an open letter to google news -

i think google news is a very fine service. and i realize that it's important to represent many different ideological and political stripes. but i'd suggest that there are sites turning up as hits on google news that simply aren't news sites at all, but pure agitprop.

i'm refering to sites such as bellaciao.org, antiwar.com, pww.org, etc. once upon a time the communist press was a good source of hard news - anybody researching american civil rights activity in the 1930s, for example, will likely find the old people's daily world and similar papers indispensible.

but these days the neocommunist press is more demogogic, doctrinaire, snide, dishonest, disingenuous, offensive and insulting to one's intelligence than anything its counterparts on the right could dream of being. and i say this as a lifelong social democrat.

i haven't done an exhaustive search or analysis of these sites. in fact (despite being a regular user of the internet for a decade - which maybe suggests something about the power of google to unearth obscure websites) i didnt' even know they existed until a story on pww.org about the revolution in the republic of georgia last year turned up on google news. i spent a month in georgia a few years ago and have a number of georgian friends in the us and in georgia itself, and i know firsthand the deep sense of betrayal georgians felt toward schevardnadze. and yet the pww took pains to paint saakashvili as an american puppet - and presented this conclusion as news in a transparent attempt to discredit the rose revolution as nothing more than a western-manufactured coup. and google picked it up and presented it to the world as news. and now antiwar.com and pww.org and the rest are taking the same line about the opposition in ukraine, and why? because the opposition is pro-west (ie friendly to the US and to europe, rather than to russia), which is anathema to the neo-communist press, for whom it isn't possible to be both pro-west and pro-democratic.

this isn't news. this is the most blinkered, hermetically sealed kind of kneejerk agitprop blindness there is (if it's possible to be both blinkered and blind, but you get the point).

look i know you can't make decisions based on who i think is right or wrong about some political issue. but at least you can look at some of the sites you've included and legitimized as news organizations and consider whether they're news organizations at all. because after all people do expect a certain degree of objectivity from a news organization - even fox news. and i think most of what passes for news on fox is shockingly skewed, but the agitprop neocommunist 'press' is in a different league altogether. they don't deserve the imprimatur of 'news source' that google currently gives them.