It's no secret that whistle blowing journalism holds a not so warm place in the hearts of some government corporations, especially those being written about in the whistle blowing outlets.
It's also no secret that many whistle blowing outlets are only small dots compared to the giant conglomerate organizations they face; organizations with the power to squash these little, but loud news outlets.
This process of squashing the metaphorical mosquito of whistle blowing organizations is exactly what happened with Inner City Press, a small news organization doing investigative reporting from the "United Nations to Wall Street to the Inner City."
According to a Fox news article, Matthew Lee, webmaster and primary reporter of Inner City Press, found himself at the mercy (or lack thereof) of Google and presumable the UN, when Inner City's stories stopped appearing on Google after Lee received a letter from the website saying that Lee's website could no longer be published on Google news.
As is the case with many forms of censorship, Google had multiple "justified" reasons for prohibiting Inner City's stories; according to Google's rules, a website cannot be considered a news outlet unless it publicly lists multiple employees.
Google does not list this stipulation in it's rules and regulations. Furthermore, once Lee pointed out that this censorship was wrong, he was told that his stories would be permitted, but it might take a few weeks. After a few weeks? The stories were not showing up anymore, which, according to Google, was a technical error, one that took the world's most powerful web giant, an unspecified amount of time to fix.
Lee said in the article that he believes a UN organization encouraged Google to stop Lee's stories from being published as they were tarnishing the UN as they exposed internal corruption.
There is no confirmation of that, but there is no proof that that isn't the case.
This situation presents so many problems; problems that are not limited to this one instance; problems that, if not powerfully objected to by the people, will continue to happen and then the entire initial goal of journalism will be moot.
The point of journalism, and I have mentioned this in other posts, is to hold the government accountable. If governments are able to stop that from happening, then they are preventing the people from being knowledgable and that is not okay.. especially in democratic states. Furthermore, websites like Google should not be encouraging the government censorship as it only sends a bigger message.
Unfortunately, there is nothing that a little organization can do to stop powerhouses like Google and the government unless they get a big enough following behind them.
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