A new report has revived scrutiny surrounding a key figure who has been quietly shaping the news for millions of Americans. The head media gatekeeper operates behind one of the most influential and biased news platforms in the world: Apple News.
At the center of the Apple News operation is Lauren Kern, the tech giant’s editor-in-chief, who, according to Fox News, started her career in some of the most prominent leftist media institutions in the country, like New York Times Magazine and New York magazine. Fox News’s report revived scrutiny following numerous Media Research Center studies on the news apps’ leftist bias. Apple entrusted Kern the power to hand-select the very stories that appear on every iPhone, reaching tens of millions of users.
Pre-installed on virtually every modern iPhone, Apple News relies on human curation rather than purely algorithm-driven aggregation. That means the stories users see in their news feeds are not accidental. And MRC studies have repeatedly shown that those editorial decisions consistently favor the left. Editorial control matters.
Kern was highlighted in a 2018 New York Times feature that profiled Apple News. The article noted that she leads a team of about a dozen former journalists “selecting the news that tens of millions of people will read.” Discussing her work on Apple News, Kern claimed, “We put so much care and thought into our curation. It’s seen by a lot of people, and we take that responsibility really seriously.”
Despite her claims of careful curation, MRC’s most recent Apple News study shows that it took the tech giant 100 days to feature a single right-leaning outlet in the top 20 of its morning editions, while hundreds of stories from left-leaning outlets have dominated the feed for months.
Under Kern’s editorial leadership, Apple News has regularly pushed elitist media outlets like The Washington Post, NBC News, Reuters, The Wall Street Journal and National Public Radio while suppressing conservative voices.
In response to a New York Post report on MRC’s January study of Apple News bias, Apple claimed it “provides access to news spanning a wide range of topics from more than 3,000 publications,” ostensibly including a balance of left-leaning, center and right-leaning outlets.
Apple emphasized that users can customize their experience by choosing which publications or topics to follow or block, attempting to frame its website as one that offers broad choice and editorial control rather than excluding any particular viewpoint.
But, as MRC research shows, Apple News only offers the illusion of choice.
Apple News’s overt left-leaning bias has even drawn attention from federal regulators. In a letter to Apple CEO Tim Cook, FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson warned that Apple could face violations of federal consumer-protection law if it claims to be neutral in its terms of service while suppressing content based on ideological or political viewpoint.
“The First Amendment protects the speech of Big Tech firms. But the First Amendment has never extended its protection to material misrepresentations made to consumers, nor does it immunize speakers from conduct that Congress has deemed unfair under the FTC Act, even if that conduct involves speech,” Ferguson wrote in a three-page letter posted on X.
FCC Chairman Brendan Carr lauded Ferguson’s letter as “exactly right,” stating in an X post of his own, “Apple has no right to suppress conservative viewpoints in violation of the FTC Act.”
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