Topic: CNSNews.com
In yet another example of the whoredom that gets complained about only when non-right-wingers engage in it, an Oct. 27 CNSNews.com "news" article by intern Lauren Shank is essentially a press release for CNS' owner:
The Media Research Center’s FreeSpeech America division conducted a study that caught Google burying 83% of Senate Republican Party candidates’ campaign websites in comparison to their Democratic competitors, who appeared as the top searches in organic search results.
“Google must be investigated for its un-American efforts to sway the election,” L. Brent Bozell, founder and president of the Media Research Center, told Free Speech America.
“First, researchers caught Google red-handed by proving Republican campaign emails were sent to spam," said Bozell. "Now we’ve uncovered Google manipulating search results to hide Republican campaign websites while promoting Democratic ones. This is all an effort by Google to help Democrats and interfere in the democratic process.”
As we've documented, the MRC "study" offers no research justification for the search terms it used or why they should have put a candidate's website at the top of the results -- a flaw that undermines the foundation of the entire study. But Shank is in stenography mode and wasn't about to question the results. Heck, she didn't even bother to disclose the obvious conflict of interest the MRC is CNS' parent.
Meanwhile, Craig Bannister tried to up the whoredom in an article the same day taht laughably tried to credit a declinein profits at Google to the MRC study:
Google’s parent company, Alphabet, suffered a 27% drop in third-quarter net profit, as search engine ad sales failed to meet projections.
Alphabet also recorded a double-digit percent decline in net income, through the first nine months of the year, The Epoch Times reported Wednesday:
[...]
What’s more, a new analysis by Media Research Center Free Speech America reveals that Google appears to be skewing its search engine results in favor of Democrats in order to affect the midterm elections in November.
“Anti-Democracy Google is manipulating search results to bury Senate Republican candidates’ campaign websites before the 2022 midterm elections,” the study, “Google CAUGHT Manipulating Search, Buries GOP Campaign Sites in 83% of Top Senate Races,” concludes.
Given that the financial numbers were for a time period that ended Oct. 1, there is no conceivable way the MRC "study" had any impact on them, despite what Bannister is suggesting. He too didn't disclose that his employer also produced the "study" he's hyping.
Does CNS think this is a good way to be a legitimate "news" organization? It's not.
