Google News Bans SF Indymedia Over Israel/Palestine Controversy

GOOGLE NEWS BANS SAN FRANCISCO INDYMEDIA OVER ISRAEL/PALESTINE CONTROVERSY, ANTI-ARAB SLURS LIKE "RAGHEAD" ARE ALLOWED

Victoria Independent Media Center

Original article is at

http://victoria.indymedia.org/news/2003/09/16562.php

Google News Bans SF Indymedia Over Israel/Palestine Controversy

GOOGLE NEWS BANS SAN FRANCISCO INDYMEDIA OVER ISRAEL/PALESTINE
CONTROVERSY, ANTI-ARAB SLURS LIKE "RAGHEAD" ARE ALLOWED

http://sf.indymedia.org/news/2003/09/1639862.php

Around March 13 of this year, I discovered that San Francisco IMC
was no longer being indexed by Google News. I wrote to them asking
why, and a week later they replied that they only index sites which
have editorial review. I explained to them that, while we accept all
article submissions, we have an active editorial team that reviews
articles for our Local/Global section. Volunteer programmers coded
a new SF-IMC webpage exclusively for Google which allowed them to
index only our reviewed articles.

On May 13, Google News again removed us from the index. According to
Marissa Mayer, product manager for Google News, this action was
taken because a few articles indexed included the term "zionazi,"
which they consider a "degrading hateful slur."

SF-IMC replied to Google News through email and even had a conference
call with them, explaining that we have an editorial policy that
specifically excludes hate speech, and that we agree "zionazi"
could be considered hate speech.

In addition, we asked for details on how their search engine
spidered this article at all, since our editorial team had not
reviewed it and it shouldn't have been spidered by them. Around
the same time, SF-IMC received anonymous emails from people
claiming that they will "make sure" we are kicked out of Google
News.

It was at this point that we stopped hearing back from Google
News at all. We emailed and called them for weeks but got
absolutely no reply.

Worse still, Google News seems to be a lot less vigilant when it
comes to racist hate speech directed at Arabs and Muslims. For
instance, at any time you can search for "islamofascist" at Google
News and get a handful of results.

Even more disturbing, on September 2, I searched for "green beret
iraq" which returned an article written by a soldier in Iraq that
refers to "ragheads" throughout:

"Instead of being sitting ducks for the ragheads we now are going
after the worthless pieces of fecal matter."
(

http://bigjweb.com/artman/publish/article_696.shtml)

"Ragheads" and "islamofascists" is journalism according to Google
News?

I believe that Google News needs to take responsibility for their
seemingly one-sided tolerance of what is and is not "hate speech,"
acknowledge that Indymedia sites have active editorial teams who
provide hours of volunteer labor to ensure that quality information
is getting out, and work with IMCs around the world to get this
information into Google News.

If Google News is nothing more than right-wing and corporate
media, they aren't providing a worthwhile service. Indymedia
is a global phenomenon with active groups in the US, Middle
East, South America, Europe, Canada, Africa and Asia, all working to
produce journalism that is otherwise censored or untouched by
multinational corporate media.

I invite Google News to again contact SF-IMC at