The Media Research kept up its war against Google by forcing its right-wing narratives on the company to reinforce its specious victimization narrative that the search engine is biased against conservatives. Even though the victimization narrative was seemingly disproven by Donald Trump winning the election, the MRC is too invested in it to give it up. Gabriela Pariseau tried to take a post-election victory lap in a Nov. 7 post:
Despite all that Google did to suppress former President Donald Trump’s website and news about him from right-leaning websites, the GOP nominee overcame the censorship and was victorious on election day.
From suppressing right-leaning media in searches for Trump for six straight weeks to suppressing Trump’s website prior to every presidential debate and during the Republican National Convention, Google appeared to try its hardest to hinder candidates whose names were not President Joe Biden or Vice President Kamala Harris. On Tuesday, President-elect Donald Trump showed that although election-interfering censorship is a serious problem that must be addressed it is not insurmountable.
MRC Free Speech America has conducted study after study during the 2024 election cycle exposing Google’s years-long effort to suppress disfavored candidates, and Google has repeatedly brushed off the censorship as either the result of so-called error or a one-off. It’s worth looking back on what Google did in an attempt to thwart Trump and his allies who opposed the Biden and Harris campaigns.
As we’ve documented, the “study after study” the MRC claimed to conduct were largely based on search terms no normal human uses, seemingly concocted to generate the biased results it demanded for exploitation in right-wing media. The quantity of the MRC’s bogus “study after study” is meaningless if theyre just repeating a faulty premise.
Pariseau added: “Other outlets and researchers have also reported on Google’s election interference efforts to bolster the Biden and Harris campaigns, including AllSides, Research Psychologist Dr. Robert Epstein and the Daily Mail.” She didn’t disclose the right-wing bias that these people and groups have — after all, if they didn’t have that bias, the MRC wouldn’t be touting them.
Indeed, the same day, Catherine Salgado promoted AllSides’ shoddy work:
Recently released AllSides data confirms MRC study results. Google Search manipulation of news outlets is real, and it overwhelmingly favors the left.
Media bias ratings firm AllSides assessed Google’s right-leaning and left-leaning bias in search results for news related to the 2024 election, particularly news concerning presidential candidates Vice President Kamala Harris (D) and President-elect Donald Trump (R), and other important election issues like the economy, immigration, crime, abortion, so-called climate change and gun control. Over 65 percent of the news Google displayed in its search results on these topics was left-leaning, emphasizing once again the bias MRC has repeatedly exposed.
In fact, out of the top 10 outlets featured by Google in its search results on select topics, Fox News was the only right-leaning outlet featured out of more than 500 media articles analyzed, per AllSides.
In a Google search for “election news,” AllSides found that Google displayed 16 times more news from outlets it rates as “lean-left” than news it rates as “right.” Meanwhile, 68 percent of results for “Trump News” came from outlets AllSides rates as “Lean Left,” and 73 percent of Google results for “Harris News” likewise came from left-leaning outlets. X owner Elon Musk reacted to the AllSides chart on Google’s bias on Election Day by touting his platform, “Send X.com links to your friends so that they know what’s really going on.”
As we’ve pointed out every time the MRC promotes then, the AllSides “analysis” never examines the content of the individual stories themselves have any sort of bias — it’s just a broad-brush attack on media outlets. Further, the AllSides chart of political leanings conveniently places major news outlets as the New York Times, CNN, CBS, ABC and Politico in the “left-leaning” category — something it even admits is subjective — which is made even more subjective and less scientific by including public opinion into the calculation.
Tom Olohan served up yet another bogus search-bias claim in a Nov. 13 post:
President-elect Donald Trump may have overcome Google’s election interference, but the search giant continues to rig presidential race search results.
The Media Research Center found that Google provided a desert of left and legacy media sources for conservatives to wander through in search of right-of-center presidential race coverage on Nov. 12—exactly one week after the election. MRC researchers once again utilized the media list provided by AllSides, which classifies publications based on their “right” to “left” bias, and searched for the terms “donald trump presidential race 2024” and “kamala harris” presidential race 2024.” The first U.S.-based right-of-center result for the Trump prompt did not appear until the sixth search result on page 11, a New York Post article. This means that users had to pass over around a hundred search results before The Post.
Google did not display a single article from a U.S.-based right-of-center outlet in the 24 pages of search results for the Harris prompt. The first right-of-center result appeared on page six in the form of a Fox News video.
Olohan then tried to spin away his shoddy work, insisting that the search terms it used to base its so-called study on — “donald trump presidential race 2024” and “kamala harris presidential race 2024” — are merely “innocuous words,” even though they mean something specific when put together in a certain way. That’s why the MRC uses that particular search string, after all. He also made a point of noting that “AllSides notes it has a ‘patent on rating bias and use[s] multiple methodologies,’ not a homogenous group or an algorithm.” A patent on a shoddy process does not necessarily make it less shoddy.