Apple News and Google News are silently starving Americans of right-leaning voices, and the numbers finally prove it.
A Media Research Center study found that the publications most prominently featured on Apple News and Google News have backed Democrats for president 31 times across ten election cycles — and Republicans exactly zero. Microsoft's MSN was only slightly less lopsided: its top five outlets went 25-2 for Democrats. Tens of millions of Americans rely on these aggregators for daily news, and the algorithm is doing the censoring before a single word gets read.
This isn't about endorsements swinging elections. It's about shaping how the public sees the country long before politics enters the picture. As MRC's Dan Schneider put it: "Almost half of voting-age Americans own an Apple iPhone," and "all its phones come pre-installed with Apple News. Swipe right and you're inundated with Apple's cherry-picked news stories." And "most people don't even know they are being fed a steady stream of leftist narratives."
The MRC study isn't an outlier. In April, the nonpartisan bias ranker AllSides reported that just 1% of Google News articles — excluding user-tailored results — come from outlets ranked as right-leaning. Apple News managed only 2%. AllSides' Julie Mastrine called it straight: "Right-leaning media is really underrepresented" — which the New York Post correctly tagged as an epic understatement. AllSides had already ranked Apple as leaning left back in 2023.
Big Tech doesn't need to ban content when it can simply bury it. This is censorship by code — silent, invisible, and far more effective than any takedown notice. Recall how establishment outlets dismissed the New York Post's accurate Hunter Biden laptop scoop right before the 2020 election, amplified the Russian collusion hoax for years, and denounced any discussion of the Wuhan lab-leak as racist conspiracy-mongering. The aggregators amplified all of it.
FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson has already pressed Apple on the issue. In February, he urged the company to undertake "a comprehensive review" of its terms of service to "ensure that Apple News' curation of articles is consistent with those terms and representations made to consumers" — and, if not, "to take corrective action swiftly." Whether Apple has done a thing about it remains unclear.
With midterms approaching and control of Congress on the line, the question is simple: will Apple and Google rebalance their feeds on their own, or will Washington have to step in and make them? The founders didn't fight for a free press so Silicon Valley algorithms could decide which press Americans get to see.
