>but as long as they are based in fact, I consider that reporting of the news of the day

The issue is that they get to pick which facts are reported and which are not. They could publish 100 articles on all the good things Google is doing, or they could publish 100 articles on all the bad things google is doing, and they don't have to lie to do either of these things, but yet they would both give their readers very warped perspectives on reality.

We see this a lot in politics, where we can have far-right and far-left websites that both technically report nothing but 'facts', but due to the extreme sampling biases used, present completely opposing views of reality.

I'm not defending Google, I'm just pointing out who is running the show here, and the answer is the New York Times. They decide what happens next. Their next article could talk about all the positive discussion and improvements Google is making in this area, or it could talk about how many additional employees are upset and don't think things will get better.

Valid point, and worth noting this also happened with the Iraq War.

While there was deception, it seemed like a much larger public impact was caused by news momentum and nobody voicing a counterpoint.

That a biased narrative can be constructed only out of reasonable facts is fairly well supported in recent history.

The NYT also publishes good things about Google and it's products.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/personaltech/g...

Google is a major visible corporation that is used by the vast majority of US and probably world internet users.

Calling big companies, politicians, and other public figures and groups with power to task on their mistakes is definitely something I expect of a journalist.

The NYT has an editoral voice and makes choices in it's coverage. But Google could also have chosen to not give massive payouts to problematic people. Acting like the NYT, which is just covering the story, is the problem seems a little weird.

Maybe you are the sort that believes that the news media is the enemy of the people.

That's what happens when they are conditioned to produce content that maximizes view/click counts. Who created that incentive? Google did.

Oh yeah there were no tabloids before Google, and all the news was completely unbiased too.

While this may be true, it falls flat once you consider that this has been done to many non-google organizations too.

You only get to understand what a massive role Google plays in the like/click/view generating ecosystem when you spend time in a modern digital publishing/advertising/marketing firm. It's like watching a huge cattle auction where peoples views/clicks etc are being traded 24*7.