Algorithmic Clientelism. How News Aggregators Favor Corporate Media Outlets While Acting As Agenda Setters - a Case Study on Google News

The emergence of technologies enabling sophisticated feedback loops between users and media, combined with users' active participation within modern news infrastructures, has led to a proliferation of new concepts in classical gatekeeping and agenda-setting theories — such as network gatekeeping, decentralized gatekeeping, reverse agenda-setting, and agenda melding (Kim & Lee, 2006; Vargo et al., 2014; Guo, 2017). These emphasize the user's influence on news presentation, effectively shifting the responsibility for constructing social reality from the media to the consumers.

However, empirical studies and analyses of corporate materials reveal that, even in algorithmic media, user influence on news presentation remains limited. For example, Google News, both a popular news app and a search engine, continues to present the same "Top Stories" to all users with the same language settings within a given country, highlighting the constraints of user impact on hierarchy of issue salience in news coverage.

In our study, we examined Google as an agenda-setter and a non-human actor in social communication. Specifically, we asked: How does Google News (Polish language version) frame the news on its Home Page? We operationalized framing as the preferential selection of specific news sources over others. To investigate this, we collected data by web scraping information from the Top Stories section over a 30-day period, capturing data sixteen times each day.

Our findings indicate that Google News favors content produced by large news corporations. This research contributes to modern agenda-setting literature, highlighting the interplay between the agendas of different types of media. We argue that Google's relationship with big media corporations resembles a form of clientelism, as the aggregator rewards partners who submit to its stringent visibility guidelines. In this sense, despite its mission to “make the world’s information universally accessible and useful,” Google operates like a Weberian bureaucracy, reinforcing hierarchies and concentrating power.