For once, Google’s YouTube actually got it right by not suppressing content surrounding the evolving journalistic scandal at CBS News, MRC researchers found.
On Oct. 6, CBS News’s Face the Nation previewed a 60 Minutes interview with Vice President Kamala Harris. The word-salad-filled clip would later be dubiously edited out when the full interview aired on Oct. 7. So, MRC researchers set out to test whether YouTube would bury right-leaning news sources like its parent company Google has with certain search results. However when searching for “cbs kamala harris edited,” YouTube made it effortless for searches to find information about the CBS scandal.
The first result of the YouTube search was a video by Sky News Australia titled, “CBS addresses allegations it edited Kamala Harris interview.” Fox News accounted for two of the next three results. This follows after MRC repeatedly exposed Google for suppressing content from right-leaning sources on 2024 presidential election coverage in its search.
Perhaps the CBS scandal was too glaring for even Google’s YouTube to intervene and suppress its reach on its platform, even though it makes both a liberal news outlet and Harris look bad politically.
MRC Free Speech America Vice President Dan Schneider partially hailed YouTube for not running cover for Harris as she faces backlash over the scandal. “The jig is up,” Schneider said. “Everyone now knows that Google and YouTube use their trillions of dollars in assets to sway elections for the left. But I will give credit when credit is due. YouTube is not hiding the 60 Minutes interview about Kamala Harris’s failure. Maybe Google is feeling the pressure from our reporting.”
Schneider added, “It is of note that the Google-YouTube cartel made this improvement only after Donald Trump read our study and threatened to prosecute Google for criminal interference in this election.”
Between Sept. 30 and Oct. 3, MRC researchers searched for “donald trump presidential race 2024” and “kamala harris presidential race 2024” and found that Google favored leftist news sources. Indeed, Google Search elevated nine times more articles from leftist media outlets than outlets without a predominantly leftist bias for the prompts
Seemingly in response to one of these studies, President Donald Trump said on Truth Social that if elected he would request that the Department of Justice prosecute Google to the furthest extent under the rule of law for election interference.
Google has also been under scrutiny for potential antitrust violations with three currently pending lawsuits. The Department of Justice in one of those lawsuits, United States v. Google, accused Google of colluding with Apple to make Google the default search engine on Apple products. This edges Google’s competitor search engines out of a huge market. Now that Oracle CEO Larry Ellison is in the process of purchasing Paramount, CBS’s parent company, attempts by Google to censor the unflattering CBS clip could similarly give the appearance of collusion to help an industry competitor.
It is also worth noting that Oracle and Google have a checkered history. Oracle sued Google in 2010 for alleged copyright infringement of code that Google used in its Android phones.
CNBC explained the crux of the suit in 2021: “The case concerned about 12,000 lines of code that Google used to build Android that were copied from the Java application programming interface developed by Sun Microsystems, which Oracle acquired in 2010.”
The case went up to the U.S. Supreme Court and in 2021 Google won, claiming that it lawfully utilized the code under “fair use” copyright allowances.
On Oct. 20, CBS released a statement in response to the allegations of cutting out part of an answer in Harris’s 60 Minutes interview to boost her image. “60 Minutes gave an excerpt of our interview to Face the Nation that used a longer section of her answer than that on 60 Minutes. Same question. Same answer. But a different portion of the response.”
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