Apple News inflames political polarization as it excludes conservative shops: study | Latest Tech News
Apple News’ editorial workforce has been intentionally excluding conservative media shops from the favored app’s handpicked “top stories,” according to a bombshell new study.
AllSides, a nonpartisan group that classifies news shops by their political leanings, reviewed a whole of 166 articles that appeared on Apple News over a two-week period last October.
The study particularly targeted on sections of the app that can’t be customized by customers – particularly the “top stories” and “trending stories” sections.
AllSides discovered that none of Apple News’ “top stories” over a two-week period in October have been written by conservative shops.
Not one of the 82 articles displayed in the curated “top news” part have been written by shops labeled as “right-leaning,” according to AllSides.
Overall, just 2% of the articles reviewed for the study got here from conservative shops, while a whopping 50% got here from left-leaning shops and 23% from centrist shops.
“Apple News’ model inflames political polarization in America by ensconcing readers inside a one-sided bubble of information that can manipulate and blind them,” said Julie Mastrine, director of AllSides’ media bias score system and one of the study’s authors.
“One-sided news consumption not only creates anxiety about current events, it prevents Americans from understanding one another,” she added.
Apple has confronted heat since The Post reported last week on a study by conservative watchdog Media Research Center, which confirmed Apple News was aggressively selling articles from left-leaning shops while stifling right-leaning news teams.
President Trump shared the report on his Truth Social account hours after it was revealed.
Following The Post’s exclusive report, FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson despatched a letter last week warning Apple CEO Tim Cook that the company may very well be in violation of client safety legal guidelines. Ferguson demanded that Cook conduct a “comprehensive review” and “take correction action swiftly.”
Apple is going through intense stress over alleged bias in its news app.
“By primarily showcasing news outlets that Americans and a panel of experts rate as left biased, Apple prevents Americans from considering the full range of views and information and deciding what they think for themselves,” Mastrine added.
To craft its scores, AllSides makes use of a multi-partisan panel of consultants skilled to spot media bias as properly as blind surveys of Americans from across the political spectrum.
It also conducts blind surveys of peculiar Americans, then averages both units of outcomes to come up with a score.
Just two of the 65 media shops that have been featured on Apple News during the study have been labeled as right-leaning – Fox News, which appeared thrice, and The Telegraph, which appeared once.
Apple CEO Tim Cook has yet to publicly tackle the allegations of bias. Lafargue Raphael/ABACA/Shutterstock
The shops that appeared most ceaselessly have been the Wall Street Journal (rated as centrist), BuzzFeed (unrated), the Washington Post (rated as lean-left) and HuffPost (rated as left), the study discovered.
AllSides said it collected tales from Apple News at 10 a.m. ET each day from Oct. 6 through Oct.19, 2025 for the sake of consistency. The trending tales part is auto-populated based on what customers are studying most.
The study’s findings carefully matched AllSides’ data about Apple News from a comparable analysis performed in 2023, which discovered that 53% of articles in the “top news” part got here from left-leaning shops and just 1% from the fitting.
FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson warned Apple last week that it may very well be violating federal law by excluding conservative news shops from its news app. AFP via Getty Images
In AllSides’ 2023 review of the ten most well-liked news aggregations providers, Apple News was given a “lean left” score, with only Yahoo News and Bing News deemed to be more skewed toward liberal views when curating tales.
Apple declined to remark.
Apple’s in-house editorial workforce has been led since 2017 by editor-in-chief Lauren Kern, who previously held editor roles at New York Magazine and the New York Times Magazine.
Lauren Kern is editor-in-chief of Apple News. linkedin/lauren-kern-editor
In 2018, the Times declared that Kern had “quietly become one of the most powerful figures in English-language media” due to Apple News’ large attain.
When initially confronted with Media Research Center’s allegations of bias, Apple said its news app customers “can tailor the app to their interests by choosing to follow or block specific publications or topics.”
Apple News went 99 straight days without that includes a conservative news story before it promoted a Fox News article about the death of actor James Van Der Beek last Friday.
The drought ended just two days after the FTC despatched its warning letter.
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