After failing to stop the return of former President Donald Trump to the White House, Google appears to have settled for going after his cabinet-level nominees.
On Nov. 19, MRC researchers searched Google for names of each of Trump’s cabinet nominations, and additionally the FCC chairman, and compared the news results against the AllSides media list, which classifies publications based on their “right” or “left” bias. MRC researchers found that in 8 out of 13 queries, Google provided zero right-leaning media sources on the first page of results. Worse still, even when Google did display news outlet articles in search results for the nominees’ names, it showed over 11 times more left-leaning media articles than right-leaning in its general search.
Google featured articles from leftist outlets including Teen Vogue, The Daily Beast, The Atlantic, CNN, The Hill, The New York Times and The Washington Post among many others. Indeed, out of the 100 news articles that Google displayed, the search engine produced a shabby eight articles from just three right leaning news outlets, Fox News, New York Post and Catholic News Agency.
In follow-up queries, researchers examined the results of searching the same names using Google’s news tab. These searches produced similarly biased results. Searches for FCC Chairman nominee “Brendan Carr” and Trump’s other first fourteen cabinet-level appointments were filled with leftist and legacy media sources that far outnumbered any right-of-center results that appeared on the front page. Out of 130 news results that appeared on the first page of a Google news tab search, only 16 were from U.S.-based right-leaning sources.
The first page of the Google news tab search not only displayed articles from leftist outlets, but it also flooded the results with vicious or negative headlines and attacks about the potential cabinet secretaries. For example, the results for Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s name included a Vanity Fair piece titled “Cheryl Hines Has a Choice (Other Women Sure Don't!).” The article included aggressive and personal attacks on Kennedy’’s wife, even going so far ast to call for her to divorce her husband. RFK Jr. has been nominated for Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services.
Google search results for Trump’s nominee to run the Department of Justice, former Congressman Matt Gaetz, and Trump’s choice for Secretary of the Department of Defense, Pete Hegseth, were similarly littered with media outlets whose headlines skewed heavily against the nominees. Google also featured a Daily Beast article labeling Gov. Kristi Noem (R-SD), potentially the next Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, a “puppy killer” in its headline.
Google featured similarly ugly attacks from leftist publications such as Salon, Teen Vogue, The New Republic, Mother Jones, CNN, NBC News and others.
The search engine did not provide any relevant news results for Department of Energy nominee Christopher Wright and Veteran Affairs secretary nominee Douglas Collins.
This study follows a breathtaking campaign of election interference by Google exposed by the Media Research Center. A Sept. 6 MRC Free Speech America study showed that Google required users to wade through a deluge of leftist news articles before getting to Trump’s campaign website.
This study was followed by studies on Oct. 1, Oct. 9, Oct. 15, Oct. 22, Oct. 30 and Election Day itself that demonstrated that Google was burying right-of-center search results. The Trump prompt for Oct. 9 produced the most egregious results. The Oct. 9 study found that Google buried the first U.S.-based right-of-center result—a Fox News video—for the Trump prompt on page 23. Nowhere on any of the 26 pages of results did a U.S.-based right-of-center news article appear.
Methodology
For this report, MRC Free Speech America analyzed the Nov. 19 Google Search and News tab results for the first and last names of fourteen men and women nominated for cabinet-level positions in the second Trump administration as well as Trump’s choice for FCC Chairman. MRC Free Speech America created an algorithm to automate this process in a clean environment. A “clean environment” allows for organic search to populate results without the influence of prior search history and tracking cookies. MRC Free Speech America also utilized the AllSides media bias chart as a gauge to determine which outlets are “right” and “lean right.” AllSides notes it has a “patent on rating bias and use[s] multiple methodologies,” not a homogenous group or an algorithm. “Our methods are: Blind Bias Surveys of Americans, Editorial Reviews by a multipartisan team of panelists who look for common types of media bias, independent reviews, and third-party data.”
Readers should be aware that this report only uses the AllSides list to analyze ratings of outlets considered by AllSides to be “right” and “lean right” and does not necessarily reflect MRC’s characterizations of these outlets.
Nominees searched include: Douglas Burgum, Brendan Carr, Douglas Collins, Sean Duffy, Tulsi Gabbard, Matthew Gaetz, Peter Hegseth, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Howard Lutnick, Kristi Noem, Marco Rubio, Elise Stefanik, Susan Wiles, Christopher Wright and Lee Zeldin.
Editor's Note: This piece previously claimed that 10 of the 14 general searches displayed zero right-leaning news sources in search results. The piece has been corrected to accurately state that 9 of 13 searches displayed zero right-leaning news sources in search results.
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