A Google Vendetta Against Conservative Blogs? Not So Fast.

by John Hawkins | May 23, 2006 1:06 pm

There are a lot of conservatives blogs upset that Google appears to be “purging” conservative websites. Here’s the Newsbusters[1] coverage of the story:

“Something frighteningly ominous has been happening on the Internet lately: Google, without any prior explanation or notice, has been terminating its News relationship with conservative e-zines and web journals.

….As reported by NewsBusters, the most recent occurrence of this unexplained phenomenon was Friday, May 19, when Frank Salvato, proprietor of The New Media Journal, realized that his content that day hadn’t been disseminated at Google News as it had been on a daily basis since he reached an agreement with the search engine in September 2005.

After sending the Google Help Desk a query concerning the matter, Salvato was informed that there had been complaints of “hate speech” at his website, and as a result, The New Media Journal would no longer be part of Google News. As evidence of his offense, the Google Team supplied Salvato with links to three recent op-eds published by his contributing writers, all coincidentally about radical Islam and its relation to terrorism.

Unfortunately, this was not the first conservative e-zine to be terminated in such a fashion. On March 29, Rusty Shackleford, owner of The Jawa Report, received a similar e-mail message as Salvato informing him that: “Upon recent review, we’ve found that your site contains hate speech, and we will no longer be including it in Google News.” For those unfamiliar, The Jawa Report focuses a great deal of attention on terrorist issues and how they relate to radical Islam.

Two weeks after Jawa was cut from Google News, Jim Sesi’s MichNews.com was banished on April 12. In Sesi’s case, the three pieces provided as examples of “hate speech” were articles by conservative writer J. Grant Swank, Jr., all about – you guessed it – radical Islam and terrorism.

See a trend here?

…To be sure, there have been complaints in the past from conservative bloggers that Google seems to have dubious requirements to be a part of its News Crawl. In February 2005, Michelle Malkin wrote of the difficulties she was having becoming part of Google News. At roughly the same time, Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs also complained about not being able to curry Google’s favor.”

Let me add that Right Wing News has been turned down as a Google News source twice now. The last time, after they turned me down, I politely wrote back and asked the reason why RWN didn’t pass muster and they politely responded that they were declining to give me a reason.

Does that mean that this is some sort of vendetta against conservatives? I’m not so sure about that. To the best of my knowledge, Google doesn’t post their requirements to be included on Google News[2], but they seem to be very inconsistent.

There are a lot of big conservative and liberal blogs that don’t seem to show up — like Power Line[3], Hugh Hewitt[4], Crooks And Liars[5], & MyDD[6].

On the other hand, some of the blogs that did make the list include:

Wonkette[7], TPMCafe[8], Wizbang[9], & Q&O[10].

Why did some of those blogs make it on while the other didn’t? No idea. But, sometimes a cigar is a just a cigar and sometimes what appears to be inconsistency may just be that: inconsistency, not a deliberate effort to get rid of conservative bloggers.

Endnotes:
  1. Newsbusters: http://newsbusters.org/node/5477
  2. Google News: http://news.google.com/intl/en_us/about_google_news.html
  3. Power Line: http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&lr=&safe=off&q=power%20line&btnG=Search&sa=N&tab=wn
  4. Hugh Hewitt: http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=us&ie=UTF-8&q=hugh+hewitt&btnG=Search+News
  5. Crooks And Liars: http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=us&ie=UTF-8&q=crooks+liars&btnG=Search+News
  6. MyDD: http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=us&ie=UTF-8&q=mydd&btnG=Search+News
  7. Wonkette: http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&lr=&tab=wn&ie=UTF-8&q=wonkette&btnG=Search+News
  8. TPMCafe: http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=us&ie=UTF-8&q=TPMcafe&btnG=Search+News
  9. Wizbang: http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=us&ie=UTF-8&q=wizbang&btnG=Search+News
  10. Q&O: http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=us&ie=UTF-8&q=Questions+and+Observations&btnG=Search+News

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