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fareesh

Okay let's give this a try

news.google.com -> Democratic debate

Websites:

BBC, Vox, Guardian, NYT, WaPo, CNN, Slate (wow), The New Yorker, USA Today

Absent:

National Review, Fox News, Wall Street Journal, reason, Forbes, RT

So basically the news algorithm considers these kinds of stories high quality:

1) Stephen Colbert plays Democrat Drinking Game (NYT)

No Greg Gutfeld sketch ?

2) Funniest one-liners at the Democratic Debate (CNN)

3) Where was Mayor Pete Buttgeig at the Debate? (NYT)

4) OPINION: Winners and Losers of the Democratic Debate (NYT)

actually has the word opinion in the title

5) Who won the Democratic Debate? Texas. (NYT)

I think there ought to be more representation from right-leaning organizations

View on HN

There should also be more representation from far-left organizations.

See this article on how Google traffic to far-left sites dramatically dropped in 2017, due to Google deciding to promote "authoritative" content ahead of "alternative viewpoints": https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/09/19/goog-s19.html

"Authoritative content" seems correlated with center-left in the US context, though the US center-left may be considered centrist or even center-right in some other countries.

Fair enough, I guess, if you also want to give more representation to far right organizations. The organizations OP mentioned are not far right. They are mainstream right. With the possible exception of RT, which I'm not actually all that familiar with.

Fox News is far right, it was founded to with the explicit purpose of putting far right view points into the main stream[0].

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2011/06/roger-a...

A) your link doesn't even mention the phrase "far right", and B) what something is today is not the same as what it was intended to be in the 70s.

You can just go to foxnews.com. It may be low-brow journalism that doesn't carry itself with the same gravity as NYT or WaPO, but none of the stuff on there seems very extreme to me. No white nationalism, for instance, which is I think is basically the right wing equivalent of the socialism (as in, actual socialism, not social democracy) and communism you see on the far left.

I think you're just pushing an agenda. Where does the blog say anything about opinion being ranked down.

In terms of what the blog actually talks about, "Democratic debate" is a terrible example. This seems to focus on boosting older articles that break the news and down rank low effort follow up stories. I don't think a consistent topic like "Democractic debate" is a good test bed.

Maybe search for a scandal?

> Where does the blog say anything about opinion being ranked down.

Every ranking boost for one result is a ranking decrease for all other results.

Most likely this is just boosting articles at the beginning of a trend curve for growth for a search. For the purpose of what's laid out here, opinion could and probably should be presented.

A great example of scandal would be the "very fine people" scandal.

A plain text reading of the transcript and a fair viewing of the press conference has the President saying that he was not talking about neo Nazis should be condemned totally, and that there were also very fine people on both sides of the statue debate.

Jake Tapper of CNN has clarified this multiple times on air.

As for agenda, I'm an Indian citizen with no business or personal interests in the USA other than following the news as a hobby and enjoying the reality TV aspect of it.

Googling it gives you essentially fake news. Try it out.

Vote the man out of office but don't destroy your society and potentially others by looking the other way and allowing a company like Google to do this.

> No Greg Gutfeld sketch ?

Who?

> I think there ought to be more representation from right-leaning organizations

For a search specifically about a left-leaning organization?

> National Review, Fox News, Wall Street Journal, reason, Forbes, RT

Two of those publications have much stricter paywalls/adwalls than any of the other publications you mentioned. One is a foreign outlet that's decidedly not known for quality international reporting. One is downright obscure compared to all the others. One is actually present in the Google News results for this topic.

> Slate (wow)

Do you have something substantive to say about Slate or its inclusion in the news results?

I feel like you aren't trying to make the fairest or strongest arguments. I'm sure you could find some more valid ways to try to make a case for google news results being politically biased.

> Who?

https://thehill.com/homenews/media/445898-fox-newss-greg-gut...

So, do you see how that article explains why a Colbert sketch is more likely to make the news than something from Gutfeld? Colbert's audience is more than twice the size of Gutfeld's, and Colbert has been in this business far longer and is better-known among people who don't regularly watch either show. Other things being equal, Colbert is simply more newsworthy. So unless Gutfeld had an especially good segment about the democratic debate, there's no reason to expect him to be included in a top news listing that only has one or two comedy/satire items.

And that's all ignoring the fact that Gutfeld's show has not yet aired an episode since the last debate, so it's quite impossible for a sketch from his show to be ranking in the news about that debate.

I wasn't making a specific argument about Gutfeld though. The broader context is that it's favoring partisan sources and messages.

That's an outcome.

By explaining why that outcome is reasonable and giving a list of valid claims to support it, it does not address the stated problem which is the fact that this search engine presents a slanted view of American politics.

Why is it ok to have this kind of search result? We all don't owe our media corporations any kind of loyalty, and we all know that they have an interest in a particular point of view.

I'd think that in this kind of situation we are all best served by knowing what the folks at CNN are saying and also what the folks at Fox are saying (not those two specifically, but as stand-ins for multiple points of view).

> I wasn't making a specific argument about Gutfeld though.

