Study Confirms Google's Rigged Algorithms Overwhelmingly Favor CNN, NYT and WashPo

Chris Menahan
InformationLiberation
May. 13, 2019

The top three propagators of the Trump-Russia collusion hoax -- CNN, the New York Times and the Washington Post -- get the top search results on Google for the vast majority of news-related searches, a new study from the Columbia Journalism Review has found.

The false Russian collusion narrative was undoubtedly the biggest fake news story of the last three years. As Axios reported in March 2019, 533,074 web articles were published about Russia and Trump/Mueller since just May 2017.

Naturally, Google's engineers chose the three biggest propagators of said fake news to be the top recipients of all news-related traffic under their new "walled-garden" algorithms (which restrict all news search results to a small cadre of establishment news outlets manually chosen and approved by Google).

From the Columbia Journalism Review, "Audit suggests Google favors a small number of major outlets":
[T]he Computational Journalism Lab at Northwestern, including Daniel Trielli and I, undertook an audit study of the "Top Stories" box on Google search. Top Stories often shows up in the prime real-estate at the top of search results, presenting a carousel of news articles relevant to the query.

To audit Top Stories, we scraped Google results for more than 200 queries related to news events in November, 2017. 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." 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.

In total, we collected 6,302 unique links to news articles shown in the Top Stories box. For each of those links we count an article impression each time one of those links appears.

The data shows that just 20 news sources account for more than half of article impressions. The top 20 percent of sources (136 of 678) accounted for 86 percent of article impressions. And the top three accounted for 23 percent: CNN, The New York Times, and The Washington Post. These statistics underscore the degree of concentration of attention to a relatively narrow slice of news sources.

Of course, the concentration of sources also varies depending on the query. On average there were 19 sources per query, but 30 percent of queries had 10 or fewer sources. And sometimes, even if there were more sources, most of the impressions could go to just a handful. For instance, the query "rex tillerson" had 38 sources, but just two of those sources--the Times and CNN--were responsible for 75 percent of the article impressions.

[...] Our data shows that 62.4 percent of article impressions were from sources rated by that research as left-leaning, whereas 11.3 percent were from sources rated as right-leaning. 26.3 percent of impressions were from news sources that didn't have ratings. But even if that last set of unknown impressions happened to be right-leaning, the trend would still be clear: A higher proportion of left-leaning sources appear in Top Stories. (Again, this means news sources shared on Facebook more often by people with a left-leaning political affiliation.)
Google bans many of the biggest right-leaning major news sites from their "Google News" search results entirely, so this is not surprising.

The controlled media's propaganda needs to be shoved down our throats to keep us all in line.


All the "conspiracy theorists" who questioned the controlled media's fake news that "Iraq has WMDs" and said "Russian collusion" was a hoax from day one need to be silenced in preparation for the next neocon war based on fake news and lies (perhaps this time in Iran or Venezuela).

All one has to do is search anything news-related on Google or YouTube to see their search results are blatantly rigged.

Here's an example I showed last year (it's only gotten worse since):



Liberal journalists these days can directly whine to Google about search results they don't like and Google will swiftly change them to suit the leftist narratives they want to advance.



Despite blatantly rigging their search results, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said during sworn testimony before congress that he leads the company "without political bias" and "to do otherwise would go against our core principles and our business interests."



"It's not possible for individual employees to manipulate our search results," Pichai claimed while under oath. "We don't manually intervene on any particular search. Providing users with access to high-quality information is sacrosanct."

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