Yahoo News Source Indexing is a Gatekeeper for corporate America and authoritarian China

by Iain Mackenzie

Yahoo's indexing of news and current affairs appears to be systematically biased in favour of Big Business interests owned media organizations. This includes that search engine's biased indexing of articles from such sources as CanWest Global's Canada.com (which also owns such newspapers as the National Post, the Montreal Gazette, and the Ottawa Citizen) and CTV GlobeMedia, in Canada, and the controversial right wing U.S. Bush administration supporting FOX-News, CNN, and the Associated Press in the United States in general.

The owners of CanWest Global in Canada, have been apparent official backers both financially and politically in Canada, of the Stephen Harper government, and the Conservative Party of Canada.

Yahoo's apparent demonstrated bias of indexing news sources that are heavily linked to the right-wing agendas of the Big Business community within the United States in particular, is an apparent violation of U.S. anti-trust law.

Yahoo's biased indexing practices, are also unethical in the extent to which this practice violates the axiomatic ethic of the internet as a forum of electronic democracy.

Indeed, Yahoo is symbolic of the political hypocrisy of the U.S. political-military-industrial complex, that professes a desire to spread democracy, including freedom of speech, which then engages in oppressive behaviour.

In September 2005, for example, Reporters Without Borders said Yahoo's Hong Kong arm helped China link Shi Tao's e-mail account and computer to a message containing the information.

He is now reportedly serving a ten year sentence in a Chinese jail. The media watchdog accused Yahoo of becoming a "police informant" in order to further its business ambitions.

Reporters Without Borders had said in a statement that, "We already knew that Yahoo! collaborates enthusiastically with the Chinese regime in questions of censorship, and now we know it is a Chinese police informant as well."

It is apparent that Yahoo's news indexing biases form an attempt to position that search engine as an 'information gatekeeper' that can heard internet site users to sources of news and current affairs which complement the agenda of corporate America. Internet site users, who use that search engine, indeed, continue to legitimate the corporate America biases of Yahoo (which are in turn investors in authoritarian China). Both corporate America and the authoritarian regime of China are against providing a social politically diverse pool of news and current affairs information for internet site users, consistent with the affirmation of electronic democracy.

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