As Google goes to court over the serious mental harms allegedly caused by YouTube, Google News has consistently provided biased media and harmfully one-sided narratives to users.
Between Feb. 17 and 20, MRC researchers found that Google News did not link to a single right-leaning outlet’s article in its top 20 articles each morning. Instead, more than half of the articles on Google News during that time period were leftist. Furthermore, the tech giant’s favorite news source across all four days was The New York Times, which has an AllSides rating of “lean left.”
In fact, out of 80 articles over the four days, Google News promoted 44 from outlets rated by AllSides as “left” or “lean left.” The remaining 36 articles came either from outlets AllSides rates as “center” (26) or from websites with no rating (10).
Notably, Google is currently in court over a landmark case brought by over 1,500 families, who allege YouTube’s design makes the platform addictive to children, according to The Independent. While YouTube faces accusations of feeding children harmful video content, Google News continues to ply news consumers with harmfully biased content. For example:
- Google News’s top four articles on Feb. 17 were all about the recent death of activist Jesse Jackson, and all the articles came from left or lean left outlets: NBC News, CNN, Axios and The New York Times.
- On Feb. 18, Google News linked to CNN coverage of the Trump administration and New York Times critiques of the Russia-Ukraine-U.S. peace talks in second and fourth place.
- Then on Feb. 19, Google News’s top article came from a New York Times report about the Epstein files-triggered arrest of Prince Andrew in Britain.
- Finally, on Feb. 20, Google News took its top two stories from The New York Times, both of them once again about Prince Andrew’s arrest.
The New York Times was the most promoted outlet across all four days, earning eight mentions.
Methodology: During the time period Feb. 17 - Feb. 20, 2026, MRC researchers examined the top 20 AllSides-rated news stories featured on Google News each day at approximately 8:30 AM ET. MRC researchers used the AllSides media bias ratings, which categorize an outlet as “left,” “lean left,” “center,” “lean right” or “right” to determine the overall bias presented by Google News and analyzed the results.
