ELECTION INTERFERENCE: Google Offers Users a Firehose of Legacy Media on Election Coverage
Google continues to go to great lengths to block users from seeing any right-of-center media outlets on 2024 presidential election news.
For the fifth consecutive week, Google rigged search results for “donald trump presidential race 2024,” shoving leftist and legacy media outlet articles into Americans’ faces. MRC researchers once again used AllSides “right” and “left” media bias ratings and had to dig deep to find the first right-of-center result for the Trump prompt search.
The first U.S.-based, right-leaning search result for the Trump prompt—a New York Post article—appeared as the eighth result on the fifth page of Google search results. This was the only right-of-center media outlet in the first 54 results, following 53 other results including left-of-center outlets such as Politico, CBS News and NBC News.
Filling the first few pages of results with left-of-center media and burying right-of-center media outlets has serious consequences. A November 2023 Pew Research survey showed that more and more Americans prefer using search engines to get their news, with 15 percent of adults preferring them—up from 13 percent in 2022 and 11 percent in 2011. And to say that Google gets the biggest piece of that would be an understatement. The search engine nearly eats the whole pie. Alphabet subsidiaries Google and YouTube account for 90 percent of daily internet searches.
While Fox News appeared on the first page for the prompt “kamala harris presidential race 2024,” only two U.S.-based, right-of-center results appeared among the first 45 non-sponsored search results across Google’s initial four pages. The other right-leaning media outlet article that appeared was from Fox News, appearing under a sea of outlets that AllSides describes as “lean left.” These outlets include The New York Times, CNN, CBS News, NBC News, ABC News, Politico and even Qatari-owned Al Jazeera. Each one of these publications appeared before the second Fox News article.
MRC researchers have repeatedly exposed Google’s rigged search results, including in four prior studies using the prompts “kamala harris presidential race 2024” and “donald trump presidential race 2024.” Google has repeatedly buried articles from U.S.-based “lean-right” or “right” news outlets. In past MRC studies, U.S.-based “lean right” and “right” results for the Harris prompt did not appear until pages four, eight, 11 and 13. For the Trump prompt, such results were absent until pages five, seven, 14 and 23.
Methodology
For this report, MRC Free Speech America analyzed the Oct. 29 Google search results of the innocuous words “donald trump presidential race 2024” and “kamala harris presidential race 2024.” MRC Free Speech America used a private window utilizing the Brave privacy browser to analyze Google search results to limit 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.
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