Following repeated demonstrations of Google News tab and general search bias, the search giant rolled out a feature to let users pick their own sources. Spoiler: It appears to be window dressing for the same old agenda.
Google announced a new feature on Aug. 12, purportedly allowing users to select their own preferred sources to appear under the “Top Stories” section in Google Search. However, when MRC researchers tested the feature, Google nearly completely failed to deliver on this promise. The search giant provided only one of four chosen popular right-leaning sources covering news of President Donald Trump’s negotiations with Russia. The rest of the page was polluted with left-leaning media publications such as CNN, The New York Times and The Associated Press.
On Friday, MRC researchers put Google's new feature to the test, setting it to preference Fox News, The Daily Mail and The New York Post, all of which rank in the top 20 news sources and are rated right-leaning by AllSides. Although all three of the outlets had recently covered Trump’s impending meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin, only one appeared anywhere on the page. In fact, Google failed to show the part of the “Top Stories” section labelled “From your sources” section at all, merely placing a lone Fox News article to compete with nine left-leaning media results and two from the United Kingdom’s state-backed BBC.
MRC researchers also selected NewsBusters as a preference. Not a single NewsBusters story appeared on the first page of results.
Instead, Google’s results included stories from NBC News and Pew Research Center with previews highlighting negative polls about public confidence in the president’s handling of the Russia-Ukraine war. The latter’s headline appeared in the Google Search results as “Majority of Americans lack confidence in Trump on Russia.”
Google has been rigging the search results for big stories long before this belated, and apparently farcical, fix.
For instance, MRC researchers found that Google prioritized biased leftist articles during the 2024 campaign season, placing them above then-Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s website in its search results. Google repeatedly stuffed search results with left-of-center content when users searched for Trump and then-Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris, as demonstrated by seven successive studies.
As recorded in MRC Free Speech America’s exclusive CensorTrack database, Google users consistently needed to wade through multiple pages of search results to find a single U.S.-based right-of-center media article.
And even after the election was over, Google did the same to key Trump nominees. Six studies showed Google sometimes left nominees such as now-Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth without a single right-leaning result. Instead, the Google results for the candidates were filled with leftist media and gnarly headlines from leftist publications as great and small as MSNBC or Inside Climate News. These included a Vanity Fair piece pushing the wife of RFK Jr. to divorce him, headlined, “Cheryl Hines Has a Choice (Other Women Sure Don't!).”
Methodology:
While logged into a Google account, MRC researchers used Google’s new “preferred sources” feature and set it to prefer articles from Fox News, The Daily Mail and The New York Post. Researchers proceeded to search the terms “Trump Russia” then analyzed the news results for political bias using AllSides’ bias ratings.
MRC researchers additionally collected examples of articles by Fox News, The Daily Mail and the New York Post that Google could have featured but didn’t include: “Inside Trump's make-or-break Alaska mission as Putin attempts to seduce the president, shatter western unity and rewrite history,” “Putin heaps praise on ‘sincere’ Trump, hints Russia and US could strike nuclear arms deal” and “Trump rails against ‘unfair’ media quoting ‘fired losers’ ahead of high-stakes meeting with Putin.”
Finally, researchers included MRC’s own NewsBusters.org among its preferred sources, although it is not a top 20 source and did not appear in search results.
Conservatives are under attack! Contact your representatives and demand that Big Tech be held to account to mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency, clarity on hate speech and equal footing for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us using CensorTrack’s contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.
Photo credit: DoD photo by Benjamin Applebaum
