Google bias!

On Monday, it was Facebook bias. Today, it's bias by another Internet giant: Google.

I keep an eye out for news items that would be of interest to this blog. And I use Google News to assist me with this daunting task. This is my job, you know.

And it's not just a job. It's an adventure!

I've heard stories before of Google not accepting left-leaning blogs as news sources - supposedly because they're opinion sites, not straight-ahead news.

Fair enough - just as long as the same rules apply to explicitly right-wing sites.

Which of course they don't - as I've discovered lately.

One of the items I received from Google's news feature today wasn't from CBS, NBC, ABC, or even Fox News. It wasn't from the Washington Post or the New York Times. It wasn't from the Ashland Independent or the Henderson Gleaner.

It was from the misnamed National Right to Work Foundation, a right-wing organization that supports laws to force union workers to subsidize nonunion employees.

The work-for-less cult is considered a news site now?

Its website is full of nothing but right-wing editorials - not real news stories.

If you think that's bad, you should see its YouTube videos. Others have pointed out before that some of these videos use bad actors to portray blue-collar workers. So the videos are phony and dishonest - like most of the rest of the corporate-backed work-for-less cult.

Via Google's news function, I've also been getting opinion-filled articles from the far-right Mackinac Center for Public Policy - whose hostility to worker rights is about on par with the aforementioned National Right to Work Foundation.

Carrying one explicitly right-wing source (but none from the left) is an accidental oversight. Carrying 2 or more is a deliberate pattern.

I don't remember ever receiving through Google News an article from an explicitly pro-labor website.

What's this about Google News not carrying left-wing blogs while it carries right-wing anti-worker sites? Who at Google is making these decisions?