Twitter killed the Hunter Biden laptop story three weeks before the 2020 election.
Silicon Valley called it a conspiracy theory – and the mainstream media let them get away with it.
Now a nine-month federal study has the receipts on what Apple and Google did next – and the number is worse than anyone expected.
Apple News and Google News Showed 31-0 Democrat Endorsement Record Across Top Promoted Outlets
The Media Research Center spent nine months auditing which outlets Apple News and Google News elevate to the top of Americans' morning feeds.
The results were not subtle.
Apple's five most-promoted outlets – the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Guardian, the Los Angeles Times, and USA Today – have endorsed Democrat presidential candidates a combined 28 times since 1988.
Republican endorsements from those same outlets: zero.
Google's top five reads like the same list with the Atlantic swapped in.
Combined endorsement record across both platforms: 31 for Democrats, zero for Republicans – stretching back to Michael Dukakis.
"Apple and Google systematically funnel tens of millions of users into media sources that have backed Democrats for president 31 times without a single Republican endorsement in 40 years," MRC President David Bozell said.
Silicon Valley built these feeds on purpose.
Google News Algorithm Pushed Left-Wing Media Bias in 48 of 60 Featured Opinion Pieces
The bias did not stop at which outlets got promoted.
MRC researchers also tracked what kind of content Google News was spiking to the top of feeds – and the opinion numbers are worse.
Out of 60 featured opinion pieces over nine months, 45 pushed a left-wing narrative.
Forty-eight of the 60 came from left-leaning outlets.
Google featured only five opinion pieces from right-leaning outlets across the entire study period.
The anti-Trump headlines Google chose to amplify included a New York Times piece asking "The Outstanding Question About Epstein and Trump," a San Francisco Chronicle piece floating the SEAL Team 6 assassination theory as a legitimate question, and a July 2026 Times piece headlined "Trump's Kiss of Death."
Five pieces in nine months and one of them attacked Trump anyway.
FTC Warns Apple News Over Conservative Censorship After Tim Cook Stays Silent
This is not a new accusation – and the Trump administration is no longer willing to let it slide.
In February, FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson sent a formal warning letter to Apple CEO Tim Cook after MRC published findings showing not one single conservative outlet surfaced in the top 20 Apple News recommendations during the entire month of January 2026.
"The First Amendment has never extended its protection to material misrepresentations made to consumers," Ferguson wrote to Cook, "nor does it immunize speakers from conduct that Congress has deemed unfair under the FTC Act, even if that conduct involves speech."
When a company sells itself to consumers as a fair and neutral news source while running an ideological filter behind the scenes, that is consumer fraud.
Ferguson told Cook to conduct a "comprehensive review" of Apple's terms of service and take "corrective action swiftly" if the curation is inconsistent with what consumers were promised.
Apple did not respond to that letter, and said nothing to the New York Post when it published the latest MRC findings.
Google declined to comment – though the company has repeatedly dismissed MRC's methodology as "totally false" and "completely flawed" without explaining what a non-flawed result would look like.
Big Tech Censorship Pattern Stretches from Hunter Biden Laptop to the Morning News Feed
Facebook throttled the Biden laptop story.
Google search results, per a 2020 analysis, were nearly 40 percent more likely to surface left-leaning pages than right-leaning ones on political keyword searches.
Sixteen percent of political keyword searches returned no right-leaning pages at all on the first results page.
Big Tech has been running this operation for a decade – and news aggregators are the final chokepoint.
Most Americans never go looking for news – they open Apple News or Google News and read whatever surfaces first.
When those feeds have handed Democrats 31 straight presidential endorsements worth of editorial firepower while conservative outlets stay invisible, the scale has a thumb on it the size of a fist.
Silicon Valley has had nine months of opportunity to fix this.
The feeds have not changed.
Sources:
- Thomas Barrabi, "Apple News, Google promote outlets that endorse Dem presidential candidates — while shutting out Republicans: study," New York Post, August 20, 2026.
- Heather Moon, "Google News Floods Daily Morning Feeds with Leftist, Anti-Trump Op-Eds," CNSNews/MRC, August 14, 2026.
- Joseph Wulfsohn, "Trump FTC sends letter to Apple over alleged political bias in its news app," Fox News, February 11, 2026.
- Luis Cornelio, "Apple & Google Push GOP-Bashing Media: 31-0 Dem Endorsement Record," MRC, August 2026.
