Republicans do not have a messaging problem so much as a distribution problem, Media Research Center President David Bozell emphasized after egregious anti-GOP messaging from the Big Four News Apps.
Bozell’s warning stems from Apple News promoting a Politico story that featured an image of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer blaming Republicans for TSA defunding. Notably, the current DHS shutdown — which has led to TSA workers going unpaid — is driven by Democrats.
“This morning, Apple News put Politico’s full-screen image of [Sen.] Chuck Schumer with a sign claiming Republicans blocked TSA funding ‘8 times’ in front of its reportedly 125 million users,” Bozell posted on X Thursday.
He included a screenshot of the Apple News-promoted Politico story, which appeared Thursday among its top 20 articles, adding: “Republicans in the Senate need to get real about what sport they’re playing. They don’t have a messaging problem. They have a distribution problem.”
A new Daily Mail /JL Partner poll found that 34 percent of respondents blamed Republicans for long TSA lines amid the Democrat-induced Homeland Security funding shutdown. Only 25 percent of respondents blamed Democrats and just 20 percent blamed both. Big Tech is fueling the misconception. Bozell observed, “When polling suggests Republicans are to blame for TSA lines, this distribution bias is why.”
He went on to warn that the “current reality” is that one political side “controls mass information distribution,” while the “other side is constraining itself by the supermajority rules,” and yet “100+ million Americans are seeing one version of the story.”
“This mismatch is not sustainable, politically,” he continued.
This morning, Apple News put Politico’s full-screen image of Chuck Schumer with a sign claiming Republicans blocked TSA funding “8 times” in front of its reportedly 125 million users.
— David Bozell 🇺🇸 (@DavidBozell) March 26, 2026
Republicans in the Senate need to get real about what sport they’re playing. They don’t have a… pic.twitter.com/uadmkveYQV
The ugly truth is that with the companies that control so much of media distribution on their side, Democrats do not have to work half as hard on their messaging as Republicans do. Bozell stated, “Democrats do not care about election security, TSA lines or homeland defense, and they simply don’t need to. Apple does the work for them.”
Bozell did not simply point out the problem, he also suggested a solution, one that circumvents the propaganda from Apple News and its fellow news aggregators. “Senate Republicans could fold like they normally do or they could change the Senate rules to allow for up-or down simple majority votes on national security and election security legislation,” Bozell explained. “The latter is fast becoming their only option out of this.”
Indeed, MRC has repeatedly exposed Apple News and the other news apps for heavily biased news selections.
On March 26, the same day that the Politico report with the image of Schumer was on Apple News, MRC Free Speech America released evidence that Apple News+ favors left-leaning outlets over right-leaning outlets 51 to three.
Even more relevant to Bozell’s comments, four terrorist attacks occurred in March as DHS lacked funding thanks to Schumer. But MRC found that Apple News, Google News, Microsoft’s MSN, and Yahoo News buried coverage of the shutdown from Feb. 14 through March 14. Only one percent, or 28 stories out of 1,977, during that timeframe were about the shutdown.
Between Feb. 11 and March 5, Apple included only two percent of its articles from right-leaning outlets, seemingly in response to MRC's exposure of Apple News promoting no right-leaning articles.
