After a week in the cold, and protests from various quarters, Inner-City Press with its coverage of the United Nations has been restored to Google News — more about this on Fox and Inner-City. But the mystery remains. The complaint that persuaded Google to de-list Inner-City from its News base reportedly came from one person. That person found it worth protesting to Google that Inner-City Press, run by Matthew Russell Lee, might have too few staff to qualify as a news outlet.
So who made the complaint? The clues suggest the complainant knew enough about the UN and its press corps to home in on Inner-City, and tally its manpower; and for some reason cared enough to check that against the criteria imposed by Google for listing an outfit in its News base. At the same time this was a complainant apparently influential enough so that Google, having received one complaint, acted upon it to remove Inner-City.
This is of course a world of many mysteries, and we cannot rule out there there is an online shepherd somewhere on the Mongolian steppe who fits this profile. But the probabilities point to someone much closer to home. If this complainant has nothing to hide, then why not come forward, speak up by name, and allow for a fair debate?
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