WIRED: Most news sites employ humans to try to pull together balanced content. Why not hire a few people to guard against bias?
BHARAT: Google News is not in the business of having humans regulate how much representation there is from the Republicans in response to a certain query and how much is from Democrats. Once you start doing that job, there is a huge responsibility, and we’d rather allow the natural distribution of a given query to surface. I think that having people look at the hundreds of thousands of articles that come in every day is just not practical. Bias may have happened once or twice on certain queries. I don’t think the problem is widespread….The truth is, Google News doesn’t have a point of view. It’s a computer, and computers do not understand these topics the way humans do and can’t be systematically biased in any direction.
Bharat is the lead developer of Google News. I have to say, this issue has always stuck in my craw. While I grok the concept of a “computer having no bias,” I also fall back to the fact that somebody programmed that computer, to look for specific keywords, to do certain kinds of matching, to query certain sources and not others. The bias isn’t directly human bias, the point of view isn’t directly human point of view, but it’s nevertheless bias, is it not? Or am I missing something?