Middle Eastern conflict traced to meddling search engine
The Australian Broadcasting Corporation recently reported that Google had recognised Palestine by replacing the name "Palestinian Territories" with "Palestine" on Google's page for the state (or whatever term Israel would prefer that we use).
I'm sure I'd be amongst the first to say that news outlets of all sorts — even the ABC — present plenty of stories that are of no real consequence to anyone. This particular non-story, however, brought me back to an issue that I also encountered in news outlets' description of a widespread cartographic error as an "IT glitch" due to its existence in Google Maps: why should it be newsworthy that Google repeats some information or decision made by its sources?
Google itself is quoted in the Palestine article as saying, modestly enough, that "We consult a number of sources and authorities when naming countries. In this case, we are following the lead of the UN." Google is an aggregator of information after all, not a creator of it. Yet Google's "recognition" of Palestine is news for the ABC.
The Register's coverage of the same story makes more of Israel's opinion that "this change raises questions about the reasons behind this surprising involvement of what is basically a private Internet company in international politics". Israel's reaction is arguably more of a story than Google's change itself. At the risk of having the Israeli foreign ministry releasing similar indignant statements about this blog, though, it begs the question of why the Israelis think it worth commenting on Google's application of a UN decision. (Their real argument is presumably with the UN, who made the decision in the first place, and I'm not going to go there.)
Google is a wealthy and powerful company, to be sure, and the actions of the wealthy and powerful are newsworthy enough in many circumstances. But are news outlets doing themselves or anyone else (bar Google) any favours by reporting as if Google is the final arbiter of all human knowledge and convention?
I recommend to my students that, when doing research, they seek out the original source of some item of information in order to critique and verify it. The difference between primary and secondary sources was, after all, a high school topic for me. But I suppose that they might feel justified in ignoring me when they see that they could get jobs reporting about Google search results.
