Google News doesn't report news. Instead, its robots scour news websites around the world for other people's reporting.
One of my favorite things to do with Google News is to use it to see how big (or not big) any given news story is.
The way I do that is to type phrases into its search bar and look at the number of results.
It's an imperfect tool, because the number of results doesn't give you context or tell you how widely read each of the stories was, but it does give you a good sense of the news stories that readers are finding most often when they browse the news online.
For example, on the morning I'm writing this column (April 25, if you're curious) typing the words "Barack Obama and elitist" into Google News returned 6,029 news stories. Obama was charged by his political opponents with being an elitist after he made a comment about how people in economically depressed small towns are bitter.
Type the words "Barack Obama and health insurance" into Google News this morning and you get 2,101 results.
That doesn't say to me, "Oh, there's no decent coverage of Barack Obama's health care proposals, screw the media." It simply tells me that campaign news coverage of late is more likely to mention a shouting match between political opponents than it is to mention substantive issues. Arguments are more interesting to reporters than policy.
One of the biggest U.S. news stories in recent weeks has been Pope Benedict XVI's visit to the United States. He met with victims of church sex abuse, led mass at Yankee Stadium, and gave a speech at the White House that so impressed President Bush he responded by grabbing the pontiff's hand and telling him "Thank you, your holiness. Awesome speech."
Typing the words "Pope Benedict visit" into Google News this morning brought up a whopping 19,718 results. It was a huge story. Hell, the word "Popemobile" alone returns 3,628.
While much of the national news media's attention was focused on his holiness and his hot wheels, an important story about the Iraq war broke.
On April 17, an elite university in D.C. published a report called "Choosing War: The Decision To Invade Iraq and Its Aftermath."
The report's tone is neatly summarized by its first and last sentences.
The first: "Measured in blood and treasure, the war in Iraq has achieved the status of a major war and a debacle."
The last, a quotation from Winston Churchill: "Always remember, however sure you are that you can easily win, that there would not be a war if the other man did not think he also had a chance."
In between those sentences are 37 pages that eviscerate the Bush administration in general and former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in specific. It faults Bush, Rumsfeld, et al for leading the United States into war based on false assumptions about Iraq's threat to the United States, as well as false assumptions about what kind of postinvasion force would be necessary to stabilize and rebuild Iraq. Rumsfeld, the report says, wanted the war to be a test of his theories about how air power and logistics technology would allow the United States to invade Iraq with a relatively small force.
Prior to 2001, the United States' contingency plan for invading Iraq called for a force of 450,000. Rumsfeld's plan, commissioned by the president after 9/11, called for a force of 140,000. Despite the objections of many of the military's senior commanders, the 140K plan went forward.
Rumsfeld's belief that a small force could knock out Saddam was correct. But his apparent belief that the same small force could stabilize Iraq proved hallucinatory. The inadequacy of Rumsfeld's postwar plan was evident by early summer 2003, yet it wasn't until 2007 that Bush finally changed course.
Even more darning when you consider the university from which the report emanated — the National Defense University, an arm of the Pentagon. The report's author is Joseph J. Collins, deputy assistant secretary of defense from 2001 to 2004.
Type the words "National Defense University" into Google News this morning and you get 88 results.
This article appears in Apr 30 – May 6, 2008.