it's not national news, it's not local news. It's gossip about a reality TV star.
This isn't journalism, this is the slow eroding of my sanity during time which I should be getting to know what the weather will be like tomorrow, whether an important referendum is coming up, actually important world events that impact real people, or significant changes to a local, national or global economic center, not to mention important scientific advances, and of course, sports news.
Real breaking news would be "a 7.5 earthquake leveled Mexico City today", "ethnic minorities in east asia continue to be massacred by their government who is denying the charges", "new tax laws will provide cuts to the richest", "the federal government is cracking down on states' push back to their anti-immigration and drug laws", etc. These are important things that are happening today that might affect me, my loved ones, my livelihood, etc. I don't give a shit what the special counsel has recently said about a person tangentially related to a controversy surrounding a political figure.
How about Google start an initiative to relay important, substantive, fact-based information to people that need it? Was that too much to put in their mission statement? I mean, they're only one of the most powerful technology companies on the planet employing the smartest engineers on the planet. Maybe they could get Google X to take a look at it.
I don't have a problem with 'truth' per se, merely a problem with who gets to adjudicate what is true versus what is not, even if something is apparently non-true.
Rather than delete or abridge any legal content (as defined by a litany of 1st Amendment SCOTUS cases), at least in the USA, instead of deleting/modifying/filtering news content, we should do with news content what we've done with movies' rating labels for as long as we have - tag the content with a 'truth' label.
So Google News can develop a tagging system that labels news articles as "most likely" to "least likely" to be true, like a 1-10 rating. HuffPo can have its own truth ratings for the content they push. Breitbart or Infowars their own, etc.
I'll go for a system like this any day over Google or the SPLC or CNN or Snopes or whomever crowning themselves "truth" endorses, when in fact, they're mostly spinning the facts and telling a story from their own POV/context.
I like Google News to browse, but their forced news-on-every-android-chrome-new-tab is the reason I've uninstalled Chrome and gone to Firefox. I was surprised, Android Firefox is actually a pretty competitive browser these days!
Hooray anti-competitive cross-subsidies.
(edit: I tend to block cookies on desktop so I guess they don't have too much profile to tailor news)
While this is generally a positive step by Google it will fall short in revitalizing the news industry for a simple reason. In a world of near infinite content options, most people can no longer justify having any single news subscription.
A better solution is a fractional subscription model where subscriptions are tiered to one's reading needs. This is what my company http://CivikOwl.com is working on. Hope to make a positive contribution to this important issue facing society.
I generally agree with the model; it's a model that's been independently struck on many times now. Most directly in the hunt are Google and Flattr.
I had the same idea some time ago, but silly me, got interested in solving the technical problems of tracking visits while preserving privacy. What I should have been doing is fretting about the business side of things.
The solution I wish for is one in which the knowledge graph generating users' news feeds is opened to users. Rather than hoping that an aggregator platform will pick what they need to read, a user ought to be able to ask questions like, "Show me articles arguing _", or, "Show me articles that contradict this one," or, "Show me articles about [topic] which users have labeled clarifying (or any synonym of clarifying)."
Is there a page that actually explains what this is? The linked to page seems to be devoid of any actual content. Is Google going to be covering the crazy costs involved in sending journalists all over the world, keeping them safe, doing investigative journalism (very little of which is happening now anyway), etc. My cynicism aside, its nice to see a tech company atleast try to help find a way to fund journalism in the future.
I think my issue with this is that google has all lots of special interests. I believe a true, functional solution most likely needs to come from a new company. A company that can build its reputation on surfacing "quality" news but without any particular bias or agenda. I'm not sure how any already large corporation would ever be able to win my confidence to act in this way.
Part of this is a method to make subscribing easier. I would prefer if there were a ubiquitous and easy way to make micro-payments for news articles. I consume news from way more sources than I am willing to subscribe to.
Sigh, reading the headline, it wouldn't take a machine learning model to predict the sentiment of the responses.
HackerNews is pretty much turning into an echo chamber itself
around news. Pretty much every announcement is greeted with intense negativity, less discussion of facts, or other solutions. And I'm not just talking about tech companies, even the release of a new language, framework, or tool is often accompanied by excessive negativity.
If you don't want news to make money via ads, and you don't like systems to encourage subscriptions, and you don't like paywalls, than pretty much you need public funding of news by the state like NPR/PBS/BBC to make news a non-profit.
So I propose the following: A national 3% tax on all internet connections: mobile phone bill, cable, etc. The revenue for this to be paid to PBS/NPR/VOA/other public news orgs.
This kind of marketing content is often provided by an agency. Hosting it on google.com where users are logged in would require extremely strict security reviews.
It's the domain they use when an engineering team doesn't make the website; this was probably made by a marketing team, so it doesn't go on google.com.
anyone else notice how all of the examples they chose are distinctly NOT current events, contentious issues, or anything where there might be a serious dispute over what constitutes the basic facts of the situation?
i'm going to join other commenters here and say hard pass.
google has too much power already, and they aren't particularly responsible stewards of the public trust. and it seems like they haven't even solved any problems with their new product...
The SPLC is part of YouTube’s “Trusted Flaggers” program, yet Google News supports Farrakhan's The Final Call, even though the SPLC lists Nation of Islam as a hate group.
I won't link the rant about the Jews controlling the FBI, but check out this "news" brought to me courtesy of Google:
"Did the Honorable Elijah Muhammad know of the mathematics in the writings of the scriptures before Doctor Khalifa, and others, did? Not only did he, but he demonstrated that he was brought into the understanding of far deeper mathematical truths, which produced, correlated and interlocked all aspects of reality—including all of the problems of humanity—by Almighty God Himself. He was taught the very root of all mathematics. This root is in the brain, or mind, of the human being. God taught and brought him into the very nature of the movement of the mind of Him, Who originally conceived of all of that which we call “universe” and Who produced the human mind. Allah taught him the root of mathematics—which ultimately resides in the core of the mind of God Himself."
Slpc still thinks Pepe is a hate symbol and juggalos are gangsters. You don't have to dig down into scripture interpretation to see they have bias issues. Remove refrences to islam, jews, and religion, and focus on why the group is unreliable if you want to engage with most people.
It became a very bad source of news: all of the articles were self-reinforcing each other with very very little actual diversity of sources.