The Media Research Center has long targeted Apple News for not being right-wing enough — and the Washington Post has reported that the Federal Trade Commission’s right-wing leader to cite the MRC’s so-called research to push action against it. Heather Moon huffed in a Feb. 19 post:
As eyes worldwide were turning to Italy for the 2026 Winter Olympics, Apple News editors pushed stories on immigration — including ICE and the Department of Homeland Security — relying on leftist and center outlets while excluding right-leaning media altogether.
Over the first two weeks of February 2026, Apple News ran 57 headlines, all from leftist or center news outlets, about immigration, ICE and the threat to DHS funding. Apple News’s ICE, DHS and immigration coverage accounted for 20 percent of the total headlines that Apple ran in its daily morning top 20 news stories. Not a single story about this highly partisan topic came from a right-leaning outlet as determined by AllSides media bias ratings.
Note that Moon made use of AllSides, which we’ve shown has a right-wing bias, and described right-wing outlets as merely “right-leaning” while non-right-wing outlets were dismissed as “leftist” or “elitist.”
The same day, Catherine Salgado gushed over its dubious research reaching the FTC:
For eight days after the Federal Trade Commission challenged Apple News on its bias, neither Apple nor the rest of the Big Four News Apps linked to a single story on the federal scrutiny despite its massive implications and widespread media attention .
Federal Trade Commission Chairman Andrew Ferguson sent a letter to Apple CEO Tim Cook on Feb. 11, right on the heels of a bombshell MRC study showing that Apple News did not have even one right-leaning article in its morning editions in January (620-0). Both Ferguson’s letter and MRC’s study sparked widespread media coverage, including stories from the New York Post and even left-leaning media such as The Washington Post, The Associated Press, CBS News, Business Insider and The New York Times.
In the letter, Ferguson called out Apple News for having “systematically promoted news articles from left-wing news outlets and suppressed news articles from more conservative publications.” For an entire week after Ferguson released the letter — from Feb. 11 to Feb. 18 — not only Apple News but also Google News, MSN and Yahoo News completely ignored the story.
“This is no accident,” MRC Free Speech VP Dan Schneider said of the Big Four News Apps’ blackout. “There were dozens of stories from both left and right-leaning outlets that these tech giants could have published. This was one of the biggest national stories of the week but anybody getting their news from the apps would have never known of it.”
Notably, Ferguson had specifically called on Apple News to take action in his letter. While stating the “FTC is not the speech police,” and that he cannot require specific news curation, he reminded the Big Tech company “of your obligations under the FTC Act.”
But if the FTC is not the speech police, why is Salgado rooting for it to become that> She doesn’t exolain. Instead, she touted her employer’s questionable research:
While Ferguson cited a November MRC study showing Apple News promoted only one right-leaning article in November, MRC has done numerous studies since then to illustrate blatant bias. Apple News is particularly guilty, but so also are the others in the Big Four News Apps. For instance, on Feb. 13, MRC revealed that it took Apple News 100 days to put a right-leaning outlet’s article in its morning articles.
When Apple News felt sufficiently harassed enough to add a couple right-wing articles, Moon cheered in a March 5 post:
Apple News blinked after an MRC Free Speech America report that called out the app for running 620 top stories from left-leaning and other outlets while running exactly zero top stories from right-leaning outlets in the month of January went viral.
Since the story went viral Feb. 11, 2026 following FTC Commissioner Andrew Ferguson’s letter to Apple CEO Tim Cook about the digital news gatekeeper’s leftist bias, the news app has run eight articles from right-leaning outlets (2%) in its daily morning top 20 news stories.
[…]Apple’s apparent reaction does not represent balance. It barely moves the needle, as MRC President David Bozell noted. “Two percent is not progress. It’s damage control,” wrote Bozell. “If public exposure and a federal inquiry only yield a modest adjustment, that suggests the bias we documented was deeply embedded. Apple News should not require public pressure to reflect viewpoint diversity. This is not about token inclusion. It’s about whether one of the most powerful information gatekeepers in the country operates fairly.”
Meanwhile, Moon did not evaluate individual articles, only labeled outlets based on the biased AllSides scale — and she made no effort to explain why the mainstream news outlets Apple News uses are, in fact, “leftist.”