I don't believe it to be orthogonal. There is a deeper philosophical question that has barely been touched on what search engines should return in response to user queries, which also applies to surfacing news. In the past with Alta Vista, word matches were the heuristic and it was extremely obvious as to how to measure the quality of the result. Now you've got very abstract heuristics, such as intent of the user, trustworthiness of the source, whether the source is healthy and good for society, the correctness or honesty of the content, how much revenue will be made with particular set of results, etc. and the public is being left out of the discussion as to which heuristics are important to apply.
