Excuse Them While They Piss Their Pants

From SodBusters:

Is Google Purging Conservative News Sites?

Posted by Noel Sheppard on May 22, 2006 - 09:37.

Something frighteningly ominous has been happening on the Internet lately: Google, without any prior explanation or notice, has been terminating its News relationship with conservative e-zines and web journals.

Not exactly Saw 2 as horror stories go. Next to this bit of tedious whinging is a depiction of the Google News logo with a menstrual red slash through it and the word "CENSORED" underneath in red letters.

The post goes on to assert that a bunch of rightwing sites whose ratio of half-witted bile to news is 10,000:1 have been determined by Google to be hate sites, and thus are no longer linked to by Google News. The Bad Sheppard ends with this soggy spot of chinless whimpering:

Moreover, to new media providers like e-zines and web journals, referrals from Google News can comprise 20 percent or more of their unique reads in a given day, which is the bread and butter for determining current and future ad revenue.

With that in mind, how much power does a company that disseminates almost half of the country's word search results command over the opinions of our growing population, and what protections exist against abuses of such overreaching power?

How does such a company put itself in the position of grand arbiter over what is and what is not "hate speech," or content otherwise objectionable?

Oh, that last one is a real stumper!

Now here's the punchline:

Noel Sheppard is an economist, business owner, and a featured writer at the prestigious American Thinker. He is also a contributing writer to the Free Market Project and a contributing editor for NewsBusters. He welcomes your feedback at nsheppard@costlogic.com.

Stop it, Noel, you're killing me.