CNBC staff largely missed the point as they reported on a former president’s outraged response to Google bias demonstrated in an MRC study.
CNBC Senior Washington Correspondent Eamon Javers responded to a Truth Social post by former President Donald Trump on the Sept. 27 edition of Power Lunch. In his post, Trump blasted Google for placing negative news stories above his campaign website, a clear example of bias exposed by MRC Assistant Editor Gabriela Pariseau. But instead of delving into Google’s bias, Javers used it as an opportunity to claim that Trump wants to control the media. “So the former president of the United States here [is] certainly trying to work the refs in terms of media coverage of himself,” Javers said.
When MRC researchers searched for “donald trump presidential race 2024,” Google topped its results with a number of articles from publications hostile to the former president. For example, stories from The New York Times, Politico and Jeff Bezos’s The Washington Post appeared before Trump’s campaign website which Google displayed as the sixth result. Not a single right-leaning news source appeared in the search results.
In response, Trump lashed out at Google. “It has been determined that Google has illegally used a system of only revealing and displaying bad stories about Donald J. Trump, some made up for this purpose while, at the same time, only revealing good stories about Comrade Kamala Harris,” Trump wrote. He went on to refer to Google’s behavior as “ILLEGAL ACTIVITY” and promised to prosecute their election interference when he takes office.
After reading this post on air, Javers proceeded to ignore Google’s flagrant bias and the fact that it elevated articles from only left-leaning news sources above Trump’s website, burying it. Instead, Javers painted Trump’s concerns as primarily rooted in authoritarianism and ego. He said that Trump was “threatening to put the Department of Justice on [Google] once he's elected if they don't conform to what he wants, which is positive stories to be displayed in Google's search results.”
Wrong! The former president is complaining that people who search for his website are force-fed a group of negative articles instead. Google is burying his campaign website underneath all this bad press.
This would not be the first time Google buried Trump’s campaign website.
Before Google began to make users run the gauntlet of negative coverage to see Trump’s campaign website, the search engine frequently buried the former president so far down that his campaign website did not appear on the first page of results. Google did this during the Republican National Convention, ahead of the July presidential debate between Trump and Biden and when Trump was in the news due to a guilty verdict following Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s politicized prosecution of the former president.
This is just one of a myriad of ways that Google has interfered in American elections on behalf of the company’s favored candidates. In fact, Google interfered in American elections no fewer than 41 times from 2008 to 2024, including by burying 83 percent of the Republican campaign websites for the most competitive Senate races of 2022.
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