Apple News promotes left-leaning media outlets as it shuts out conservative sites entirely: study
Apple’s popular news app has been aggressively promoting articles from left-leaning news outlets — even as it has all but shut down posts from more conservative publications, according to an explosive study.The Media Research Center, a conservative watchdog group focused on tracking media bias, analyzed a total of 620 stories that were featured by Apple News in high-traffic morning time slots between Jan.1 and Jan.
31.The Apple News feed is a mixture of stories curated by a team of in-house editors and some by algorithm.Of the 620 stories, a whopping 440 came from outlets that are rated as left-leaning, while the remaining 180 were published by centrist outlets.
Meanwhile, outlets which are considered right-leaning — including The Post — were shut out entirely.In January, Apple News featured a total of 72 articles by Washington Post, 54 articles by the Associated Press, 50 by NBC News, 34 by The Guardian and 25 by NPR, according to MRC’s data.It published 54 Wall Street Journal articles.
The numbers for The Post and Fox News were zero and zero, respectively.MRC’s researchers relied on media bias ratings compiled by AllSides, a nonpartisan organization that uses a multi-partisan panel of experts — with two members from the left, two from the center and two from the right – that are trained to spot media bias.It also conducts blind surveys of ordinary Americans, then averages both sets of results to come up with a rating.AllSides’s experts did not participate in the MRC study or have any advance knowledge about its findings.
Nevertheless, Julie Mastrine, who serves as director of AllSides’ media bias rating system, said she was “not surprised at all” by the results.“The bottom line is that Americans that are relying on these Big Tech companies to provide them with news are not getting a balanced view and they’re not getting the full scope of perspectives available,” Mastrine said in an interview.In a statement provided after this stor...