Yeah - either it needs to have so much volume that it's representative, or they need to include some kind of demographic to stop the results getting skewed.
As a mechanism it's an interesting idea. There are probably other twitter-ish aggregation start-up ideas that you might be able to get out of this.... e.g. send an sms/mms and it's posted as "news" for that geographic area. You could then aggregate news for relevance for a given area (e.g. local, state, national, world).
