The persistent and sometimes annoying question of bias in Google News has been met head-on by Eric Ulken, a graduate student at the Annenberg School of Communication who wrote his Masters thesis on the subject. Devising a study whereby articles were scraped from both Google News and Yahoo! News during the 2004 pre-election period, then analyzed sentence-by-sentence for their political slant, Ulken concluded that both news services are unbiased—if the "nontraditional sources" (like blogs) are removed from Google News. Google apparently includes more of these nontraditional sources than Yahoo! does, and they skew Google's bias in both directions. Remove those sources, and Google settles down into a tighter zone of neutrality that is virtually identical to Yahoo!'s. (via TechDirt.)
1. Hope this doesn't lead some to conclude that Google should eliminate blogs to further reduce bias!
Frankly, what I would be concerned about if I was Yahoo is that my content has a bias toward the center and doesn't allow for very divergent-from-the-norm views.
This is all really quite silly... bias exists EVERYWHERE. When will the so-called press watchmen who preach a lack of bias come to realize this?
Posted at 4:42AM on Dec 19th 2005 by Jamie