We’ve shown how the Media Research Center opened a new front in its dirty war on Google by whining on behalf of Donald Trump that it offered “rigged” search results on his cabinet nominees (read: it quoted accurate reporting about them, which the MRC does not dispute), based on the skewed methodology of right-leaning monitor AllSides. That continued in a Dec. 19 post by Tom Olohan:
Google’s relentless PR campaign against President-elect Donald Trump’s nominees is still ongoing. The Media Research Center has caught the search giant rigging the results for a fifth consecutive week.
MRC Researchers searched Google for the names of Trump’s cabinet nominees along with two additional top officials–Brendan Carr who Trump selected to Chair the FCC and Kash Patel who he selected as his FBI director. Researchers searched both via a general Google search and a news tab search each of which yielded results that were full of leftist articles from legacy media outlets attacking the nominees. Indeed, Google presented 15 times the number of articles from often hostile left-leaning sources than from outlets that media ratings firm AllSides rates as “right or “lean right.”
For most of the nominees, Google did not present a single “lean right” or “right” result in the general search. Only five of the general searches returned any right-leaning articles to counteract the vicious attacks that legacy and leftist media hurled against Trump nominees. Indeed Google presented zero “lean right” or “right” search results for 75 percent of the nominees recognized by Google.
As in previous search studies for the names of Trump nominees, Google provided no relevant search results in a search for Christopher Wright, Trump’s choice to run the Department of Energy.
Google rigged the news tab results as well, providing over six times as many left-leaning articles as U.S.-based “lean right” or “right” articles. Absurdly, Google once again found space in the news tab results for climate cult propaganda outlet Inside Climate News and the aggressively anti-Trump publication, The Bulwark. AllSides rates The Bulwark as “lean right” even though The Bulwark’s writers advocated supporting Democratic Party nominee Kamala Harris while embracing leftist positions on a number of issues.
As before, Olohan identified no purported bias in any of the articles found in the search results — even in the Bulwark item he’s attacking for not being far-right enough (as the MRC does). He’s just falsely (and lazily) imputing “bias” on them based on who published them, a measure which has its own subjective bias.
Olohan was at it again in a Jan. 9 post:
As President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration draws closer, Google is still relentlessly working to bring down his cabinet-level picks and other nominees.
MRC researchers consistently found a glut of leftist articles and personal attacks when searching Google for the names of Trump’s cabinet nominees along with Brendan Carr and Kash Patel, his picks to head the Federal Communications Commission and the FBI, respectively. Using media bias ratings firm AllSides, MRC researchers found that Google consistently provided double-digit ratios in favor of leftist content in the general and News tab searches performed on Dec. 26 and Jan. 2. The search giant presented no fewer than 10 times more articles from leftist sources than right-leaning sources including a host of vicious media attacks on the nominees.
[…]Google also peppered its results with articles delivering personal attacks against the nominees, especially Patel, Pete Hegseth (the presumptive nominee for Defense Secretary) and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (the presumptive nominee for Health Secretary).
On Dec. 26 alone, at least six of the News tab search articles went after Patel. For example, MSNBC warned he would be a “dangerous FBI Director,” while WIRED used the headline “Kash Patel is the Hero Qanon has been waiting for.” Patel also came under fire from Newsweek, The Atlantic, The Times and NBC News.
On Jan. 2, nine out of ten articles Google provided in the News tab search results attacked Patel, using some of the same articles from the Dec. 26 search plus additional broadsides from ABC News, The Washington Post, The Bulwark and Politico. Google included an MSNBC article accusing Patel of “grifting” and indulging conspiracy theories and a New Yorker piece implausibly arguing that Patel would be a more dangerous FBI director than J. Edgar Hoover.
Both days of News tab results also went after RFK Jr. on many different fronts from a Rolling Stone article arguing that RFK Jr. would “Make America Sick Again” to arguing that RFK Jr. “can’t be taken seriously” or that America must “tame” him. These results also featured such radical publications as Mother Jones and The Daily Beast.
Yet again, Olohan didn’t prove anything in those articles to be false or misleading. Instead, he repeated his boilerplate about Allsides: “AllSides notes it has a “patent on rating bias and use[s] multiple methodologies,” not a homogenous group or an algorithm. “Our methods are: Blind Bias Surveys of Americans, Editorial Reviews by a multipartisan team of panelists who look for common types of media bias, independent reviews, and third-party data.”
Ollohan cointinued to be angry that fctual information about Hegseth was reported:
CNN was one of many outlets Google used to fill the results with negative headlines about Hegseth. While readers might draw negative inferences from the actual CNN title, “Police report reveals new details from sexual assault allegation against Trump’s defense secretary nominee,” Google made things far worse. People who googled Hegseth in the News tab on both dates would have found a shortened headline that says “Police report reveals new details from sexual assault,” which gives the impression that both the police and CNN agreed that there was a sexual assault.
Once more, Olohan didn’t prove any of that reporting wrong, and he’s effectively calling the woman a liar by complaining that the police didn’t agree there was a sexual assault; as the CNN report noted, “the report does not say that police found the allegations to be false.”
Olohan continued to show how biased his so-called analysis is in a Jan. 16 post:
Just one day after Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg apparently steered his platforms away from censorship and election interference, Google shamelessly pressed on with its efforts to rig search results against President-elect Donald Trump’s nominees.
Following Zuckerberg’s Jan. 7 announcement, MRC Free Speech America researchers once again searched Google for the names of Trump’s cabinet-level nominees as well as other important officials such as FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr and FBI Director-nominee Kash Patel. Researchers conducted these searches using Google’s general search and its News tab feature. Using media bias ratings provided by AllSides, MRC researchers found that Google did not display a single U.S.-based “lean right” or “right” article for 68 percent of general searches on the first page of results.
Indeed, for the general searches, Google yielded U.S.-based right-leaning sources for only the names of eight nominees. Overall Google provided over nine times as many articles from outlets rated “lean left” or “left” in the general search. This included articles from leftist outlets such as The Huffington Post, MSNBC News, and the ESG enthusiasts at Bloomberg News. Google also flooded the results with legacy media outlets such as The New York Times, CNN and the Big Three networks as well as leftist, taxpayer-funded PBS and NPR.
As in most prior searches, Google provided no news articles in the general search for Christopher Wright, Trump’s choice to run the Department of Energy.
The Jan. 8 News tab search failed to provide a U.S.-based “right” or “lean right” result for 12 of the 26 nominees (46 percent), but Google did manage to find space for a hearty serving of vicious attacks and leftist and legacy media articles. Google stuffed the News tab search results with over seven times as many articles from “left” or “lean left” sources.
And these articles went after Trump’s nominees over and over again. Users trying to find news coverage of Trump’s choice to run the Department of Energy, Lee Zeldin, on Jan. 8 would find a Nov. 13 headline from climate cult publication Inside Climate News warning of Zeldin’s “Radical Game Plan.”
Olohan provided no evidence to justify his smear of Inside Climate News as a “climate cult publication,” whatever that means. Olohan also showed his credibility-shredding bias by denouncing organizations that reported accurately about the nominees as “leftist,” while his preferred right-wing outlets are described only as “right-leaning.”
Olohan went on to whine that “The search engine similarly promoted nasty articles about Vought, as seven of the 10 News tab articles highlighted Vought’s work on Project 2025, apparently to drive a wedge between Trump (who condemned the project) and his nominee.” Yet again, Olohan identified nothing inaccurate in those reports, nor did he explain why Project 2025 shouldn’t be criticized even though Trump did exactly that before the election.