Google Clearly Promoting Barack Obama

With all the fervor over media bias, many of us have already turned to The Internet as an alternative source of information. Unfortunately, this same bias which has newspapers and network TV  devouring it’s own credibility from the inside out, has leaked onto The Internet.

The New Media Monster

Google News Sources

While I realize the top news stories on Google are dynamically fed and change every few minutes, the vast majority of 1024 x 768 prime real estate is occupied by headlines from the much beleaguered New York Times, The Washington Post, The Huffington Post, CNN, and The BBC. There are many other sources cited such as Fox News, The Christian Science Monitor, The AP, and Reuters but the sources in the first group come up more often on my homepage. How is this bias? Let’s find out.

The New York Times and The Washington Post both openly support the candidacy of Barack Obama for President. In addition to making a public endorsement, both publications use the age old trick of running “hard news” with a left hand curve while presenting the conservative point of view in the editorial and op ed sections. This is their version of “fair and balanced”.

The Huffington Post… A liberal left smear site… So much anger it’s hard to believe anyone could quote them as a credible news source.

CNN – Many documented allegations of liberal bias and unfair practices. Same for The BBC. Even though I didn’t include The AP in this group, if you go to their website at the time of this post, there is a scrolling marquee of images depicting top stories. Notice the image of Vice Presidental candidate Sarah Palin appears right next to the image of Syrian villagers with coffins, supposedly containing the bodies of “martyrs” killed in a US attack earlier in the week. Not only are the images conveniently placed, but Sarah Palin appears to be blowing them a kiss.

Fair and Balanced?

In addition to the preponderance of liberal left leaning news sources taking up the front page, I took a close look at headlines from Fox News and The Christian Science Monitor. I picked those two because the mere mention of either name sends liberals screaming into the night crying fascism and bigotry. The headline for Fox News? Thousands Still Without Power in Upstate New York After Snow Storm How about The Christian Science Monitor? Obama rips Sarah Palin in new campaign ad

So the story Google runs from Fox is about a power outage (aka, who gives a crap…) and while The Christian Science Monitor decries the Obama ad in the article following the headline, you wouldn’t know that unless you read the whole thing. TCM would have done better to run the headline: Questionable Obama Ad Rips Governor Palin. Same story, but quite a different sounding headline. Of course if they ran that headline, you probably wouldn’t see it on Google.

Before you call me crazy, take a look at the Google ad(s) to the right. Who’s name or image do you see? Again, this is constantly changing, dynamically loaded content but 98% of the time, B.O.’s over there…

The following article is a re-post from OregonLive.com

Days of rage: There’s something happening here

by David Reinhard, The Oregonian

Saturday October 25, 2008, 11:00 AM

There’s battle lines being drawn
Nobody’s right if everybody’s wrong
– Buffalo Springfield

What is happening to us? What explains the boorishness, hate and even violence that increasingly mark our politics?

No, this isn’t another prissy commentary on “negative” ads — another high-sounding homily on how we ought to focus on “the issues,” by which the writer means “the issues that I think voters should focus on.” Nor is this a screed against demonstrations, however boisterous, or some young fools’ lawn-sign stealing. There’s no interest here in trampling on free-speech rights or spitting into the wind of what must be a rite of passage.

Comedian Jon Stewart

What troubles me — what should trouble us all — is the outbreak of largely liberal intolerance we’ve seen over the last few elections, and especially this one.

Something’s happening here, and it’s getting scary.

We’ve had two 23-year-old males here tossing Molotov cocktails to burn down Gene Scrutton’s John McCain sign in the Sellwood neighborhood.

In Minnesota, graffiti messages (“u r a criminal resign or else”) were spray-painted on the garage of U.S. Sen. Norm Coleman’s St. Paul home.

A 23-year-old Michigan man, a Democrat, has admitted to plotting to detonate a homemade bomb in the tunnels near the Republican convention.

In the Washington, D.C., suburbs, a motel with a McCain sign on its lawn received threatening calls and a McCain-signed pumpkin patch was vandalized.

In central Florida, the Republican headquarters manager told police he believed that his home with two McCain signs was shot up because of his support for McCain.

It doesn’t involve physical violence, threatened or real, but “The Daily Show” host Jon Stewart’s “[expletive] you” to Sarah Palin in a recent comedy (?) act suggests how far we’ve gone in the age of the unhinged.

Yes, I know this stuff runs both ways. Here in Oregon, we had the hanging of an Obama cut-out at Newberg’s George Fox University. The Washington Post reports that Obama signs in Alexandria, Va., were painted with racist epithets. We learned Friday that a McCain campaign worker’s claim that she was beaten up and had the letter “B” cut into her face because her car had a McCain sticker was a hoax. Such deranged doings are just as appalling when it comes from the right, though my sense is that this hate-filled intolerance more often comes out of left field.

I also know we’re a big country, and a few goof-balls do not a national trend make. But I don’t think I’m committing sociology based on a few incidents. We’re talking about more than a few beer-addled goofballs here.

A young friend of mine was working for the Bush campaign in 2004. One weekend he left his car outside a friend’s Eugene house for safekeeping while he was out of town. Upon returning, he noticed the “W” sticker had been removed from his car. Hey, buddy, you were supposed to take care of my car, he said to his friend. Oh, yeah, his friend said, my father did that when he was here this weekend. He couldn’t stand a student having a Bush sticker on his car.

Now, mind you, this wasn’t a practical joke. The father was dead serious, and he wasn’t some ne’er-do-well with a six-pack of beer aboard. He was an immaculately credentialed Portland professional who also headed a major community organization.

I love politics and public policy, but the ugliness, the anger, the coarseness and even the threats of violence I’ve experienced as a conservative opinion-writer in achingly “tolerant” Portland have contributed to my decision to leave the business after this election. My heart was starting to harden — do we conservatives not have hearts, do we not bleed? — and I didn’t want that to happen.

I joked at first about some of it. When a reader sent me my column covered with dried feces, I looked on the bright side. He could have said he wouldn’t …. on my column. I took comfort in the fact law officers visited the Iraq War foe (a peace advocate!) and the liberal critic (a Portland public school teacher!) who threatened my family. But the constant expletive-laced rants, the nifty Nazi-Hitler-German references, the holier-than-thou hate for any opposing view from the half-informed — well, it’s not what our public discourse should be about. It wasn’t in a better age. If I sometimes responded in kind (and I did), forgive me.

What accounts for this rage? Maybe it’s that so many feel the White House was stolen from them eight years ago. Maybe they just feel entitled to rule. (Dude, where’s my country?) Maybe it’s the Iraq War. Or George Bush, though many lefties have worked themselves into the same derangement syndrome over Palin. Maybe the cause is deeper. I don’t know. I only know it’s not a good thing for civil society.

Obama’s not my candidate — McCain is — but, if he’s elected on Nov. 4, Obama will be my president and I’ll be happy to cheer two things. One, the fact that the United States has, at long last, elected an African-American president. Two, the possibility that Obama’s election might deliver us from this nastiness. I think it’s called the audacity of hope.
David Reinhard, associate editor, can be reached at 503-221-8152 or davidreinhard@news.oregonian.com.