In January, Apple News highlighted 72 Washington Post articles, 54 Associated Press pieces, 50 from NBC News, 34 from The Guardian, 25 from NPR, and 54 Wall Street Journal stories.
Apple’s News app has been favoring left-wing outlets, while right-wing publications went entirely unfeatured, a new report shows. The Media Research Center (MRC), a conservative media watchdog, analyzed 620 stories featured in high-traffic morning slots between Jan. 1 and Jan. 31. They found 440 stories came from left-leaning outlets, 180 from centrist sources, and zero from right-leaning publications.
“This is a subliminal form of propaganda, paid for with corporate dollars but without campaign finance disclosures,” MRC’s Dan Schneider told the New York Post. “It could be illegal.”
Apple’s top stories went 97 consecutive days without a conservative outlet. The last right-leaning article, MRC said, appeared on Nov. 5, 2025, from the British outlet The Telegraph about Sudan’s civil war.
https://twitter.com/FreeSpeechAmer/status/2021221155118428276?s=20
In January alone, Apple News highlighted 72 Washington Post articles, 54 Associated Press pieces, 50 from NBC News, 34 from The Guardian, 25 from NPR, and 54 Wall Street Journal stories. The app also included 30 stories from The Athletic and 27 original Apple pieces, mostly links to its daily podcast “Apple News Today.”
MRC based its classification on AllSides’ media bias ratings, a system run by a multi-partisan panel of experts. Julie Mastrine, director of the AllSides rating system, said she wasn’t surprised by the findings. “The bottom line is that Americans relying on these Big Tech companies for news are not getting a balanced view,” Mastrine said to The Post. “They’re not getting the full scope of perspectives available.”
AllSides also did a 2023 study of the 10 most popular news aggregators, ranking Apple News as one of the most left-leaning, with only Yahoo News and Bing News considered more skewed toward liberal viewpoints.
Apple spokespersons defended the app, noting it “provides access to news spanning a wide range of topics from more than 3,000 publications including the Wall Street Journal, Fox News, Bloomberg, USA Today, Washington Examiner, New York Post, CBS News, local outlets, and more.” They added that users can “tailor the app to their interests by choosing to follow or block specific publications or topics.”
MRC’s data also showed Apple News often highlighted stories critical of former President Donald Trump’s immigration and foreign policy, selecting headlines that “raised doubts about Trump’s actions.”
The report comes as Apple CEO Tim Cook faces potential scrutiny from federal regulators over media bias in Big Tech. FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson recently launched an inquiry into tech censorship, aiming to assess whether firms have illegally silenced Americans, and has already conditioned a major advertising merger on firms avoiding politically-motivated boycotts.
“Almost half of voting-age Americans own an Apple iPhone,” Schneider said. “Swipe right and you’re inundated with Apple’s cherry-picked news stories. Most people don’t even know they are being fed a steady stream of leftist narratives.”
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