Directions

-Read the excerpt below from Noel Sheppard's post at newsbusters.org on May 22nd.
-Read "Types of Media Bias" in the right column. Then answer the questions.

…Google, without any prior explanation or notice, has been terminating its News relationship with conservative e-zines and web journals.

At first [glance], one can easily ignore such business decisions by the most powerful company on the Internet as being routine. However, on closer examination, such behavior could give one relatively small technological corporation (when measured by the size of its workforce) a degree of political might that frankly dwarfs its current financial prowess…

…the most recent occurrence of this unexplained phenomenon was Friday, May 19, when Frank Salvato, proprietor of The New Media Journal, realized that his content that day hadn’t been disseminated at Google News as it had been on a daily basis since he reached an agreement with the search engine in September 2005.

After sending the Google Help Desk a query concerning the matter, Salvato was informed that there had been complaints of “hate speech” at his website, and as a result, The New Media Journal would no longer be part of Google News. As evidence of his offense, the Google Team supplied Salvato with links to three recent op-eds published by his contributing writers, all coincidentally about radical Islam and its relation to terrorism.

Unfortunately, this was not the first conservative e-zine to be terminated in such a fashion. On March 29, Rusty Shackleford, owner of The Jawa Report, received a similar e-mail message as Salvato informing him that: “Upon recent review, we’ve found that your site contains hate speech, and we will no longer be including it in Google News.” For those unfamiliar, The Jawa Report focuses a great deal of attention on terrorist issues and how they relate to radical Islam.
………

For the complete report, go to NewsBusters.org.

Identifying Media Bias

To accurately identify different types of bias, you should be aware of the issues of the day, and the liberal and conservative perspectives on each issue.

Types of Media Bias:

Questions

Do you think Google’s termination of conservative websites that report on radical Islam’s relation to terrorism is justified?  Explain your answer.


Scroll down to the bottom of the page for the answers.

Answers

Opinion question.  Answers vary.