Let’s have a little more fun with Google News, shall we?
I want to praise the service, first of all, for its ability to fill my news-hungry belly with tasty bites from every section of the political menu. Only an algorithm could be so balanced in its worldview. (Lookin’ at you, Mitt…)
But I should also commend Google News engineers on their ability to create software that can analyze two separate news stories and pass them off as belonging to one single event…or am I missing something?
High court upholds jails’ strip searches (USA Today) Supreme Court OKs routine jailhouse strip searches (AP) Supreme Court approves strip searches for minor offenses (Christian Science Monitor) Supreme Court OKs Strip Searches (Newsweek/Daily Beast) Justices Approve Strip-Searches for Any Offense
So what’s “the truth” here? Yeah, in this case it is the same event, but the blame goes to the editors for their headline-writing disabilities. I purposefully did not read any of the news articles, so I can’t vouch for “the truth” in this case. All I can say is that, had I not been given a choice of sources, my opinion would have been made for me.
