From my just-moments-ago entry at Google News Suggestions:
It's very clear from the number of times that this specific issue has come up, and from the completely worthless "self-help" tips that are too arcane, and too ineffective, that Google News simply does not have the integrity to allow individual users to make personal preferences about which so-called news sites are displayed at news.google.com
Many, many people have expressed the opinion that FOX News and the Wall Street Journal are nothing more than propaganda arms of the Republican party and Rupert Murdoch's News Corp.
Individual people do have the right to hold this opinion.
Individual people should have the opportunity to act upon their opinions, and eliminate any "news" feeds from FOX News and its affiliates, and the Wall Street Journal, if they so choose.
Since Google is entirely unresponsive to the requests of so many people, I for one will take the only action that one person can:
I've closed the browser tab that used to point to news.google.com for good, I'm gone, and I won't be back.
See ya...
I used to have news.google.com open 24/7/365 in a browser tab, just to provide an aggregate news feed of world goings-on, but in the last year it's become very apparent (IMO) that either:
- FOX news and the WSJ have figured out how to game Google's news ranking system, or
- Google news is entirely on auto-pilot and no one at Google really knows or cares what goes up there, or
- some combination of 1) and 2), above
This is really unfortunate (again, IMO) because I really liked Google's minimalist interface and lack of advertising.
But...
I used to actually keep track and either FOX News and/or the WSJ used to consistently account for a disproportionate percentage of the stories displayed.
Here's just one example, chosen at random:
FOXNews 7
Wall Street Journal 9
(NewsCorp subtotal: 16)
Washington Post 10
New York Times 9
ABC News 6
NBC News 5
Associated Press (the AP is a Google client) 20
Now, in-and-of itself this might not seem to be too bad, but this specific example is really on the low end, and of those "articles" display, there was an almost-breathtaking bias in both the topic and the wording.
And the placement of FOX News and/or the WSJ was always strangely prominent, being either at the top of a category, and very frequently both would be in the "Top Stories" block at the same time, albeit with different content.
That's fine, I suppose, for people who want to seek out that sort of crap, but in an ostensibly-neutral news aggregator like news.google.com I think it's unacceptable.
Beyond that, if you browse the Google News Suggestions or the Google News Help pages, two things are really clear:
- Google itself has nothing to offer in terms of any response, and
- the self-help "tips" that still exist are either wildly intricate (editing the Windows registry? I mean, come on..) or are in fact completely ineffectual, as was the work-around in the Comment I posted today under the Mid-day Open thread.
So, what to do? What to do?
Since the only power one person has is the power to act as one person, I've closed my news.google.com tab for good, period.
Maybe sometime I'll hear that Google has finally relented and let people customize the news feed they get from news.google.com, but speaking for myself I'm not going to hold my breath.
- bp