The Orion--CENSORED!

For Week 11:

It's awesome to have stories from The Orion get picked up on Google News. In fact, Google News is one of biggest referrers to The Orion's Web site.

In fact, on many search terms concerning the Matthew Carrington, The Orion will often be shown higher in relevance than a certain local professional daily.

But, I saw something today on Google News that made me wonder what exactly is going on, and how often people are getting the full story on Google.

My column, The Online Lines, runs on the site every Sunday. Today, my column argued in favor of Proposition 73, which would amend the state constitution and require notifying the parent or guardian of a minor wishing to receive an abortion.

When my column shows up on Google News (run a search on "Proposition 73" (with the quotation marks, and look by date) this is how some accompanying text taken from my column reads:

What's your position on Proposition 73, which would require parental notification for minors wanting an abortion? Didn't enjoy it? ...

Not really anything that intresting, except for one thing. The first question and second question shown aren't right next to each other, but are in fact seperated by 60 words. A portion of those words included lyrics of a song yelled at anti-abortion demonstrators that people could likely find offensive. Normally, when leaving a section like that out, it would require using an ellipsis (...)

Here's how the first part of my column actually reads:

What's your position on Proposition 73, which would require parental notification for minors wanting an abortion?

If your answer was no, try to comfortably sing these song lyrics—sung toward pro-life demonstrators at the March for Life in January—to the tune of "Jesus Loves the Little Children:"

Jesus should have been aborted,
Mary wanted a career.
Abortion is a woman's right,
So we won't give up the fight,
Until you Christian assholes go away.

Didn't enjoy it? Maybe you even found it repulsive?

Needless to say, I was really stunned when I saw this. I had no idea Google censors portions of what shows up on their news pages.

This is an interesting jump-off point for a lot of questions: What does Google decide to censor? Who determines what is censored? How often do they censor? Have they ever received a complaint about censoring?

It's really shocking, and I'll probably cross-post to The Orion Blog later, with some editing.