The Press Gang. Alive and well online
p2pnet news view | P2P:- In the bad old days a press gang was a Royal Navy posse which scoured dockyards and booze halls looking for victims to “press” into service.
In 2008, ‘press gang’ has a different, and very unhealthy (for freedom of speech), connotation.
In September, 2007 , “Today we’re launching a new feature on Google News that will help you quickly and easily find original stories from news publishers – including stories from some of the top news agencies in the world, such as the Associated Press, Agence France-Presse, UK Press Association and the Canadian Press – and go directly to the original source to read more,” says Google on its site.”
That was from p2pnet’s GNS: Google News Service.
I went on, “Can’t surfers do that already? Yes, but, ‘Duplicate detection means we’ll be able to display a better variety of sources with less duplication,’ says Google.
” ‘Instead of 20 ‘different’ articles (which actually used the exact same content), we’ll show the definitive original copy and give credit to the original journalist’.”
But, looked at another way, “instead of being able to choose from posts which, although they may carry agency copy, might also have different interpretations and slants of the events being discussed, readers will only have access to materials presented by the agencies Google is in bed with,” I said.
And one year on, it’s getting really silly.
These days, after identifying a topic, I more often than not skip past the ‘news’ sections and go straight to one or other of the search engines.
That way I’ll get not only the lamescream headlines, but stories on the blogs, specialist and not-specialist sites. You name it.
Google and Yahoo search engines are great. But their ‘news’ sections largely feature sterile pap.
The same wire ’stories’ are slavishly regurgitated verbatim, in many cases, in one corporate press item after another.
On Google and Yahoo, news diversity?
What’s that?
(Sorry for the rant 
)
Jon Newton – p2pnet
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