Posted on 07/01/2005 9:46:59 AM PDT by Behind Liberal Lines
Google News proudly features this “news” article from jihadunspun.com, a known pro-terrorist propaganda site:
From Jihad Unspun:
US forces shot and killed a nine-year old Iraqi girl as she came out of her school following final exams in Baghdad. A medical specialist in Baghdad’s al-Yarmuk General Hospital told the correspondent for Mafkarat al-Islam that an American sniper opened fire on ‘A’ishah Ahmad ‘Umar, killing her.
For its part, the US military occupation forces announced that they had begun an investigation of the Marine who shot the little girl and promised to punish him if he is found guilty.
A source in the Iraqi puppet army told Mafkarat al-Islam that the American soldier was very drunk at the time of the killing and that he was withdrawn from his observation post after the incident.
The father of ‘A’ishah, who works for the Railroad Department said that residents in the area where his little daughter was killed told him that the American had been betting with his buddies whether he could hit the little girl who had come out of the school some 700 meters from the US observation post.
For its part, the American propaganda TV station called “al-‘Iraqiyah” blamed what it called “terrorists” for the shooting of the little girl, but subsequent statements by the US military and the Iraqi puppet forces exposed the “al-‘Iraqiyah” story to be a lie.Where to begin? The Newsweek-quality anonymous sources? Or the fact that there are no Marines in Baghdad (they are deployed to the west)? Or the fact that U.S. forces in Iraq do not have ready access to alcohol?
No, instead we start with the fact that Google News was the focus of an article by honestreporting.com on this same pro-terror site back in January. Six months afterward, Google still features the pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic web site as a valued news contributor.
One could presumably ignore honestreporting.com, but Google News also ignored the April 8, 2005 State Department warning of Jihad Unspun’s suspected al-Qaeda support:
A trio of obscure Web sites and individuals has combined to spread deliberate disinformation, particularly about U.S. actions in Iraq. The entities involved are Islam Memo (Islammemo.cc), Muhammad Abu Nasr, and Jihad Unspun (jihadunspun.net).There are many sites of questionable veracity to draw news articles from, but in light of the well-documented pro-terrorist background of Jihad Unspun, one might start to question the motives of those at Google News that still consider Jihad Unspun a valid news source.
Most of the disinformation appears to originate with Islam Memo, which is a pro-al Qaeda, pro-Iraqi insurgency, Arabic-language Web site based in Saudi Arabia.
Muhammad Abu Nasr, co-editor of the Free Arab Voice Web site (freearabvoice.org), translates material from Islam Memo into English and posts it as "Iraqi Resistance Reports" on his Web site.
Jihad Unspun publishes selected articles by Muhammad Abu Nasr, giving them a broader audience.
Note: Hat tip to Rusty Shackleford, himself a former Google News contributor, who alerted me to this story.
Update: Instalanched before I could even fix the spelling of "al-Qaedariffic." Thanks again, Glenn. More spelling errors are available free of charge to my valued guests on the main page.
Posted by Confederate Yankee at June 24, 2005 07:33 PM | TrackBack
MY BS meter is pinging at full-tilt...
They say that the Marine was "drunk" - where did he get the alcohol? As far as I know, alcohol is prohibited in the country by US Forces...
They can kiss my @$$...
Google is really starting to scare me.
Are we looking at the emergence of a new model for media gatekeepers, as the alphabet news networks were the gatekeepers for so many years?
I did a Google search on Buckminster Fuller today, looking for a source that regarded him unfavorably. Couldn't find one.
The market is ultimately self-correcting. If Google or any other enterprise (NY Times, CBS, etc.) is outed as inaccurate or dishonest, people will stop using it or listening to it.
The barriers to entry are pretty low. Anyone can pretty much build their own search engine and fine tune it to their liking.
There's no "ranking by quality and credibility" going on here. What a silly article. Does the author want google to start filtering out sources it deems unreliable? It would be more than a search engine then.
Google has already announced it is filtering news sources.
That's comforting, but I remember how many decades it took for a substantial number of people to catch on to the leftist bias at the alphabet networks.
I remember very well the rolling eyeballs back in the early eighties when I would insist that no, it wasn't just "sensationalism" in an effort to sell newspapers/magazines/news broadcasts, but a consistent pattern of bias.
Heck, I still get it today when I recount instances of the media not just distorting or "spinning," but making things up out of thin air.
It's still too early to tell what will happen, but I think there's a danger.
When I do a search, I always look at where the results come from. I wouldn't read anything that says something like jihadunspun.com, whatever that means.
"Google has already announced it is filtering news sources."
IOW, they're doing just what Walter Crankcase and Dan Blather did.
A fellow FReeper linked me to Dogpile as a search engine. I now used it over google
http://www.dogpile.com/
Use dogpile.
It shows up on dogpile as well.
For decades the left controlled what Americans knew, and therefore what Americans could think, by owning the media.
Isn't owning the Internet search engines analogous to that?
"Big Time BS"
Hey, it's big time BS first of all because our boys don't act like that.
"It has become so."
Then isn't there a very real danger in letting the left own the Internet search engines?
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