The Media Research Center repeated its baseless insistence that including credible news sources in news searches is somehow “election interference” in an Aug. 27 post by Luis Cornelio:
Google is actively assisting Vice President Kamala Harris in maintaining her media honeymoon by keeping users in the dark about her radical policy views, including her support for abolishing ICE and threatening to end private health insurance, a new MRC Free Speech America study found.
The study revealed a staggering bias in Google’s favoring of left-leaning media by a nearly 10:1 margin in both Google Search and the Google News tab. MRC conducted the searches on Aug. 21, covering four search prompts across both Google Search and the Google News tab. These findings raise serious concerns about Google’s influence on the outcome of the 2024 election, echoing its interference in the 2022 midterm elections.
MRC completed the searches using a clean environment, discovering that Google has promoted left-leaning media sites at a shocking 17:2 ratio in Google Search results. The bias was equally pronounced in the Google News tab for search results, where left-leaning outlets appeared at a 19:2 ratio. This is a nearly 10:1 biased ratio on each tab.
MRC used the media bias chart by AllSides to determine the ideological leaning of the outlets featured in Google’s search results. Among the 19 media outlets that received favorable placements in the Google News tab results were The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC, Politico, Slate, Vox and The Guardian. In contrast, only three right-leaning media outlets — The Federalist, New York Post and The Washington Times — were scarcely featured.
Cornelio ofered no evidence that those “leftist” media outlets are actually leftist, at least to the extreme tnat the Federalist, Washington Times and New York Post are explicitly right-wing — and, of course, he never examined any of the articles from those “leftist” outlets for purported bias. He added:
This new study followed the release of a Media Research Center/McLaughlin & Associates survey showing that between 71 and 86 percent of Democratic and Independent Biden voters are unaware of Harris’s previous support for radical policies.
We’ve documented that this is a meaningless and deceptive push poll bought by the MRC from Donald Trump’s election pollster — a reminder that the MRC cares about getting Trump elected, not about “media research.”
The MRC played this game again in a Sept. 25 post by Gabriela Pariseau:
Google has a long history of interfering in American elections in favor of the most liberal politicians. In the lead-up to the 2024 election, like the most recent presidential debate, Google is giving Americans the rigged ABC treatment.
In the past, Google buried the campaign websites of Republican candidates. Now the search giant very clearly pads its search results about political candidates with leftist legacy news articles, many of which are hostile to Republicans and either neutral or favorable toward Democrats. Readers will have to sift through the biased news before they even see the organic results of their searches, let alone a candidate’s website.
MRC Free Speech America researchers conducted searches on Sept. 6 for “donald trump presidential race 2024” and “kamala harris presidential race 2024” to determine where Google Search would position each candidate’s presidential campaign website. In both searches, news from leftist-biased legacy outlets like CNN and The New York Times populated the top of the search results.
Pariseau brought a certain “liberal bias”-obsessed co-worker to whine about this:
MRC Free Speech America worked alongside MRC NewsBusters Executive Editor Tim Graham who analyzed these articles for bias. He noted that not every story needs to show a blatant leftist bias to be problematic because Google credentials the news sources by elevating them in search results. “Google [is] telling the reader that the most reliable sources of campaign news are CNN, NBC, The Times, The Post, Politico and The Economist—liberal sources all.”
The Washington Post live updates page, which showed up in the results for both searches, featured slanted headlines in its list of articles about the election.
“This is not neutral, there are snotty headlines and opinion pieces,” Graham said. He cited headlines like: “Analysis: Trump’s sudden move to re-litigate sexual abuse claims goes off the rails,” “Hunter Biden’s tragedy and turmoil shadowed the Biden presidency” and “Nikki Haley says she’s willing to campaign for Donald Trump, but he hasn’t asked her.”
How convenient that Graham doesn’t have to actually prove bias in a specific story because he’s already painted the outlet with the broad brush of “liberal bias.” Graham also didn’t explain how exactly those headlines he cited are inaccurate, however much he finds them “snotty.” Still, he continued:
The Economist article titled “Donald Trump v Kamala Harris: who’s leading the polls?” included subtle but still evident bias.
“Averaging the polls seems fairly neutral, but the descriptions of the candidates can sound loaded,” said Graham. “Writers highlight negatives for both campaigns but suggest Harris is not an ideologue, and that Trump is very divisive. Apparently, Democrats can say the worst things about Trump and his supporters and it’s never viewed as divisive. It’s merely implied that it’s accurate.”
Again, Graham never actually proves any of this is inaccurate, nor does he demand that right-wing media similarly act in a fair and neutral manner. Meanwhile, Pariseau went on to complain:
Although Google included stories from many of the top-20 most viewed news outlets, according to Statista, notably missing is the third most-viewed news site, Fox News Digital. Not a single Fox News article appeared among the first news options in either of the two searches MRC Free Speech America conducted.
Pariseau didn’t mention that one reason this might be is because Fox News — whose right-wing bias Pariseau didn’t label — discredited itself by deliberately lying to its viewers about “election fraud” after the 2020 election, which resulted in a $787 million settlement with voting-tech company Dominion. If you’ll recall, Graham thought Fox News deserved a pass for lying to people because nobody watches Fox News to learn the truth, only to have their partisan biases reinforced.
Graham rehashed all this in his Sept. 30 podcast:
Imagine if you could start from scratch and search Google without a previous internet search history. How would Google twist the results without knowing the user who is asking for it?
MRC Free Speech America VP Dan Schneider explains their latest research into Google. Gabriela Pariseau reported that a clean Google search on September 6 for the presidential candidates would lead you inevitably to Democrat media sources (Politico, New York Times, Washington Post). No one imagines those sources are going to provide anything objective on Trump, not when they rail against him as killing democracy in darkness. But they are the “trustworthy” sources, and conservative media are treated as pure misinformation.
Graham offered no evidence to back up his claim that those outlets are “Democrat media sources” or offer any evidence that they are not trustworthy.