• Parties involved: Matthew Lee of Inner City Press; Google (News/Blog search service); United Nations Development Programme (UNDP)
  • Source of conflict: Google deliberately removed a the website of a prominent U.N. critic from its News Search ranking after a user complaint
  • Timeline: Blog de-listed and re-listed February 2008
  • Court’s decision: No court case; Google re-listed
  • Impact on blogosphere: Google expressed its perceived difference between news and blog sites, and demonstrated its power to change content listings. Many news consumers saw this as a very controversial and political move, a sign of corruption, and a misuse of power. While nobody questioned the legality of the site’s content in traditional press freedom cases, in this case another website was able to control listing and readership of a blog site, which equates to similar damages to the blog.

    News site Inner City Press, led by its sole reporter Matthew Lee, has recently focused on issues of internal corruption in the United Nations. It has often ranked very high on Google’s News Search feature when users search for news on the U.N. Fox News explains that in February 2008 Lee received a notice from Google, and was removed from the listings a week later:

    “We periodically review news sources, particularly following user complaints, to ensure Google News offers a high quality experience for our users,”[a Feb 8 e-mail from Google to Lee] said. “When we reviewed your site we’ve found that we can no longer include it in Google News.”

    [. . .] [O]n Feb. 1 someone e-mailed Google a complaint about Lee’s Web site, alleging that Inner City Press was a one-man operation, thus violating the Google News ground rule that news organizations it lists must have two or more employees.

    The Google News ground rule mentioned in this article highlights a critical policy for distinguishing between journalists and bloggers, by the number of employees working for a given site. Google defines Lee as a blogger rather than a journalist, regardless of the politics of his content or the traffic on his site.

    Google agreed a week later to restore Inner City Press’s listing on its news search, but will not reveal the user who requested the removal.

    Lee and his site have become an important outlet for whistleblowers by the U.N., so Google’s action was criticized for being a political move perhaps pressured by the UNDP, which Google partnered with in November 2007 to achieve anti-poverty goals.