Say Anything Blog

Just to be clear, Inner City Press hasn’t disappeared from Google (it’s the #1 item if you search on those 3 words - http://www.google.com/search?source=ig&hl=en&rlz=&q=inner+city+press).  It has disappeared from Google News.  Google News is simply a focused search portal, limited to sites that Google has deemed credible (granted, the word “credible” here is defined solely by Google).

That Google removed the site from the ranks of news sources it deems credible is hardly problematic - ICP is more of a watchdog/opinion site, and not a legitimate news source.  Take a story on GE that’s front page news for them just about every day:

Inner City Press / Community on the Move and the Fair Finance Watch have become increasingly concerned with the lack of consumer protections at GE Capital, and at the lack of human rights, social and environmental standards at General Electric (GE). GE Capital is increasingly entering the field of subprime (ICP contends, predatory) lending, at higher-than-normal interest rates in ways that are far from transparent to consumers, and without sufficient consumer protection safeguards in place.

They’re entitled to their opinions about the business practices of whatever company they feel like watching, but this hardly qualifies as “news” in the strictest sense of the word.  Likewise, Google removing ICP from their sources of news (but leaving them free to turn up #1 in normal searches) hardly qualifies as censorship. 

This story has gotten blown waaaaay out of proportion, IMHO.  To give the proverbial disclaimer: Rob, I agree with you 90+% of the time, but I’d classify this one in the 10-% category.  I offer my opinion on my blog (sonofasillyperson - in Rob’s blogroll - thanks, Rob!) on various items in the news, too.  Should I demand that my site be included in Google News searches?

One problem with general Google searches is that you have to comb through a lot of garbage to get at legitimate sources.  One of the main ways to move up the rankings of a normal Google search is to have a lot of other pages link to your site (which the web-crawler bots that Google uses interpret as implying importance/relevance of the site).  So if a bunch of wing-nut-netroots types link to a site like ICP in their personal blogs, general Google searches will hype it towards the top of the returned results.  Google News is just a subset of sites that some paid Google employee/department controls, and the price of admission to the list is having to pass their version of a “sniff test”.

The real infringement on free speech would be if ICP somehow got Congress to pass a law requiring Google to include them in their defined list of “news” sites.

I might be willing to buy your line of argument, Ryan, except that Google first accepted this guys site into their Google News index but then decided to exclude him once he started writing thing that were inconvenient for them.

There’s the rub.

Also, Google’s inclusion of “news” sites such as al Manar (propagandists for terror groups such as Hamas) while sites critical of the UN get banned undermines their credibility.

When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.

-- Thomas Jefferson

Rob’s recently listened-to songs:

But they still have every right to include/exclude anyone they want from their own definition of what’s “newsworthy”, right?  And they definitely have the right to change their minds on any judgment call they made in the past.

I do agree that moves like this undermine Google’s credibility - in a big way.  Though not nearly as much as when they cave to the Communist party in China to exclude certain sites from even their organic search engine. 

But the bottom line is, Google as an incorporated entity has the same right to speech and expression as anyone else.  I’ve heard many sources (including ICP itself) claiming “censorship” - and this example isn’t even close to censorship.  And, give me a break, for ICP’s founder to say something as asinine (and grammatically inforgivable for a “journalist") as ‘If we can’t get this guy out of the U.N., let’s disappear him from the Internet,’ - that’s just dopey, since he still appeared right on top of the tradition search engine.  He overplayed his hand miserably, in my view.

As for a “free speech issue” (which is only slightly different than outright censorship, though obviously the difference is razor-thin) - well, I don’t buy that either.  If I (hypothetically, of course), started railing against SayAnythingBlog on my blogsite, and if you subsequently removed me from your blogroll, would my argument hold any water if I claimed that my right to free speech had been infringed upon?  Of course not.  That’s a ridiculous argument.  You can roll or de-roll anyone you want.  This is your site.

So why is ICP’s claim any more credible?  It’s not - it’s just that the stakes are higher because he presumably makes his living off of his site, so the loss of Google-Ad revenue is probably pretty crushing to him.  But that’s no different than the Dixie Chicks saying that they lost their right to free speech when radio stations who disagreed with their political views chose to stop airing their music (and thus stopped paying their label royalties for doing so).  Their claim held no basis in law (or even logic, for that matter), either.

I hate the UN and about 99.9% of the things they do (UNICEF being about the only exception), so I’m not ecstatic about any corporation caving to their demands.  But the bottom line is, they’ve got the right to do it, and we’ve got the right to use dogpile, lexis-nexis, or whatever other search engine we want. 

It’s just too bad those commie sympathizers have such an amazing grasp of data organization and search algorithms…

Ryan,

But they still have every right to include/exclude anyone they want from their own definition of what’s “newsworthy”, right?

You spent about five paragraphs making that point, but I never said that Google didn’t have that right.  Of course they do, they’re a private company.

What I’m saying is that it was wrong, and that their claim that the site wasn’t worthy of their news index doesn’t stand scrutiny when you consider some of the other sites they choose to include.

When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.

-- Thomas Jefferson

Rob’s recently listened-to songs:

Apparently I should have spent six…

What I’m saying is that a policy as arbitrary as a corporation’s definition of “newsworthy” is their prerogative.  And they’re also free to be as arbitrary as they wish on whether to change their minds on a site that has previously passed their arbitrary scrutiny.  We’re all free to criticize their policy, sure - and I agree with you that their decision to de-list ICP but keep the one you mentioned is bunk.  But the point I was trying laboriously (not to mention ineffectively, apparently) to make is that calling it a free speech issue or censorship is ludicrous.  And when you wrote “Beyond the free speech issues, which are important believe you me,” in the original post, I took that as you suggesting that this is a First Amendment violation, which it clearly is not.  That clause from your post is about the only thing I took umbrage with, which is the same issue I’ve had with the way this story has been covered elsewhere.  I recognize that that was secondary to your main argument in the post…

What I’m saying is that a policy as arbitrary as a corporation’s definition of “newsworthy” is their prerogative.  And they’re also free to be as arbitrary as they wish on whether to change their minds on a site that has previously passed their arbitrary scrutiny.

And I’m agreeing with you.

But the point I was trying laboriously (not to mention ineffectively, apparently) to make is that calling it a free speech issue or censorship is ludicrous.

Except that it isn’t.  I’m not saying this is a free speech issue in terms of the 1st amendment.  I’m not saying Google should be sued.  I’m saying that the company clearly is more than willing to pick and choose what kinds of speech and journalism it indexes based on its own self interest.

That, clearly, is a problem.

We’re on the same page more than you realize here.  You’re laboriously trying to make a point that I already get.

When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.

-- Thomas Jefferson

Rob’s recently listened-to songs: