How Online Gatekeepers Guard Our View - News Portals' Inclusion and Ranking of Media and Events

Abstract This study examines two news portals, Google News and Yahoo News, using a theoretical framework that incorporates the theory of network gatekeeping (Barzilai-Nahon, 2007) and the notion of search engine bias. The study tests three hypotheses about the relationship between dominance of the news media, proximity of news events to the U.S. interests, and position of the news links on portals' front pages and result pages. The study analyzed 34,277 news items from 1,200 pages retrieved in 60 days in 2006 and 2008. The descriptive data show four major trends: 1) Google News and Yahoo News differed significantly in media inclusion on the front pages, with Yahoo relying on a very limited number of media outlets; 2) the two portals also differed significantly in media inclusion on result pages except for 'Iraq bombing' pages in 2008: Yahoo relied more on agencies and U.S media outlets while Google relied more on non-major media from the U.S. and other countries; 3) both news portals increased the proportion of major media and decreased that of non-major media between 2006 and 2008; and 4) for both news portals, the distribution of media outlets was heavily skewed, with very few media outlets used hundreds of times during the studies period while the majority used only a few times. The hypothesis tests, using combined data of two portals of two years and separate data of each portal of each year, show none of the three hypotheses are fully supported. These findings advance the understanding of the traditional gatekeeping notion in the Internet context. They also challenge the network gatekeeping theory regarding the role of the gated relative to the gatekeeper, and caution against any sweeping generalization about news portals as a single entity. Keywords: News portal, search engine, gatekeeping, online news, world news Introduction Thanks to the thousands of news websites available online today, our view of the world has expanded in an unprecedented manner. The age of dependency on a few international news wires has long gone; we now enter an era where news from different corners of the world is constantly fed onto personal computer screens by both major global news media and numerous smaller news outlets. As with any type of online information, news on the World Wide Web is no longer scarce; it is now abundant. Abundance, while clearly preferable to scarcity, has its own pitfall. Navigating through the intricate Web to get to a desired online destination is a daunting task, especially to inexperienced Web users. It is simply impossible for any individual to scan through all news websites, let alone thoroughly assess them and evaluate their credibility, hence the need for certain assistance. On the World Wide Web, news portals exist for such purpose, offering a broad array of worldwide resources and services to maximize the efficiency of online users who want to know what goes on around the globe. The notion of news portals being the gateways to worldwide news is intriguing because it implies the process of gatekeeping. It is rather surprising, though, to find few scholarly works (e.g., Gerhart, 2004; Schroeder and Kralemann, 2005; Ulken, 2005) probing into the world of news portals. This study is an attempt to fill the void. It examines news portals, a type of web portals that provides aggregated news from thousands of news sites, often with the help of an embedded search engine for news search. The purpose is to understand how news portals, by way of news link display, include and rank media outlets and news events on the front pages and the result pages. The world section pages of Google News and Yahoo News, the two most popular news portals in the U.S., are the investigated sites. A recent survey shows approximately seventy five percent of Web users begin their search for online information through a search engine (Kennedy, 2005). According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project, the use of search engines ranks second only to email use as the most popular activity online (Pew, 2009). …