How does one write a computer program to be "Liberal"?
The fact of the matter is, that Google news is almost fully automated - Its all software, with a couple grunts scanning the page to make sure no porn creeps in.
The same for the search engine - All automated.
Google news has massive lists of news sites that they scan, and if a story breaks on one but never shows up anywhere else it is considdered local news, and is not placed on their news page. After a story starts to appear on many
sites, it will start to show on google, even tho the number
of "minutes ago" will reflect only the story they linked to.
This is totally in conformance with Google's Link based reputation philosophy, where the number of links to a page indicates its rank. With news, its the number of sites posting the story.
So if google seems liberal to you its merely because the press is liberal. Google writes NONE of their own news.
For the past few months, I've received daily Google news alerts on "oil for food". While I'm glad for the free service, not one article link from Fox News or any other TV based web news service has been sent to me. This leads me to believe they do not monitor such sites.