Elections

With only 14 days to go before election day, Google has not let up its efforts to bury right-leaning media and bolster leftist coverage in an apparent attempt to protect Vice President Kamala Harris and harm former President Donald Trump. 

MRC researchers once again used AllSides “right” and “left” media bias ratings and found that Google Search results for “kamala harris presidential race 2024” and “donald trump presidential race 2024,” skewed wildly to the left. On Oct. 22, Google continued to prominently feature far-left and legacy media outlets such as Vox, NPR, CNN, The New York Times, and USA Today. Google’s search results also featured publications owned by leftist billionaires, such as Jeff Bezos’s The Washington Post and Marc Benioff’s Time, as well as Qatar’s Al Jazeera. Google did not display a single right-leaning outlet in search results until page four for the Harris prompt and page five for the Trump prompt.

The first search result that Google displayed from a media outlet that AllSides rated as “lean-right” or “right” came in the form of a New York Post article which appeared on page four of the search results for the Harris prompt. Google again buried the first “lean right” or “right” outlet as the second result on the fifth page when MRC researchers analyzed results for the Trump prompt. Again the first article from a right-leaning outlet that appeared was the NY Post. 

The potential impact of Google’s bias is enormous. A November 2023 Pew Research survey showed that an increasing number of Americans depend on search engines for news. The study showed that 15 percent of U.S. adults prefer getting their news from search engines, up from 13 percent in 2022, and 11 percent in 2021.

This study is not the first time the MRC has exposed incredible leftist bias in Google search results. 

MRC researchers have repeatedly used the prompts “kamala harris presidential race 2024” and “donald trump presidential race 2024” to demonstrate just how skewed Google’s election coverage is. Over the last several weeks, Google has repeatedly buried articles from U.S.-based “lean-right” or “right” news outlets. In prior studies, U.S.-based “lean right” and “right” results for the Harris prompt did not appear until pages 8, 11 and 13 of search results. For the Trump prompt, such results were absent until pages 7, 14 and 23 of the search results.

The MRC has conducted 24 previous studies on Google’s election-related search bias and documented the search giant’s long history of election interference dating back to 2008. Between 2008 and 2024, Google interfered in American elections at least 41 times. 

Methodology 

For this report, MRC Free Speech America analyzed the Oct. 22 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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