One big way you can tell that “media solutions company” AllSides has a right-wing bias is by looking at who is promoting its work. The Media Research Center is a big promoter, of course, but another is WorldNetDaily. An anonymously written May 4 article stated:
Conservatives looking for an alternative to Google news to escape the leftist ideological bent need not look at Bing for an answer, according to a new report.
The Daily Signal, citing an AllSides study, said Bing skews even further left than Google.
“People completely underestimate the dangers of bias when it comes to search engines. They think they are getting balanced information, and they’re not,” John Gable, co-founder and CEO of AllSides, the organization that conducted the study, explained to the Daily Signal.
“Instead, they’re being thrown into divisive filter bubbles that make them confidently ignorant.”
AllSides dedicates itself to presenting balanced news, and analyzed Bing during March.
“The analysis found that 83% of the articles on Bing News’ homepage came from media outlets AllSides rates as Lean Left or Left, while only 13% came from media outlets rated Center, and 0% came from sources rated Lean Right or Right,” the Daily Signal reported.
As we documented when the MRC promoted this same “study,” AllSides offers no evidence that the content of the individual stories themselves have any sort of bias — it’s just a broad-brush attack on outlets it doesn’t like — and it proclaims major news outlets as the New York Times, CNN, CBS, ABC and Politico to be “left-leaning,” something it even admits is subjective.
Joseph Farah invoked this study in his May 5 column as an excuse to whine yet again how WND has been demonetized:
Slowly but surely, the leftists got their way and happily and effectively destroyed the First Amendment in one lifetime. Poof, and it was gone.
They did this through monopolizing advertising and search results for leftist sites while denying conservative ones. When that didn’t work, sites like WND were PERMANENTLY DEMONETIZED, severely inhibiting our ability to participate in the online advertising world.
Google not only controls the flow of advertising and search results, but its No.2 competitor, Bing, the Microsoft-owned search engine, is arguably worse, according to a recent study.
[…]This fascinating portrait of the state of the cyber media was done by Tyler O’Neil, the managing editor of the Daily Signal.
Is this what the Founding Fathers had in mind when they crafted the Constitution and made the First Amendment the shrine of our bill of rights, the most important of our freedoms? No.
It cannot be an accident or chance. WND does not come up at all in Bing searches. We’re considered fringe – though we arguably speak to the biggest populous movement in the U.S., the MAGA community.
Farah then cited another AllSides work offering similar results (which we’ve also debunked):
In March, a Google spokesperson countered the earlier survey’s results, claiming AllSides’ “methodology is deeply flawed” and arguing that the study “cherry-picked a few topics and ran for a very brief period of time, presenting a misleading picture of Google News.”
Google News is a very important tool of the search engine. Before Donald Trump became president as the “biggest threat to freedom in the United States,” WND often found its news reports prominently placed in those Google reports. Obviously, not anymore as our nation continues marching toward fascism.
[…]Google is failing the nation. Period. And Bing skews even further left than Google.
Farah concluded:
To quote Gable, again: “People completely underestimate the dangers of bias when it comes to search engines. They think they are getting balanced information, and they’re not. Instead, they’re being thrown into divisive filter bubbles that make them confidently ignorant.”
That’s the state of the nation – becoming confidently ignorant. And that’s the intent. Better to manipulate us. They’re having their way with America.
Given the amount of fake news and misinformation WND publishes — which is the real reason WND has been demonetized by people like Google who don’t want to be associated with such shoddy work — it seems that Farah is the one who wants his readers to be “confidently ignorant.”