Aha! I figured it wasn’t just happening to The Moderate Voice. Over the past few months I’ve been surprised — the word is really “shocked” — to see Google News and Google Blog updates written by someone with a political agenda. Several alerts — which in the past have NEVER been editorials –referred to this blog as the “misnamed Moderate Voice” or “misleadingly named” Moderate Voice. One went after me personally. I figured sooner or later whoever did this would do it to one of the “big players” and that someone who apparently listens to too much talk radio and does not read this site with its many viewpoints would go too far with someone else.
Now it has happened.
Now this issue has — so to speak — stepped out of the shadows.
It’s not wise to do to ABC News’ Jake Tapper what has been done now on at least three occasions to TMV in alerts that people sign up for that are not supposed to be written from the left, right, as a Democrat, or Republican but as factual alerts. To wit via Mediaite:
Well, this is mature. Last Thursday, the watchful eyes at Raw Story noticed that, listed among the incoming day’s news was a post by a correspondent at ABC News they had not heard before: one Mr. “Jack Meoff.” Once they clicked on the story, they noticed it was a report on Congressman Bernie Sanders‘ comments in favor of auditing the Federal Reserve, and Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel’s comments against this. The actual author on the ABC News page? Jake Tapper.
Mediate has the alert on its page.
So, what happened? Is this a response to some similarly low-brow prank from ABC to Google? Highly unlikely, not the least because there seems to be no motive there. Was Thursday Take Your 13-Year-Old Son to Work Day at Google News? Is it an insidious attempt by the Federal Reserve (or someone with a crude sense of humor?) to threaten Tapper into not covering stories about legislators who want to audit it? Actually, there’s a very high chance it was a prank by some intern on a slow-news Friday, but if there was ever a story around which it’s fun to make up conspiracy theory scenarios, it’s this one.
But the reality is: we have had it happen to us, too but not in quite as graphic a way. And I did send an inquiry to Google asking what was going on but never got a response. I said what I’m saying in this post about the traditional concept of the alerts.
It’s really no biggie, however. Except Google might want to consider the impact on its corporate image. If these alerts are coming out now and they are politically based, swiping at reporters and bloggers the alert writer does not like, is that the corporation’s intent? I doubt it.
Whoever writes these should start their own blog — or contact me and we’ll let you do a Guest Voice post where you can discuss an issue.
But, no, Jake Tapper is not alone on this.
And it’s a pity because I’m a huge Google fan — it’s my search engine of choice, I use its Google News page as my tip sheet, I love and recommend Google Chrome and on any matters except that complaint Google always contacted me and were extremely polite and efficient. I’m a former newspaper reporter and when I go to get-togethers my former colleagues usually blast Google and I tell them I love it. They get mad at me (but then everyone does including apparently whoever is writing the alerts).
In a way, though, all of this is not surprising. In general, politics on all levels – in Congress, television, radio, on weblogs — is now marked by two trends: 1) name calling and trying to define those with whom someone disagrees; and 2) partisan politicization on many fronts (politics-based dating services, the decline of fact-based news’ popularity in favor of political-belief-based reporting).
But now this seeps into Google Alerts?
Suggestion to Google: Move whoever is writing these off that particular assignment if you can figure out who’s doing it. Issue a guideline on alerts. Unless the concept changes, they’re not blog posts.
Get someone on who realizes that the news alerts need to be aggregators that are sent to political independents, Democrats, Republicans, liberals, conservatives, moderates who frankly did not sign up to get something that sounds as if the writer watched too much Sean Hannity or Keith Olbermann. Joke or not, intern or not — it demeans the once reliable, unbiased Google News alerts.
FOOTNOTE: I deleted the other alerts I got but if I get more like the ones I got before I’ll do a short post that will quote the alert. I KNOW this is NOT the way the corporation — even middle managers – want these alerts to go out. They are supposed to be lists with links to posts and stories — not editorials or satire pages.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.