If you get your news from Apple, Google, Bing, or Yahoo, you are unknowingly being fed a steady diet of left-wing stories. That’s according to research by AllSides, a news aggregator that rates the bias of news sites.

Yet, these Big Tech sites continue to insist that they are ideologically neutral.

The AllSides audit found that nearly three-quarters of the links on Google News were to left-leaning news sites. Just 1% took readers to a right-leaning news source. Google has gotten worse since AllSides started auditing aggregator sites in 2022, when the share of left-leaning stories on Google News was 61%.

At Apple News, the current ratio is 50% left-leaning to 2% right-leaning. Bing is 72% to 5%. Yahoo was 53% to 2%.

What is particularly amusing, or sad, depending on your perspective, is the fact that the Drudge Report is on the left-hand side of the bias column. The audit finds that 49% of the sources that Drudge now links to are left-leaning, just 10% are right-leaning.

See also:  “Drudge Is Dead” and “Meet The New Drudge, Better Than The Old Drudge“

Mark Grabowski, head of Adelphi University’s communications department, called the findings “damning,” telling the New York Post that “These companies have spent years insisting their platforms are neutral. This data makes that claim very hard to take seriously.”

If anything, the bias among these aggregator sites is even more rampant than AllSides admits. That’s because AllSides’ method of rating news bias appears itself to skew a bit leftward. For example, it puts news outlets such as BBC News, Reuters, Newsweek, and the Wall Street Journal’s news section in its “center” column, and claims NPR, Politico, and Axios only “lean” left. But it shoves Fox News all the way over to the right, along with straight-up opinion outlets like National Review. (See its bias chart here.)

When confronted, Big Tech companies will trot out excuses for their flagrant bias, but that is poppycock. As Grabowski correctly observes, “There’s no shortage of credible right-leaning journalism out there.”

RealClearPolitics, which regularly links to our editorials, has an almost perfectly balanced page, according to AllSides, with 23% of its links going to sites on the left, 22% on the right.

The only aggregator site more dead center is AllSides itself.

This isn’t the only insidious form of bias AllSides has uncovered. Another analysis found that “fact checking” sites are also overwhelmingly skewed to the left. Of the 25 fact-checking sites rated by AllSides, 12 lean left, just six lean right, and seven are in the center.

This is a particularly nasty form of media bias, given that these “fact checking” sites all pretend to be impartial, merely presenting stone-cold facts. But as AllSides puts it:

These sources may be seen as more reliable or credible than other news outlets because of their focus on ‘facts.’ But often, fact checkers will analyze information for the reader and draw a conclusion about what the facts mean, which is subjective in nature. Other times, they’ll display bias based on what facts they choose to downplay or to highlight. They also show bias based on story choice — for example, primarily fact-checking left-wing politicians, or only fact-checking right-wing claims.

The problem with both of these forms of bias is that they amount to false advertising. Big Tech news sites and fact-checking sites claim to be impartial.

They are not. And, one way or another, this form of journalistic deception needs to stop.

— Written by the I&I Editorial Board