The Patriot Post® · Big Tech's News Aggregator Leftist Bias
Where you get your news is as important as the news itself. That’s because there is no such thing as an objectively neutral news outlet. Like every human on planet earth, every news organization has its political and social bias. That said, there are news outlets that strive to be as objective as possible and have sought to establish journalistic standards to get closer to this goal.
However, over the last several decades, and especially over the last decade, mainstream or legacy news media companies have increasingly been exposed for their mostly leftist bias. This would include all networks, such as ABC, NBC, and CBS; cable news stations, such as CNN and MSNOW (formerly MSNBC); and print media, such as The New York Times and The Washington Post. Indeed, Fox News has really been the only major news media outlet that reported on the news from a predominantly right-leaning bias.
Some of these media outlets, like MSNOW, have been explicit about their leftist bias. However, the vast majority have denied or downplayed their leftist bias, claiming to simply be reporting the news. Furthermore, they have also sought to establish the false perception that these mainstream legacy media outlets are the only truly reputable and trustworthy sources of news, while at the same time declaring every right-leaning news organization as biased and therefore untrustworthy.
By playing what amounts to a shell game, these “reputable” legacy media outlets also cultivate the notion that they are the only media enterprises trustworthy enough to act as the gatekeepers of what news and narratives should be presented to the public.
And in the age of new media, the Leftmedia’s near monopoly on the news Americans consume has been significantly damaged, if not broken entirely. This is demonstrated by Americans’ low trust in mainstream media.
Legacy media has fought back, both by setting up new arbiters of truth, the so-called “fact checkers,” and by groups like NewsGuard that present themselves as non-biased auditors of news organizations. Of course, both types of organizations exist primarily to protect the reputations of legacy leftmedia outfits while disparaging right-leaning and conservative media outlets.
Thankfully, media watchdog outfits like Media Research Center have done yeoman’s work investigating and documenting the legacy media’s leftist bias.
Recently, MRC exposed another, more subtle example of Leftmedia bias. That bias is found in news aggregators, specifically the Apple News app and Microsoft’s MSN.
What MRC found was that the news outlets that both these Big Tech companies source for their news aggregators are almost entirely Leftmedia organizations.
For example, last month, MRC found that just 2% of the articles Apple News aggregated came from right-leaning news outlets. And that 2% was an improvement from the 100 days prior, when MRC noted that not a single article Apple News aggregated to the app came from a right-leaning source. Of that 2% change, MRC President David Bozell observed, “Two percent is not progress. It’s damage control.” He added, “If public exposure and a federal inquiry only yield a modest adjustment, that suggests the bias we documented was deeply embedded. … This is not about token inclusion. It’s about whether one of the most powerful information gatekeepers in the country operates fairly.”
Similarly, MRC found that MSN operated from the same leftist bias, noting that of 70 articles on its new aggregator last month, just two came from right-leaning media organizations, Fox News and Fox Business. To make matters worse, neither of those two stories dealt with politics or significant cultural issues; instead, they were what’s best described as lifestyle fluff pieces: an interview with singer LeAnn Rimes and an exposé on actress Jane Seymour sporting a bathing suit for her 75th birthday.
Bozell charged, “MSN is attempting to drive the political narrative by cherry-picking the outlets that hate President Trump the most. Somebody needs to explain why the number-one cable news outlet in America is being sent to the back of the bus.”
Other conservative media outlets like the New York Post, Daily Mail, Breitbart, Newsmax, and The Washington Times are effectively nonexistent to MSN’s news aggregator.
How does this happen? MRC explains, “Because MSN is the hard-wired default for Windows and the Edge browser, Microsoft is force-feeding this lopsided reality to millions of users who never opted into a leftist echo chamber." MRC contends that MSN and Apple are creating the ”illusion of balance.“
Like NewsGuard and the litany of self-declared "fact-checkers,” this action by these Big Tech companies is yet another underhanded effort to put their thumbs on the scale of public opinion with the aim of leading the public in a leftist direction, all the while acting like they’re simply giving the American public what it wants.