The particular blacklist that the Daily Caller unearthed, deceptive_news_blacklist_domains.txt, applied to entire sites, and it was intended to prevent blacklisted sites from showing up in any of the special search results.
Based on this information, it is clear that Google CEO Sundar Pichai did not tell the truth to Congress when he said, “We don’t manually intervene on any particular search result.”
The blacklist was manually generated...
...by Google’s Trust and Safety team.