Considering Google’s plan “to build a database that will compare the track record and credibility of all news sources around the world, and adjust the ranking of any search results accordingly” (see Google To Implement Bias Towards Mainstream News), I am reminded of George Creel. Creel ran the Committee on Public Information (CPI), a warmongering propaganda outfit set up by president Wilson on April 13, 1917. “CPI recruited heavily from business, media, academia, and the art world,” writes Propaganda Critic. “Like modern reporters who participate in Pentagon press pools, journalists grudgingly complied with the [CPI’s]official guidelines in order to stay connected to the information loop. Radical newspapers, such as the socialist Appeal to Reason, were almost completely extinguished by wartime limitations on dissent.”
Of course, nowadays, there is no CPI telling newspapers and web sites what they will publish or post—and there does not need to be because censorship (or propaganda by omission) is a built-in feature of the corporate media and information services, as Google demonstrates. Note Google’s assertion that it is simply adjusting the “credibility” of news sources, as if the New York Times and the Washington Post, two “mainstream” corporate newspapers guilty of telling lies about Saddam Hussein’s illusory weapons of mass destruction and thus cheerleading Bush’s illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq, are more “credible” than other news sources that told the truth about what Bush and his clique of warmongering Strausscons were up to, indisputable facts borne out after the fact (and generally ignored by the corporate media).
In short, after Google installs its “quality” control algorithm, a search of the words “Fallujah” and “war crimes” will return stories by the corporate media (who have basically ignored the war crimes in Fallujah) and sort those stories at the top of the list while stories by Francis A. Boyle posted in Counterpunch or Christopher Bollyn of the American Free Press will sorted at the distant end of a list of 400,000 results.
In order to use Google effectively in the future, it may be necessary to click on the page numbers at the bottom of the page until you reach the end of the list. Remember, in Bushzarro world, everything is backwards, up is down, night is day, mass murder is democracy, etc. Bushzarro Google, as a large corporate leviathan with a strangle hold on the “search market,” will naturally follow these dynamics. In order to find the truth, more work will be required.
Nobody said it would be a rose garden.