Balancing Act: How News Portals Serve Up Political Stories

Balancing Act: How News Portals Serve Up Political Stories

Google News uses computer algorithms to identify top stories while Yahoo 
News favors old-fashioned human editors. But do Google's automated 
search results display a conservative bias?
J.D. Lasica
Posted: 2004-09-23
http://www.ojr.org/ojr/technology/1095977436.php

In newspaper newsrooms, editors often go to great lengths to achieve a 
semblance of balance in coverage of the two major candidates for 
president. Some count the story inches devoted to both men. Others make 
sure that photo size and placement don't favor one over the other. 
Journalistic fairness demands equal treatment.

But what are the rules for online search engines, where millions of 
users are turning for their daily news fix? Does evenhanded coverage 
apply in the bottomless news hole of cyberspace? Does having an 
editorial team or an automated program get you a better sweep of 
important news about the political candidates?

These are tricky questions. To their credit, Google News and Yahoo News 
agreed to pull back the curtain and explain how they acquire and display 
political news.

Google News: Unintentionally skewing to the right?

Launched three years ago, Google News now attracts about 6 million users 
a month, double the audience of a year ago. In August it drew 5.8 
million visitors, making it the 14th most popular site on the Web for 
current events and global news, according to Nielsen//NetRatings.

Google News scours not the entire Web but 7,000 information sources 
(4,500 of them English-speaking) and then groups and prioritizes the 
news into clusters of articles. An internal "sourcing team" decides 
which information providers to comb, but for competitive reasons Google 
would not disclose which sources it uses.

Google News' most astonishing accomplishment is that it's produced 
entirely by computer algorithms. The company seems to delight in the 
fact that it relies on engineers and product managers but no editors, 
much less reporters, for its news section. (Of course, like fellow 
aggregator Yahoo News, it relies on other news publications' editors and 
writers.)

The automated system is far from perfect, as legions of bloggers and 
journalists have observed when Google News places the wrong photo next 
to an accompanying story, or when it misses major breaking news, such as 
the space shuttle Columbia disaster, which received no mention for more 
than an hour.

Despite those predictable flaws, it's been puzzling to read Google News' 
takes on John Kerry and George W. Bush over the past month. On Aug. 24, 
for example, users who clicked on the "John Kerry" link under Google 
News' In the News heading were treated on the first page of 100 search 
results to these headlines, among others:

    * Useless-Knowledge.com: John Kerry Said "Bring It On", Now Whines 
To Bush To Stop The Ads
    * Enter Stage Right: The imploding John Kerry
    * BushCountry: Americans May Be Stupid, But Not THAT Stupid
    * Intellectual Conservative: Why James Rassmann Is Honestly Mistaken 
About John Kerry Saving His Life
    * RushLimbaugh.com: Who's the Cowboy Now?
    * Frontpagemag.com: John Kerry's Puzzling Silver Star Citations
    * Useless-Knowledge.com: John Kerry's Resume (Part V) At Worst, 
Treasonous Behavior
    * Michnews.com: Swift Boat Veterans for Truth Expose John Kerry's Lies
    * WorldNetDaily: Krazy John Kerry
    * MensNewsDaily.com: John Kerry is Definitely "Unfit for Command"
    * Michnews.com: I'm John Kerry And I Approve This Flip-Flop
    * Useless-Knowledge.com: John Kerry Just Can't Stand The Heat

In addition to mainstream news outlets from both sides of the political 
fence (say, NPR and The Washington Post on the left and The Washington 
Times and New York Post on the right), there were 34 anti-Kerry screeds 
from the second-tier websites. There was only one pro-Kerry item, from 
CommonDreams.org.

Far from an isolated example, the pattern has repeated itself throughout 
the past month. Small conservative Web sites such as Useless-Knowledge, 
Men's News Daily, Michnews and ChronWatch turn up in disproportionate 
numbers when clicking on news about John Kerry. Useless-Knowledge, for 
instance, made up 12 of the first 100 results for John Kerry on Friday, 
and 11 of the first 100 results Saturday.

