NewsBusters reports that Apple News has been called out for highlighting left-leaning articles from liberal news media, while excluding those with a conservative perspective. One of the last right-leaning articles was published in November from a London-based outlet regarding the Sudanese persecution, but the article was hidden behind a paywall.
Media Research Center (MRC) published its findings regarding this, and President Donald Trump shared it with his FTC. Chairman Andrew Ferguson put Apple on notice last week: balance out the coverage or you could be facing a violation of the FTC Act, and fines of more than $53,000 per violation. Late last week, it published its first story from a right-wing source, a story from Fox News about colon cancer.
David Bozell, president of MRC, says that “if conservative voices are excluded, that directly shapes public perception at a scale.”
The Apple News app is preloaded on every iPhone, iPad, and many other devices, and Brittany Hughes of MRC says that it is hugely influential.
“So have you ever wondered why your niece or your next-door neighbor or that crazy woman at your kid's school is buying all of this left-wing garbage and sounds like an MSNBC bobblehead every time they open their mouth?” asks Hughes.
She says that it is the most-used news app in the United States. It aggregates news articles from legitimate news sources, but again they all lean left.
“We at the Media Research Center analyzed more than 600 articles featured in the Apple News morning editions in the month of January. Of those, 440 were from left-wing rags like the AP, NBC, The Washington Post, and The New York Times,” says Hughes.
Hughes says that it is leaving huge swaths of the country uninformed.
“This is why millions of Americans don't know about things like the violent criminal aliens being arrested by ICE or the true impact of voter fraud and think that there's evidence that Donald Trump abused children contained in the Epstein files. There's not,” states Hughes.
