Once again, another study has found that Google’s search results when it comes to news and information overwhelmingly skew away from conservative and independent media to “mainstream” sources that are far more noted for their fake news.
As Breitbart News reported earlier this week, data collected by Northwestern University found that Google search results overwhelmingly favor garbage network CNN compared to all other news networks.
Results for CNN, the study found, were followed by The New York Times and The Washington Post — the Holy Trifecta of fake news in the Trump era.
Breitbart noted further:
Of the top 20 news sources promoted by Google in its “top stories”, the top results on its News Search feature, just one was somewhat right-wing, Fox News. But Fox accounted for just three percent of the stories that appeared in “top stories,” compared to 10.9 percent for CNN, 6.5 percent for the New York Times, and 5.6 percent for the Washington Post.
But hey — there’s no bias at Google. Nothing to see here. Move along.
And yet, the Northwestern researchers found, Left-wing news orgs dominated the top 20 sources in Google news search results. They include CBS, ABC, NPR, The Huffington Post, The Guardian, BBC, The Verge, Politico, and the Los Angeles Times.
Even Al Jazeera gets a lot of love from Google.
In all, an astounding 86 percent of results in Google’s “Top Stories” feed came from the top 20 Left-wing sources. The only exception was Fox News, and that popular network only garnered about 3 percent of results in Google’s search engine.
But even mainstream sources that only lean right — including The Wall Street Journal and the New York Post — didn’t get into the top 20 at all, despite the fact that they do not have a reputation for publishing fake stories regarding Russian “collusion” and other Trump-era fantasies created by the Obama-aligned Deep State. (Related: BEHOLD, the two-tiered fact-checking system designed to deceive America.)
So many news sources, so little reference to them by Google
“To audit Top Stories, we scraped Google results for more than 200 queries related to news events in November, 2017,” lead researcher Nicholas Diakopoulos, an assistant professor at the university, wrote in explaining his methodology in a story for the Columbia Journalism Review.
“We selected the queries to test by looking at Google Trends every day and manually choosing terms related to hard news events. These included names of people in the news such as ‘colin kaepernick,’ breaking news events such as ‘earthquake,’ and issue-specific queries such as ‘tax reform’ or ‘healthcare gov,’” he continued.
“We set up our scraper to minimize the potential for result personalization (the process by which Google tailors its search results to an account or IP address based on past use), and ran each query once per minute for a full 24 hours,” he wrote.
In all, the research team collected 6,302 unique links to news stories that were displayed in Google’s Top Stories box and for each of those links, the team counted an article impression for every appearance. According to the data collected, just 20 news sources of the thousands available accounted for more than half of the article impressions seen.
Further, the top one-fifth of sources (20 percent) accounted for nearly 9-in-10 (86 percent) of impressions. And the Holy Trinity accounted for nearly one-in-four stories (23 percent).
“These statistics underscore the degree of concentration of attention to a relatively narrow slice of news sources,” the research team reported.
In other words, consumers of Google’s Top News feed are getting a very skewed, very biased, and very “narrow” version of events — in our country, of course, but also abroad.
No wonder nearly half of Americans really believe that POTUS Trump and Russia ‘colluded’ to ‘steal’ the 2016 election, despite the fact that this hoax has been revealed time and again in media other than the Holy Trinity.
Read more about the extremely biased news cartels at NewsCartels.com and Biased.news.
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