Not trying to make friends...
I just saw this quote from
a recent article by "Rush Limbaugh":http://rushlimbaugh.com (via "Google News":http://news.google.com):
bq. People say a mind is a terrible thing to waste. I say the liberal mind is already wasted...
I'm not a fan of Rush, but this quote made me laugh due to its utter absurdity.
Rush made it onto Google News because of his discussion of the "'implanting false memories' study":http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2003/02/030217115223.htm just released. This study has very important implications for law enforcement, and further discredits many of the supposed Satanic child abuse cases from the 1980's. Not much relevance for politics though.
One could argue that Google 'chose' the incorrect article to 'headline' the false memory study story - it would have been more valuable for readers to link to a mainstream analysis (Rush is really just using the study as a jumping off point for another discussion). This phenomenon, which occurs relatively frequently, seems to happen primarly when there are significantly different interpretations of the same events - for example, stories about the Israeli / Palestinian conflict have a very different headline in the 'Arab News' than in Ha'aretz. I don't know if there is anything that Google can really do about this, unless they decide to add an artificial 'weight' to one set of sources over another.
Regardless, it's great to have stories from both sides and from all around the world so easily accessible from one place and updated 24/7. This is particularly valuable here in Hong Kong, since most of the web updates on an EST daytime schedule.
Posted by Stephen Bronstein at February 20, 2003 01:06 PM