A study by a conservative media watchdog shows that the four major search engines are heavily promoting mostly liberal news.
So now the numbers confirm what we’ve long suspected.
Dan Schneider of the Media Research Center calls the approach a “subliminal form of propaganda” that could potentially be illegal, arguing that these platforms are suppressing conservative voices.
Schneider, the organization’s vice president for Free Speech America, alleges that major news-aggregation apps are heavily biased toward liberal, left-leaning or leftist narratives.
The “Big Four” apps, which Schneider identifies as Apple News, Google News, Yahoo and MSN are the primary platforms feeding liberal bias to the masses, his analysis shows.
Of 620 stories featured in January on Apple News, for instance, 440 of them came from left-leaning outlets.
The same study showed that right-leaning outlets, such as the New York Post and Fox News, were often entirely excluded from the top, high-traffic morning slots.
The report cited high-frequency inclusion of stories from The Washington Post, The Associated Press, NBC News and NPR – all leftist outlets.
The liberal ideology is baked into the cake, so to speak, because these apps come pre-installed on devices, meaning users may be unknowingly consuming, as Schneider calls it, a “steady stream of leftist narratives.”
The center’s research confirms the suspicions of a 2023 study by AllSides that also gave Apple News a “lean left” rating.
The media center said its aim is to highlight what it describes as “Big Tech” editorial bias, which it argues shapes public opinion by controlling the information displayed on news feeds.
Scorecard:
✓ Maine Wire: 147,000 Facebook followers (22,000 increase in past month.)
✓ Portland Press Herald: 93,000 Facebook followers (1,000 increase in past month.)
