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Headline Roundup May 12th, 2019

Google's "Top Stories" Section Heavily Biased- New Study Shows

Summary from the AllSides News Team

Google News disproportionately displays left leaning sources on their top stories section, according to a recent study. CNN, the New York Times, and the Washington Post round out the top three most featured outlets, accumulating 23% of the total impressions that Google News gets. Of the top twenty outlets, Fox News was the only right leaning source, counting for 3% of total impressions. These results are consistent with an independent AllSides' analysis of Google News Bias.

Featured Coverage of this Story

Audit suggests Google favors a small number of major outlets
Audit suggests Google favors a small number of major outlets

Columbia Journalism Review

News

IN THE LAST WEEK OF APRIL, nearly 23 percent of all traffic to news sites tracked by web analytics firm Parse.ly came from search engines. Google alone accounts for nearly half of external referral traffic—traffic, that is, that comes from platforms, apps, and other outside sources— to news sites. Together with the fact that Facebook referral traffic is on the wane, this means that Google’s search algorithm is now perhaps the most powerful mediator of online attention to news.

But for all the influence Google has in directing attention, we...

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Google's left-leaning media bias revealed: Academic study exposes how search engine massively over-promotes results from liberal news websites over right
 Google's left-leaning media bias revealed: Academic study exposes how search engine massively over-promotes results from liberal news websites over right

Daily Mail

News

Google's bias towards left-wing media outlets has been laid bare by an algorithm which detected that it favors sites including CNN and The New York Times over others.

According to data compiled by researchers from Northwestern University, the search engine promoted those sites over others repeatedly in November 2017.

Of the 6,302 articles that appeared in Google's 'top stories' page that month after a term was searched, more than 10 percent were by CNN.

The New York Times was the second most favored and accounted for 6.5 percent of articles....

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Handful of 'left leaning sources' dominate Google's 'Top Stories,' study finds
Handful of 'left leaning sources' dominate Google's 'Top Stories,' study finds

Washington Times

News

A new study from the Computational Journalism Lab at Northwestern found that many of Google’s top hits for news searches came from just a handful of sources.

Researches Daniel Trielli and Nicholas Diakopoulos conducted their study by looking at the results of over 200 news related questions every day in November 2017. They found 6,303 individual links to articles in the Top Stories Box, and counted an “article article impression each time one of those links appears.”

Their data showed that 86% of Google’s Top Stories came from only 20...

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