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 Recent commentary from National Journal: Social Studies: America's Secret Weapon in the War on Terror: Americans (November 26, 2002) Quietly, the public is mobilizing—not in the militarized fashion of WWII but in the networked manner of WWW. By Jonathan Rauch. Legal Affairs: Spying By the Government Can Save Your Life (November 26, 2002) The complexity of issues involving FISA has enabled critics to cry wolf in a most misleading fashion. By Stuart Taylor Jr. Political Pulse: What Would Defeating Saddam Trigger? (November 26, 2002) In the years since the Gulf War, anti-Americanism has grown along with U.S. influence in the Middle East. By William Schneider. Media: Bias, Anyone? (November 19, 2002) Surprising, perhaps, but blatant liberal bias in the media's election post-mortems has been hard to find. By William Powers. Legal Affairs: Bush and the Supreme Court: Place Your Bets (November 19, 2002) With Republicans about to control the Senate, the conditions are ripe for Rehnquist to step down. By Stuart Taylor Jr. Political Pulse: A Popularity Contest (November 19, 2002) In Georgia and other key states, whites turned out in unexpectedly high numbers to support Bush. By William Schneider. By William Schneider. Wealth of Nations: What If This Is As Good As It Gets for Bush? (November 19, 2002) An extended period of slow growth is setting in, and President Bush needs to address it. By Clive Crook. More from National Journal. |
Media 
The Play's Not the ThingGoogle's News Machine: What happens when you take humans out of the story-selection process? by William Powers ..... One night this week, just before 10 p.m., seven news stories were prominently featured on the home page of Google News, a Web media outlet that's been getting a lot of attention for the way it sifts and organizes journalism from thousands of different sources. Top billing went to a New York Times story headlined, "Labor Party in Israel Names Former General Its Leader." Just below was a Reuters story with the boldly uncompelling headline, "History of Allied 'No-Fly' Zones Over Iraq." To the right of these stories, also at the top of the page but in a smaller font, were five other headlines that had made their way to the apex of the entire news universe at that moment, as defined by Google: "Stocks Fall on Disappointing Sales, Outlook for Home Depot" (Minneapolis Star-Tribune) "Astronomers Find First Double Black Hole" (Minneapolis Star-Tribune) "Test Nightmare for England as Flintoff and Giles Drop Out" (Independent) "James Coburn, 74, Flinty Film Villain" (International Herald Tribune) "Report Finds Some Dialysis Centers Dangerous to Your Health" (CNN) The mind swarmed with questions. If you hadn't tuned in to any other news outlet earlier in the day, for instance, you might wonder what exactly had happened to James Coburn that he should find himself once again in the global spotlight—a flinty Harry Potter cameo, perhaps? I had completely missed the rise of Minneapolis as the new hub for news about Wall Street and the cosmos. As for England's nightmarish test, I figured it must have been in a really hard subject like calculus, and Flintoff and Giles, whoever they are, dropped out because they just knew they would flunk. But the oddest thing about this odd melange was that, while it was very fresh—"Auto-generated 8 minutes ago," the page declared—it did not include any of the three stories that were playing large in the broader world of news at that precise moment. Just a few hours before, the U.S. Senate had approved the homeland security bill, news that was headlining the Web sites of both The New York Times and The Washington Post. Earlier, the tanker Prestige had split in two and sunk off northern Spain, setting off environmental panic. I'd been watching a Washington chat show on MSNBC when a grim Pat Buchanan broke away to announce, "It's a horror show on the beaches of Portugal and Spain." And Michael Jackson had been caught on video dangling his infant child, Prince Michael II, from a fifth-floor hotel balcony in Berlin. The clip was showing over and over on cable news, and an unsettling still version was playing on The Drudge Report with the headline, "MAD BAD DAD." In fact, these three stories were all further down the Google page, as I discovered upon scrolling. Google News constantly updates its offerings, and when I returned an hour later, both Jackson and homeland security had been promoted to "Top Stories." What's intriguing about all of this—and the reason media folk are watching it somewhat nervously-is that Google gathers and presents the news automatically, without any input from people, not even journalist people. As the site itself explains, the headlines "are selected entirely by computer algorithms, based on how and where the stories appear elsewhere on the Web." The idea is that if you take humans out of the selection process, you get a clean read on the news, uncorrupted by bias: "While the sources of the news vary in perspective and editorial approach, their selection for inclusion is done without regard to political viewpoint or ideology. While this may lead to some occasionally unusual and contradictory groupings, it is exactly this variety that makes Google News a valuable source of information." As that menu of top stories shows, this system has its eccentricities. For example, Google has a somewhat bizarre fixation on the sport of cricket-bizarre for an American, anyway—which is what that English "test" story was actually about. But then, the best news sources have always felt like a rich, somewhat mysterious pageant. And in many ways, this is an exciting experiment. Lately I've been visiting Google News several times every day, to see how the media world looks through the emotionless eyes of an algorithm. Though it lacks ideological passion, Google is judgmental, too. It does rank stories, after all, not by thinking but by adding up numbers. Indeed, it's strange to see this designedly unmediated outlet holding onto this one kind of mediation, even if it's mediation of a mechanical sort. For my money, the real revolution in news presentation is happening at those Web sites that take other outlets' stories and present them with a minimum of visual or verbal ranking, in a rolling list that suggests this is more or less the order in which they came over the transom. Media people are entranced by a site called Romenesko's Media News, which does precisely this. Of course, that's just an illusion, too. There are human beings behind Romenesko and Drudge and all the other outlets of this kind that have taken off in recent years. Those sites have acquired their obsessive followings largely because there are real people, individuals of particular tastes and sensibilities, choosing and deciding how to play the stories. Without their respective eyes for news and senses of humor—two different flavors of droll—Romenesko and Drudge would be Google-esque machines: objective, but not very good company.
What do you think? Discuss this article in the Politics & Society conference of Post & Riposte. More from National Journal. More on politics and society in Atlantic Unbound and The Atlantic Monthly. William Powers is media columnist for National Journal. He recently spent three months in Japan as a Japan Society Fellow, studying the role of reading in Japanese life. This column appears every week in National Journal, a weekly magazine covering politics and government published in Washington, D.C. For information on National Journal Group publications, see NationalJournal.com. Copyright © 2002 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved. |
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