Careful Your Prejudice is Showing

Andrew Orlowski over at The Register makes some wild assumptions based on a single sentence about Google and Blogs in a report on Yahoo News otherwise concentrating on Google’s financial plans.

“Google allows people to search Web pages, as well as search specific types of content such as news sources, shopping sites through its “Froogle” service, Usenet groups. Soon the company will also offer a service for searching Web logs, known as “blogs,” Schmidt said.”

Orlowski manages to read an awful lot about his own problems with weblogs and Google into that last sentence. He even claims it is an announcement: “CEO Eric Schmidt made the announcement on Monday”, and then goes on to quote extensively from his own interviews with Chris Roddy, a politics and linguistics undergraduate at the University of Emory. and Gary Stock, chief technology office for Nexcerpt, Inc. (who incidently publishes his own blog) enough snippets to back his own points of view.
He also misquotes a conversation on slashdot in which someone says “In your search string, add the term -blog” (which is standard search engine syntax to exclude results that contain the word blog) and which Orlowski misquotes to be “a suggestion that Google add a -noblog option, which it effectively appears to be introducing by default.” That latter phrase presumably referring to his own interpretation of Google’s plans for a new Blog only search tab and removal of blog results from the main search which he derives from the single sentence quoted above!
This is major case of a ‘reporter’ airing his own prejudices as ‘news’.

5 thoughts on “Careful Your Prejudice is Showing

  1. It looks like Evan has self-censored his own opinion! 🙁
    “you know, in order to spread more ‘Google censors Evhead’ suspicions” 🙂
    It’s not too hard to find though. 😉

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