Yeah, you were. Your overall point wasn't about him specifically, but you most certainly did attempt to use him as a (completely invalid) supporting argument. You're generally doing a very bad job of supporting your position. That's understandable to an extent because showing convincing evidence of systematic bias requires gathering a non-trivial amount of data, but you could at least do us the favor of not bashing Google for suppressing stories that don't exist.

And there's still the issue that you chose a partisan search term as your example. Given that, it seems very reasonable that Google's news results would include more results from left-leaning sources, because they have more to say on that particular subject. It almost seems like you're arguing that Google News should be biased toward equal time/prominence for different factions even if that's not accurately representative of what news and commentary is out there.

I think the misunderstanding here is that we are focusing on an offhand remark made mostly in jest.

You can read as much meaning and intent into it and in that sense it would be very difficult, if not impossible, for me to do a good job to counteract the manifestation of unintended meaning or intent into what I say, so going forward I will limit any facetious remarks.

Regardless, the data here was that I typed a search query and the outcome was from sources that lean left of center. I think people are best served when there is a diversity of views since we can potentially benefit from the lived experience of everyone, all of whom have something valuable to contribute to our discourse. In a political sense voters are not served well when the news organizations that are shown to them on a search result page are either pro or anti ruling party.

In my country most television news is pro-government, with the exception of one channel. This government frequently misrepresents data and it's helpful to us as citizens when our media organizations can hold them accountable. If Google were to favor some media corporations over others, it can potentially prevent the media from doing this.

Fundamentally I think a better news product is one that provides diverse points of view to the reader to help inform them of the diverse perspectives on a particular topic. By boosting some corporations over others, in a world where bias is fairly well established, I think the product does readers a disservice.

Interesting. When I Google just the word "debate" I get an opinion piece from Fox as the second result.

These results are neither hermetic nor repeatable since the ranking will be polluted by searches and clicks coming from your browser in the past, you account on other browsers, other people using your IP, other people in your region, etc. There is no pure function mapping a search term to a result list, and the desire for such a thing is too silly to take seriously.

If most folks are getting similar rankings then the impact of the pollution is minimal though.

Are you getting different results?

For me (Firefox + noscript + ublock in private browsing mode):

- cnn

- cbsnews

- NY Times

- NPR

- AP News

- Wikipedia

All neutral sources except for the NY Times and CNN on a bad day.

Of your list there: Nation Review, Reason, and Forbes are not journalism outlets. RT doesn't have editorial independence like other state backed media. Without getting into debate, maybe Fox News should be on my page before wikipedia and a second CNN link. But I don't see a reason for those others.

FYI, you seem to be listing results from a regular Google web search, not a Google News search.

ah my bad

For what it's worth, with my account logged in to Google geolocated in India, my results are almost the same except BBC and Guardian instead of CBS and NPR. This is for Google Search, not Google News, as the other commenter pointed out.

As a comparison : https://www.thefactual.com/news/story/214519-Democratic-Deba...

Full disclosure: I am one of the techies who built it.

Comments/Feedback welcome.

The first 10 for me were:

NYT, NYT, NYT, NYT, Vox, NYT, WaPo, NPR, CBS, LA Times

They certainly seem to like New York Times

I'd probably pay for a filter that distinquished editorial from reporting.

You'd end up with an empty reading list.

No, you wouldn't. There is actual reporting that takes place in the world. Like all things, what is and isn't reported or investigated is slanted by whoever is doing the reporting. But pure editorial is a very different beast.

You're thinking of gossip.

Anyone quoting sources and showing their work (published data) is reporting.

Even if you disagree with the interpretation, conclusions. Especially if you disagree.

Sadly, I continue to be embarrassed, surprised when geeks proclaim it's all just opinion. This anti-intellectualism is how cults and hoaxes fester and grow.

It's not helping.

Is it too much to ask that the primary beneficiaries of our modern, technical, scientifically advanced society also defend the foundations of our society?

How about just part time? A few hours per week. Take a breather from the cynicism. Just pretend the world is knowable and that we can work to improve stuff. Think of it as a new hobby.

> Anyone quoting sources and showing their work (published data) is reporting. Even if you disagree with the interpretation, conclusions.

Interpretations are commentary, not reporting. Reporting is strictly facts. Even opinion pieces contain some reporting ("X did Y, and here's what you should think about it"). I don't believe it's "anti-intellectualism" to ask for more reporting and less commentary.

I think the point of the parent is that any story you read is editorialized to some degree, even if all it's doing is listing facts.

Every time you read a report on a topic, mountains of facts are omitted for the sake of disseminating the points the authors and editors thought you should know to build your opinion. It is thus vital that you trust their judgment to do so in a way that's beneficial to you.

Knowing things is just really hard and we tend to fool ourselves into believing we know more than we do and that we can know more than is reasonable (yours truly included).

I empathically agree with your paras #2 and #3.

"any story you read is editorialized to some degree"

The opinion is the value add.

I used to read The Economist, because they challenged my views. I read Tyler Cowen today because I disagree with him and because he argues his case.

The rut we find popular discourse in today is caused by two things. The New Deal consensus we once had has not been replaced with a new consensus. The reluctance to distinguish between blather and discourse (debate).

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