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People often complain about biased views in mainstream media. That media is inherently biased is not a disputable issue. If anything, it is indisputably true. After all, it is a human behind the lens and the pens. How could one hope to ever provide an objective, unbiased picture of the real world, through a portal of finite dimensions? Should we just give up consuming news except for the sake of entertainment, a commendable use to which it seems increasingly to be put?

Therein lies the fundamental problem of journalism. While the problem can never be solved completely, I believe that it can be mitigated "in the limit". What I mean is that it is possible to define an abstract, albeit unattainable, standard of "purely objective" journalism, and devise ways that approach it with increasing closeness. Google News is one such approach and, I submit, the best we have to date of as unbiased a presentation as possible. In this respect, I was strongly attracted to a metaphorical viewpoint.

The following parallel occurred to me as I was defending Google News to a technical friend. I said that Google News does to journalism what TCP does to IP. For those not "in-the-know" IP is the Internet Protocol, the language used by computers to talk to each other over the vast Internet. Yet, incredibly, IP is unreliable. It provides no guarantees that packets of information you send to your recipients will reach them in the correct sequence, and much less whether they will reach at all. How then does the average Internet user today enjoy email, blogs and e-commerce, and even secure banking transactions, all built over the admittedly fallible Internet? The answer lies in a layer called TCP or the Transmission Control Protocol. TCP is concerned with end-to-end communication and provides the reliability guarantees that we want. (Of course, one can imagine layers built over TCP to provide increasingly higher levels of reliability to approach true reliability "in the limit"). TCP mediates all communication between Internet users by intercepting our packets to IP, and ensuring via suitable confirmations and acknowledgments from the remote end whether our messages make it through. If they don't, TCP tries again, and again, until it either succeeds in delivering our package, or letting us know of an underlying problem. The beauty of TCP is that it starts out with the assumption of an unreliable Internet, and yet, instead of throwing up its hands and giving up, it builds on top of it to deliver something reliable!

I believe Google News has done exactly the same thing to journalism. It starts off with the assumption that mainstream media is inherently biased. But instead of throwing up its hands and giving up, it leverages the vastness of the space of such biases, and identifies (although indirectly) a collection, or some subset of biased views such that the sum total bias of this collection is as small as possible! Indeed, what better way for objective persons to decide for themselves on the "righteousness" of a war, than to read about articles from both sides, juxtaposed to each other!