According to Noel Sheppard of NewsBusters and other sources, Google removed a couple of anti-Islamic sites from Google News due to alleged hate speech.
The New Media Journal, one of the removed sources (others were MichNews.com and Jawa Report), in reaction created an “Anti-Google Search Engine Index” listing such sites as Gigablast, AltaVista, ASK, MSN or Yahoo “who do not manipulate content based on the ideology of political correctness” (I’m not sure they heard of Yahoo and MSN’s involvement in China).
Now, I think we need to make an important distinction between manual removals in Google web search (like Nazi sites in Germany, or human rights sites in China) and manual removal of results in Google News.
The distinction is that Google web search is (was) a self-proclaimed mirror of the web, whereas Google News always had been a hand-picked selection of news sites deemed “worthy” by whatever standards Google employs.