Imagine it’s Valentine’s Day at Silicon Valley Middle School. The cafeteria is covered in construction-paper hearts. Everyone pretends not to care — while caring very much. And the most popular kids — the ones who decide who’s cool, who eats lunch alone, and who gets stuffed into lockers — are quietly deciding who deserves a Valentine and who gets the dreaded, “Sorry, we’re just friends.”
Now swap out the middle schoolers for Apple News, Google News, Microsoft’s MSN, and Yahoo News, and you have a pretty good picture of today’s media ecosystem.
Instead of candy grams, these platforms hand out something far more valuable: visibility, traffic, and perceived legitimacy. Algorithms play matchmaker. Editorial choices determine who gets asked to the dance, who goes stag, and who doesn’t even get through the door.
The pattern is hard to ignore.
Research from the Media Research Center examining the “Big 4 News Apps” found that left-leaning outlets dominate coverage, while right-leaning outlets are routinely sidelined or completely buried.
Start with Google News, the alpha dog at the lunch table. Google appears especially fond of The New York Times — not a casual acquaintance, but the kind of devotion that fills a notebook margin with hearts. Between Halloween and Valentine’s Day, Google featured about twice as many New York Times stories (215) as its next most-featured outlets, CNN (122) and the BBC (105). Because Google’s news feed appears by default on millions of Android and Samsung devices, that preference carries enormous national reach.
Looking at 106 days of data since Halloween, Google News promoted 1,757 stories. Almost 70% came from left-leaning outlets, 29% from centrist sources, but just 2% from right-leaning media.
Like Google, Apple News also has a bestie from the print world. The Washington Post receives frequent top placement and prominent visibility. Since Halloween, Apple has featured the Post 109 times. Other regulars in Apple’s rotation include NBC News (89), Reuters (86), and the Associated Press (85).
Michael Short/Getty Images
Overall, of AllSides-rated outlets, Apple News featured 75% left-leaning outlets, 25% centrist outlets — and zero right-leaning outlets in the period studied. Zero is on purpose. Zero means being locked out of the dance. Zero is indefensible.
Next comes Microsoft’s MSN, whose reach comes from its enormous footprint on desktop computers. While its distribution is not quite as disturbing as Apple’s or Google’s, its preferences are still clear. MSN is more than smitten with Newsweek, publishing 316 Newsweek stories between Halloween and Valentine’s Day. That level of attention would make any publisher blush.
MSN’s mix included about 10% right-leaning outlets and 37% centrist outlets — higher shares than its competitors, but still leaving Left-leaning sources with the largest slice of attention at 53%.
And then there’s Yahoo News. It’s easy to joke about Yahoo, but the platform draws more than 200 million monthly views, something achieved by only three other outlets. Think of Yahoo as the bad boy who got held back a grade but has a date at every party. And Yahoo certainly plays the field.
Yahoo occasionally features right-leaning outlets, but it has a serious thing for smaller, radical outlets — Buzzfeed, Salon, the New Republic, Rolling Stone, Huffington Post and Mediaite.
Yahoo is also unique among the Big 4 in relying heavily on its own in-house reporting. Those stories leaned left and accounted for a large share of featured content (269 stories). Of the 1,715 stories Yahoo promoted in the study period, 88% came from left-leaning outlets (by far the most of any of the news apps), 6% from centrist organizations, and 6% from right-leaning sources.
Defenders of these platforms argue they are simply promoting “mainstream” outlets with proven “reliability.” But Americans aren’t buying that claim. Gallup polling shows trust in national media has never been lower.
There are reasons for that collapse in confidence. Many Americans remember years of breathless coverage of the Russia collusion narrative, the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story, the dismissal of the Wuhan lab-leak evidence, and persistent shielding of President Biden’s cognitive deficiencies. They’ve also watched elitist media advocate aggressively for DEI, ESG and anti-ICE movements — while insisting they are neutral observers.
Distribution is power. A newsroom can produce solid reporting, but Apple, Google, MSN, and Yahoo are clearly trying to control the narrative. The political Left has long understood that institutions shape culture and public opinion. Today, the Big 4 news apps are the institutions: enormously powerful, largely opaque, and virtually unaccountable to the public.
So yes, it’s Valentine’s Day. And in the digital cafeteria, Google, Apple, MSN, and Yahoo are still handing out cards to the favored few and pushing others into lockers.
But another holiday is coming. The Fourth of July is only months away, and federal regulators are examining whether dominant tech platforms have unfairly restricted competition in parts of the media ecosystem. Congress should also continue to investigate the role Big Tech plays in shaping what Americans see and don’t see.
In a free country, the biggest companies should not determine who is allowed into the dance and who is not, who gets a voice and who gets left out in the cold. Freedom must be available to all.
* * *
Dan Schneider is Vice President for Free Speech at the Media Research Center.
The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.
.png)
.png)
