A new study on the Google News service shows that five news organizations considered liberal make up almost half of the sites recommended when people are doing searches.
The study, performed by researchers Seth Lewis and Efrat Nechushtai and published in the journal "Computers in Human Behavior" in August, showed that everybody gets the same results when searching online, but 49 percent of the total recommendations returned come from The New York Times, CNN, Politico, The Washington Post and HuffPost, reports Newsbusters.
In addition, just 14 news organizations made up 79 percent of the total news recommendations that returned.
Lewis told Wired that Google is "dominated by mainstream news," and that people who consider the mainstream media to be left leaning, "you will have concerns about the restults you get from Google News. There's no question about that."
The research was done through the human intelligence service Amazon Mechanical Turk, and used people's personal Google accounts in 2016 to search for candidates Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.
According to a table in the study, The New York Times resulted in 22 percent of all recommendations, followed by CNN with 12 percent; Politico, 11 percent, The Washington Post, 11 percent; and HuffPost, 7 percent.
Meanwhile, the survey group also seemed to lean left, with 41 percent of the group identified as liberal and 27 percent conservative out of the 168 participants.
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
© 2024 Newsmax. All rights reserved.