By contrast, a search on George Bush or George W. Bush typically results 
in a fairly neutral, evenly balanced set of results from both sides of 
the political spectrum, with many of the same small conservative sites 
showing up to sing the president's praises.

What's going on? Have Google's search results been hijacked by Fox News?

Krishna Bharat, chief scientist for Google News, said he was puzzled by 
reports that the service has been skewing politically in one direction.

"Google News is a bit like a conversation that we're hosting," he said 
by phone from India. "We're inviting thousands of news sources to take 
part, even those who are very small. The two big things we're seeking 
are inclusion -- we want everyone at the table -- and diversity of 
opinions in the press."

Bharat said Google News uses a mix of techniques to ensure that users 
are presented a diverse range of perspectives. The ranking and 
prominence of stories are based on several factors: How many 
publications are writing about a topic; how recent the articles are; the 
size of the story, with substantive pieces ranking higher than short 
items; and the frequency of the search term within the article. The 
computer algorithms, he said, "are trying to understand how hot and how 
big the story is."

Every 15 minutes a new edition of Google News is generated and the 
ranking changes. The formula rearranges the headline blurbs in each 
story cluster based on the freshness of each article and the importance 
of the source. "The algorithms do not understand which sources are 
right-leaning or left-leaning," Bharat said. "They're apolitical, which 
is good."

Google News does not use the same formula as Google's general search 
engine, which ranks results based on how many people are linking to a 
site or article. (While "John Kerry" results in 100,000 results on 
Google News, the same term draws 4.3 million results on Google.) Special 
interest groups use a linking technique known as "Google bombing" to 
skew Google's general search engine results to their liking. For 
example, the first result for a search on "Dan Rather" is not the CBS 
News site but RatherBiased.com. Bharat points out, however, that link 
popularity plays no result in Google News' rankings.

"Our mission is to be all-inclusive," Bharat said. "We want breadth and 
variety. I would like Republicans and Democrats alike to read pro-Kerry 
and anti-Kerry articles, but it's not our job to change the natural 
range of opinions that you see in the press. We're showing you the world 
the way it is."

But are they? Why does clicking on a "John Kerry" link in Google News 
turn up so many second-tier conservative sites but so few liberal sites?

Bharat said it might be an aberration, and that more people might type 
in "Kerry," which gives you a more balanced set of results, drawing more 
articles from major media organizations. But that ignores the fact that 
Google News itself uses "John Kerry" as the preferred search term when 
it highlights news about the candidate in its In the News section.

Gaming the system -- or site optimization?

Ethan Zuckerman has a theory about what's happening. He observed the 
same phenomenon. A search for "Kerry" on Google News turns up mostly 
mainstream media sources, while a search for "John-Kerry" -- the search 
conducted when you follow the In the News link -- turns up a great deal 
more opinionated pieces culled from second-tier and fringe sites.

"I think what you're seeing is an odd little linguistic artifact," said 
Zuckerman, former vice president of Tripod.com and now a fellow at 
Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society who studies search 
engines. The chief culprit, he theorized, is that mainstream news 
publications refer to the senator on second reference as Kerry, while 
alternative news sites often use the phrase "John Kerry" multiple times, 
for effect or derision. To Google News' eye, that's a more exact search 
result.

A second possible factor, Zuckerman said, is that small, alternative 
news sites have no hesitancy about using "John Kerry" in a headline, 
while most mainstream news sites eschew first names in headlines. The 
inadvertent result is that the smaller sites score better results with 
the search engines.

"You have to wonder why some of these wacky sites make the cut," he 
added. With an occasional exception, Weblogs are generally not found 
among the Google News results, so Zuckerman had some advice for aspiring 
political publishers who want to game the search engines: Don't blog -- 
start an alternative news network. Use terms like George Bush and John 
Kerry frequently, rather than their last names alone, in both your text 
and headlines. Publish new works frequently.

What Zuckerman calls gaming the system, others call optimizing your site.

Thomas Krafft, a Web site developer, said he began working with the 
conservative news site ChronWatch nearly three years ago when it was 
averaging 100 visits a day. "I completely rebuilt the site to better 
organize, categorize and display the content, to ease the process of 
adding articles to the site, and to especially be more search-engine 
friendly," he said by e-mail.

