According to the Google News algorithm, six American lives are worth more than 20,000 Iranian lives.
4 Comments
Actually, Google news posts the stories by time. If you read the header, it indicates age of story, 55 minutes, 2 hours, etc. The latest stories are posted in order. They are a news ticker, they don’t editorialize and take all news stories as they pop up. There is nothing sinister here.
“The headlines that appear on Google news are selected entirely by computer algorithms, based on how and where the stories appear elsewhere on the web. There are no human editors at Google selecting or grouping the headlines and no individual decides which stories get top placement. This occasionally results in some articles appearing to be out of context.”
In other words, the algorthms are reflecting placed priorities, which means that news organizations are more concerned, on the whole, with a few deaths in San Bernardino rather than 20,000+ Iranians.
Local paper has major front page over-the-fold story about local community(San Simeon quake, Paso Robles) rolling up its sleeves and getting down to the hard work of cleaning up.
Under the fold, 20,000 Iranians. Bam.
A. Brown(ish) skin
B. Muslims
C. Plus they kidnapped the embassy or something back in the 80’s, until Reagan saved us. Or something.
D. I keep seeing that morphing image of bin Laden into Saddam and then way in the background there the Ayotollah Khomeini.
Makes you wonder who’s in charge of media priorities these days.
I don’t know what’s up with people and their twisted priorities, but I felt very sad to read that on page 2 yesterday. 20,000! That’s almost half of my town.
Actually, Google news posts the stories by time. If you read the header, it indicates age of story, 55 minutes, 2 hours, etc. The latest stories are posted in order. They are a news ticker, they don’t editorialize and take all news stories as they pop up. There is nothing sinister here.
http://news.google.com/intl/en_us/about_google_news.html
“The headlines that appear on Google news are selected entirely by computer algorithms, based on how and where the stories appear elsewhere on the web. There are no human editors at Google selecting or grouping the headlines and no individual decides which stories get top placement. This occasionally results in some articles appearing to be out of context.”
In other words, the algorthms are reflecting placed priorities, which means that news organizations are more concerned, on the whole, with a few deaths in San Bernardino rather than 20,000+ Iranians.
Local paper has major front page over-the-fold story about local community(San Simeon quake, Paso Robles) rolling up its sleeves and getting down to the hard work of cleaning up.
Under the fold, 20,000 Iranians. Bam.
A. Brown(ish) skin
B. Muslims
C. Plus they kidnapped the embassy or something back in the 80’s, until Reagan saved us. Or something.
D. I keep seeing that morphing image of bin Laden into Saddam and then way in the background there the Ayotollah Khomeini.
Makes you wonder who’s in charge of media priorities these days.
I don’t know what’s up with people and their twisted priorities, but I felt very sad to read that on page 2 yesterday. 20,000! That’s almost half of my town.