At least on immigration, Google News suffers from an intentional case of GIGO: Garbage In, Garbage Out.

When you go to Google News and search for immigration stories, the search results tend to be full of misleading stories designed to promote comprehensive immigration reform ("amnesty"), illegal immigration, or massive immigration. Google is not taking steps to improve those search results.

To prove my point, I recently reviewed 59 top immigration articles promoted by Google News [1], with the following results:

• 20 articles (33%) were strongly in favor of amnesty
• 14 articles (24%) also favored amnesty, just not as strongly
• 4 articles (7%) were against amnesty
• No articles were strongly against amnesty

Of the 21 articles that I put in the neutral category ("none" in the table), many used misleading language. Because of that, I could have also put those in the "foramnesty" category, but I tried to be as fair as I could.

Bottom line: well over half of the articles I reviewed were biased in favor of amnesty.

To see the results in a sortable and searchable table, go here. An explanation of the table is at [2].

The table links to my past coverage of the sources and authors of many articles, for instance the New York Times and Julia Preston. Earlier this year, this site was denied inclusion in Google News for reasons they won't disclose [3]. Which means that Google News is willing to promote articles by Julia Preston, but won't even include posts here showing how she misleads.

Determining exactly why Google does things this way is beyond the scope of this study. However, part of it appears to be that many of their lower-level staffers are of the milquetoast, pseudo-liberal authoritarian type. They don't know much about issues like immigration, but they do believe most of what they read in the New York Times because someone else has determined that the NYT is credible. Another part is more cynical and down-to-earth: misleading people on immigration serves the business interests of Google: more immigration means lower labor costs. See Youtube corporate and Google corporate for past examples of Google tilting the dialog in their corporate favor.

I expect Google apologists to say a few things to the above. First, they'll try to claim that Google is just a conduit for the articles and isn't hand-picking what they promote. Yet, Google does choose to promote mainstream sources that mislead (such as the New York Times) and they do choose not to promote those who show how the NY Times misleads. I concentrate on distributing factual information and would take steps to rectify the situation if I found myself distributing misinformation. Google has no qualms about distributing a shoddy product.

Those Google apologists might also claim (correctly!) that my survey isn't scientific. It would be nearly impossible to conduct a truly scientific survey to determine biased media sources. The best recourse for apologists is to try to dispute my characterization of specific articles. I invite apologists to do that: choose an article that I've labeled as "strongforamnesty" or "foramnesty" and show how that's not the case in the comments below. (I'll then respond by showing those apologists wrong).

Another thing Google apologists might claim is that sources like the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times deserve their top positions in Google News because they're credible sources. If that's the case, why have I been able to show them wrong so very many times?

And, of course, those apologists will point out that this is personal. Those apologists shouldn't judge others by their own standards: I would have written something like this even if I'd been included in the Google News index. And, that doesn't invalidate the results of my study.

Here's the bottom line: if you care about accurate information, please don't put any faith in Google News.

10/21/13 UPDATE: I've started collecting the articles I discuss here that I discovered from Google News. See the from Google News page. Finding misleading immigration articles to discuss here is made easier with Google's help.

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[1] The articles were retrieved in early June 2013. I wrote a program to request the feed from Google of their top 20 stories for the term "immigration" every hour. The program saved those to a database (over 200 articles).
The link I used was this:
news . google . com/news?hl=en&gl=us&q=immigration&gbv=1&um=1&ie=UTF-8&output=rss&num=20
Another program showed me a random article, which I then reviewed. I only skipped articles because they were duplicates or had been deleted.

[2] The "source" column is the publication where the article appeared, and in many cases that contains a link to previous coverage of that source at this site. For instance, one article reviewed is from New York Times, and that link has extensive coverage of how the NYTimes has misled with their past immigration coverage.

The "authors" column lists the authors, and as with the "source" column many of those authors have been featured here in the past. For instance, Julia Preston.

The "bias" column contains one of five choices: strongforamnesty, foramnesty, none, againstamnesty, and strongagainstamnesty (none are in the last category).

The "My notes" column has my comments on the article.

The "Google description" column is an abbreviated version of the description as provided by Google News.

[3] You can read about that here:
productforums . google . com/forum/#!category-topic/news/google-news-publishers/VkoARkIg4HA