I quit using the totally-not-biased Google News over 5 years ago when nearly all top headlines were consistently sourced from The Huffington Post. This was logged-out by the way.
For the uninitiated, it is a glorified opinion blog. Don't take my word for it; to quote Wikipedia, "HuffPost is an American news aggregator and blog... created to provide a liberal alternative to the conservative news websites such as the Drudge Report."[1]
I place them one step above BuzzFeed, which pumps out quality hard-hitting journalism such as "Quiz: How Much Random Vagina Knowledge Do You Have?"[2]
Don't worry, "articles were randomly chosen by a computer program". That's when I realized that Google News was programmed to be an echo chamber, otherwise such biased unverified opinion wouldn't consistently bubble up to the top and masquerade as "news".
I use Bing News[3] now. It's not perfect, the signal-to-noise has gotten slightly worse over time but at least it's sourced from legit news outlets.
For the person about to reply that you can “hide outlets”: doing so only marginally improves the experience. I’ve personally hidden over 20 outlets with overtly leftist biased writing. My feed is now only obscure local channels that are owned by the same company. Google News refuses to permit socially conservative viewpoints (Fox News doesn’t make that list for me) to make up a user’s personalized feed.
They shouldn't be promoting any news source over another. A true unbiased news aggregator should spit out articles like a bingo cage. Once you rank sources, or include opinion masquerading as news, it's manipulation of the media. When you deliberately bury all sources you disagree with, you are de facto creating an echo chamber. It's enraging that they tried to pass themselves off as unbiased with the vague statement about the ordering of the articles being "chosen by a computer program"; I noticed that statement no longer appears.
> Google News refuses to permit socially conservative viewpoints (Fox News doesn’t make that list for me) to make up a user’s personalized feed.
This isn't true. I just looked up a few conservative publications, from the center-right to the heavy-on-conspiracy and they all show up as available news sources.
In my country, it does the opposite — full of content from rightwing publications. Perhaps it's not Google injecting its bias but an emergent outcome of the ideology prevalent in society and media in our respective countries.
Google News these days shows more of a variety of perspectives. I use it in incognito and see headlines from across the political spectrum. Most of the right-leaning news is from Fox though, which is unfortunate.
For the uninitiated, it is a glorified opinion blog. Don't take my word for it; to quote Wikipedia, "HuffPost is an American news aggregator and blog... created to provide a liberal alternative to the conservative news websites such as the Drudge Report."[1]
I place them one step above BuzzFeed, which pumps out quality hard-hitting journalism such as "Quiz: How Much Random Vagina Knowledge Do You Have?"[2]
Don't worry, "articles were randomly chosen by a computer program". That's when I realized that Google News was programmed to be an echo chamber, otherwise such biased unverified opinion wouldn't consistently bubble up to the top and masquerade as "news".
I use Bing News[3] now. It's not perfect, the signal-to-noise has gotten slightly worse over time but at least it's sourced from legit news outlets.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HuffPost
[2] https://www.buzzfeed.com/audreyworboys/how-well-do-you-know-...
[3] https://www.bing.com/news