JD Lasica's got a story on OJR this week questioning whether the Google news algorithms somehow squew to the right.
The conclusion? Google New's organizing principles may favor the search terms used by smaller media, who more often write about John Kerry (as opposed to Kerry). Lasica also looks at the human-edited Yahoo News, which has a small, focused team managing the output, and lets those folks have the last work. Says Yahoo News Product Manager Jeff Birkeland: "It would be extremely challenging to write a program that catches up to what we're able to do on a daily basis."
Conclusion: John Henry wins. No journalist will ever agree that a machine could do a better job--and why should they?