President Donald J. Trump was up before dawn the other day firing off a tweet about Google.
“Google search results for ‘Trump News’ shows only the viewing/reporting of Fake News Media,” he wrote. “In other words, they have it RIGGED, for me & others, so that almost all stories & news is BAD.”
The president’s message seems to have been inspired by a post from conservative blogger Paula Bolyard.
“Conservatives and Trump supporters have for the last several years questioned whether Google was deprioritizing conservative news sites, hiding them from users who utilize their search engine,” Bolyard wrote.
To test the theory, she performed her own searches and then analyzed the results using a media-bias chart assembled by Sinclair Broadcasting’s Sharyl Attkisson.
“I expected to see some skewing of the results based on my extensive experience with Google,” Bolyard wrote, “but I was not prepared for the blatant prioritization of left-leaning and anti-Trump media outlets.”
The president can take it from here.
“Fake CNN is prominent,” he tweeted. “Republican/Conservative & Fair Media is shut out. Illegal?”
The president contended that 96 percent of the results from a Trump news search came from left-leaning media, something he described as “very dangerous.” He elaborated during subsequent remarks in the Oval Office.
“I think Google has really taken advantage of a lot of people, and I think that’s a very serious thing,” he said. “That’s a very serious charge.”
That 96 percent figure came from Bolyard, who examined the top 100 results from her searches. She found that CNN came up most often, the Washington Post and NBC tied for second and CNBC came in fourth. The New York Times, Politico and The Atlantic tied for fifth.
All, in Attkisson’s estimation, are liberal news sources. Others might disagree. Bias, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.
In those Oval Office remarks, the president claimed to have received “literally thousands and thousands of complaints.”
“So I think that Google and Twitter and Facebook, they’re really treading on very, very troubled territory, and they have to be careful,” he said.
All three companies deny the accusation.
“Search is not used to set a political agenda,” Google said in a statement, “and we don’t bias our results toward any political ideology.”
Bolyard spoke with Google’s Maggie Shiels, who insisted her own searches found “an endless stream of stories from a wide variety of sources.”
That didn’t sway Bolyard, who quoted fellow blogger Roger L. Simon suggesting that companies like Facebook and Google are dangerous.
“They control, or at least inordinately influence, how Americans and even much of the world think,” he wrote.
For his part, the president continues to promote the politics of grievance, and his latest targets are the same social media organizations that helped to make him what he is today.
“Social Media Giants are silencing millions of people,” he tweeted. “Can’t do this even if it means we must continue to hear Fake News like CNN, whose ratings have suffered gravely. People have to figure out what is real, and what is not, without censorship!”
That statement is certainly ironic coming from a man so prone to lying, but he’s right that we can’t tolerate censorship.
We can’t rely on search engines or social media platforms to sort the news for us, and we should not ask them to promote the stories we like or bury the ones we don’t.
It’s up to us to come up with our own news sources. And to judge the ones we find.
We aren’t helpless bystanders here. We have the power to think.
