Google Censors a Site That Exposes United Nations Corruption

Posted by Liliana Segura, AlterNet at 3:08 PM on February 20, 2008.

Anyone on the U.N. corruption beat in the past couple years has likely come across Inner City Press, a no-frills United Nations-focused news site that happens to be "the most effective and important media organization for U.N. whistleblowers," according to Bea Edwards of the Government Accountability Project (GAP). Since December 2005, Inner City Press has run stories spotlighting wrongdoing and malfeasance within the United Nations Development Program, from Turkey to West Africa to North Korea.

Inner City Press has filled an important niche: "Current whistleblower protections at the U.N. are grossly inadequate," according to GAP. With would-be whistleblowers vulnerable to retaliation, the news site has "reported the arcane tactics of silencing the free speech of employees of conscience in the U.N. system."

Now, it looks like Inner City Press itself is the subject of retaliation -- and not, at first glance, by the U.N. Instead, the site has been buried by the very search engine that has driven traffic to it for more than two years: Google News.

Earlier this month, editor-in-chief Matthew Lee received an ominous message on behalf of Google:

"We periodically review news sources, particularly following user complaints, to ensure Google News offers a high quality experience for our users … When we reviewed your site we've found that we can no longer include it in Google News."

Are "user complaints" coming from the U.N.?

Surprise: FOX News is on the trail:

In November 2007, during a press conference in which Google announced its partnership with the UNDP to achieve anti-poverty goals, Lee earned a less-than-friendly response when he asked why the Internet company hadn't signed a global human-rights and anti-censorship compact -- elements in the U.N.'s Millennium Development Goals…

It was this incident, Lee said, that put him in the crosshairs. Lee said he felt certain that the Internet company and the international agency had now joined forces to make his work less accessible to the public.

"I've been covering … U.N. stories, three to four a day, for two years, and for the last two years there's been no problem at all," Lee said. "Then that Friday, I received the e-mail. There's something a little skeezy here. I think that Google got involved with the U.N. on these Millennium goals and thought, this is the United Nations, if they tell you some small Web site is a thorn in their side and there's a credible reason you could remove them from your news service, you do it."

Sound conspiratorial? A bit. And yet …

"Google's reference to 'user complaints' is disturbing," says Bea Edwards. "We can't help wondering who is complaining about Inner City Press. Considering their continuing coverage of U.N. whistleblower issues, it's not too difficult to venture a guess."

Read the GAP press release here.

Tagged as: whistleblower, inner city press, google, united nations

Liliana Segura is an AlterNet staff writer and editor of the Rights & Liberties section.