"Today, ChronWatch averages nearly 10,000 visits per day and is 
regularly placed near the top of the Google News service," Kraft said. 
"And it looks like we're on track to see the same results and popularity 
for the site through MSN's new search service as well." Krafft said he 
also advises his clients to use keywords and phrases that match users' 
precise searches and to write in informal, accessible language.

ChronWatch editor Jim Sparkman said the site attracts volunteer 
contributors who believe passionately in their cause. "There are many, 
many sites like ours on the Internet, and many, many e-mail exchange 
groups, that are forming a new communication method that is beginning to 
rival the big media in influence," he said.

Yahoo takes a people-powered approach

Yahoo News, launched in August 1995, has been in a tug-of-war with 
CNN.com all year over the No. 1 online news ranking. In August, Yahoo 
News attracted 22 million unique visitors to CNN's 22.9 million, 
according to Nielsen//NetRatings. In July, and during the Democratic and 
Republican conventions, Yahoo News topped CNN.com.

Jeff Birkeland, product manager for news, said Yahoo is out "to create 
the broadest, deepest, most comprehensive and useful news experience 
from start to finish."

Toward that end, Yahoo News hosts breaking news, features and analysis 
from more than 100 news partners, mostly major news organizations. A 
small editorial staff programs the Yahoo News front page as well as 
plucking out hidden gems that appear on other sites. Special sections 
like Election 2004 include breaking news from partner news sources, 
pointers to political blogs and the candidates' sites, and in-depth 
analysis and commentary. Readers who want to go deeper can plumb Yahoo's 
news search, which indexes more than 8,000 sources.

Users looking for the latest news about John Kerry will get about 2,700 
results from Yahoo's news partners. A wider search of all Yahoo's news 
sources will turn up about 66,000 results from across the Web, including 
small online newspapers and foreign publications but none of the small, 
politically active independent news sites often featured on Google News. 
In addition, a search on Yahoo's standard search engine turns up more 
than 7 million references to John Kerry on the open Web.

Like Google News, Yahoo won't disclose how a term like John Kerry or 
George Bush makes it to the front page of its search results, but 
Birkeland said the factors include the source, the freshness of the 
story, and a method of determining relevance.

Yahoo achieves balance in political coverage by using a wide variety of 
news partners and an editorial staff that pulls together "a very wide 
cut at what the news is on a given day," Birkeland said.

"We use actual humans," he added. "News is far too human of an endeavor 
to rely 100 percent on automation."

Birkeland pointed to several advantages that an editorial staff has over 
Google News' algorithm approach.

First, he said, "we'll always have breaking news faster. It's very 
difficult to be timely on breaking news if your news service is relying 
on an algorithm that works off news being published elsewhere first." 
Yahoo News' partnerships with major news organizations allow it to 
publish news about major events within seconds or minutes of a story 
being filed. By contrast, a search engine that depends strictly on 
trolling the Web might publish news that's 20 minutes old on a news 
site, but the story could be two days old.

Second, Birkeland pointed to "accuracy and trust issues." "We're working 
with news partners who are in the accuracy business," he said. "We don't 
have the kinds of situations where the reader scratches his head 
wondering why a story from a questionable source winds up at the top of 
the main news page. It's extremely important to have editorial oversight 
rather than rely on an algorithm's questionable judgment."

Third, an editorial staff allows Yahoo News to better sort the news into 
opinion and analysis sections in addition to straight news.

A final advantage is that readers get a more comprehensive, friendlier 
user experience when they're reading the news on a single site such as 
Yahoo News as opposed to hopping from site to site, Birkeland said. By 
hosting the material, Yahoo can display additional material and tools, 
such as related stories, video and photos, message boards, and the 
ability to rate the story or e-mail it to a friend.

Is the rise of the machines at Google News a threat to the carbon-based 
life forms at Yahoo News? "I'm not that concerned, frankly," Birkeland 
said. "It would be extremely challenging to write a program that catches 
up to what we're able to do on a daily basis."
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