August 28, 2018

Donald Trump Is Tired of Being Screwed by Google

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Donald Trump is pissed:

Google search results for “Trump News” shows only the viewing/reporting of Fake New Media. In other words, they have it RIGGED, for me & others, so that almost all stories & news is BAD. Fake CNN is prominent. Republican/Conservative & Fair Media is shut out. Illegal? 96% of results on “Trump News” are from National Left-Wing Media, very dangerous. Google & others are suppressing voices of Conservatives and hiding information and news that is good. They are controlling what we can & cannot see. This is a very serious situation-will be addressed!

And what’s to be done about this dire situation?

The Trump administration is “taking a look” at whether Google and its search engine should be regulated by the government, Larry Kudlow, President Trump’s economic adviser, said Tuesday outside the White House. “We’ll let you know,” said Kudlow. “We’re taking a look at it.”

Well, let’s take a look at what I get when I open a Google window and search for Trump:

  • CNN
  • Fox News
  • Vice News
  • Politico
  • Trump’s Twitter feed
  • Guardian
  • Politico
  • NBC News
  • News about #trump on Twitter
  • Donald J. Trump for President
  • Washington Post
  • Fox News
  • CNN
  • Pittsburgh Post Gazette
  • ABC6OnYourSide
  • Washington Times
  • CNBC
  • Vanity Fair
  • The Atlantic
  • New York
  • Wikipedia
  • ABC News
  • Trump Hotels.com
  • Vanity Fair
  • The Atlantic
  • Trump National Golf Club
  • White House.gov
  • New York Times
  • YouTube
  • Bloomberg
  • Trump Tower New York
  • Twitch.tv/trumpsc
  • USA Today
  • New Republic
  • RealClear Politics

I got bored of transcribing sites after that, But it looks to me like about a third of them are sympathetic to Trump. The other two-thirds are standard news sites, and sure enough, their coverage is mostly about whatever dumb thing Trump has done lately. But what do you expect? It’s not like Trump gives them much to work with.

Anyway, it’s obvious that Trump can’t “do anything” about this. It’s just another effort to bully someone into tweaking their algorithms to give him more positive coverage. First it was Facebook, then Twitter, and now Google. They’re all “shadow banning” the sources who are sympathetic to Trump, you see, and that’s an outrage. The White House demands that everyone give him more positive coverage!

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

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Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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