The MRC vs. Google: Biased 'Research' To Benefit Trump
Throughout the election, The Media Research Center peddled its bogus narrative -- based on its own faulty right-wing bias -- that Google's search results don't promote Republicans enough.
For years, the Media Research Center has been waging a unfair and distorted partisan war against Google. Unsurprisingly, that war continued during the 2024 presidential election. Luis Cornelio complained in a June 28 post:
Google News overwhelmingly propped up leftist media outlets in the aftermath of the CNN debate between former President Donald Trump and President Joe Biden, MRC Free Speech America can confirm.
MRC researchers conducted a clean search query for “Biden,” “Trump,” and “Presidential Debate” in Google News tabs on Friday. The results, while unsurprising, revealed that the tech giant significantly boosted leftist media outlets a day after polls showed that Trump dominated Biden in the first presidential debate ahead of the 2024 general election.
Key Findings:
Out of the 12 spots in the Google News tab, the Media Research Center found that only one right-leaning outlet was highlighted when searching for “Biden.”
When searching for “Trump,” only leftist outlets were exclusively highlighted.
Similarly, when searching for “Presidential Debate,” Google News barely spotlighted Fox News, while prominently featuring 16 leftist outlets.
Google Highlights Leftist Outlets by an 11 to 1 Ratio in Search for “Biden” in News Tab
The CNN debate has been widely described as a Biden “bloodbath,” but do not expect Google to show right-leaning outlets using similar language.
Analysis completed by MRC researchers shows that Google News results for the “Biden” and “Trump” queries almost completely excluded right-leaning media outlets, based on a media list provided by AllSides.
By an 11 to 1 ratio, Google highlighted leftist media outlets while censoring reports from right-leaning media outlets as categorized by AllSides.
Instead, the tech giant prominently featured media outlets such as CNN, The Washington Post, NBC News, Politico and The Associated Press, all of which are dubbed as left-leaning media by AllSides.
Other media outlets included The Hill, Forbes and The Wall Street Journal, which are considered center-leaning by AllSides.
ConWebWatch has documented how right-leaning AllSides’ labeling is highly dubious and subjective — indeed, it’s laughable for AllSides and the MRC to portray mainstream outlets like CNN, The Washington Post, NBC News, Politico and the Associated Press as “leftist.” Further, no evaluation was performed on any of the articles from those outlets for their individual bias, so Cornelio can’t possibly know if any bias actually exists.
Gabriela Pariseau spent an Aug. 1 post complaining that Google assumed searchers would want to know about Donald Trump’s opponent when searching for Trump:
Google is redirecting users searching for former President Donald Trump’s name toward news about Vice President Kamala Harris in what appears to be another search term switcheroo, an MRC Free Speech America search found.
The MRC findings corroborate reports from X owner Elon Musk and others who noted that when users search for “donald trump” or “trump rally,” the banner with news results listed Harris’s name.
When MRC researchers searched for the terms “donald trump” on Tuesday, Google displayed what is described as a “knowledge panel” about the former president including his name and fomer title. The search giant followed up with a news panel labeled “News about Harris·Trump” banner.
“Harris keeps calling Trump and Vance ‘weird.’ Here’s why,” read a headline by the Associated Press piece shown second. As if that was not enough, Google highlighted a Washington Post headlined, “Trump, with a history of sexist attacks, again faces a female opponent” in the third result.
A Wednesday search for the term “trump rally” prompted news panels favorable to Trump’s opponent. “Kamala Harris rally in Atlanta,” reads the title of the first news panel.
When MRC researchers searched for the terms “kamala harris,” Google results showed a knowledge panel of her name and the fact that she is the vice president of the United States followed by a news panel labeled “Kamala Harris visit to Georgia.” Trump’s name is not mentioned in either the first or second Google news panels in the resulting search.
“Google is reliably shameless,” MRC Free Speech America Vice President Dan Schneider said of the anti-Trump censorship. “It consistently manipulates data to achieve its political goals. Yet again it appears to be altering its algorithms to feed the American people a positive narrative about one candidate while disseminating terrible accusations against the other.”
Pariseau didn’t explain why Google must censor information about Harris in a Trump-related search.
Pariseau made a similar baseless assumption about deliberate Google bias in an Aug. 7 post:
Google is still redirecting users to news about Vice President Kamala Harris even when they search for a completely different name, an MRC Free Speech America search found.
Now that the Democratic Party nominee has picked her running mate, Tim Walz, MRC decided to put Google once again to the test. Researchers conducted a comparison of Google’s search results when searching for “j d vance rally” and “tim walz rally,” and in both cases, Google referenced Harris. But in the case of Vance, Google referenced Harris even before Vance.
When MRC researchers searched for the terms “j d vance rally” on Tuesday, Google displayed a news panel labeled “Top Stories Kamala Harris and JD Vance.” All of the top six news results referred to Vance, four of the six stories referred to Harris as well.
But when MRC researchers searched for Harris’s own vice presidential pick (“tim walz rally”) Google showed Walz’s name first. “Top Stories Tim Walz ᐧ Kamala Harris,” the news panel read. A USA Today story noted an upcoming Philadelphia rally, CNN noted Harris’s recent decision to choose Walz as her running mate and a third article noted that Trump blasted Walz as a “West Coast wannabe.”
Again, Pariseau offered no evidence to back up her assumption of deliberate bias — she’s simply parroting her employer’s narrative. She further parroted her preferred presidential candidate making a similar argument in a July 30 post:
Trump took to Truth Social to revel in Facebook and Google getting called out for censoring search terms and an iconic image related to the attempt on his life.
“Facebook has just admitted that it wrongly censored the Trump ‘attempted assassination photo,’ and got caught. Same thing for Google,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “They made it virtually impossible to find pictures or anything about this heinous act. Both are facing BIG BACKLASH OVER CENSORSHIP CLAIMS.” The former president added, “Here we go again, another attempt at RIGGING THE ELECTION!!! GO AFTER META AND GOOGLE. LET THEM KNOW WE ARE ALL WISE TO THEM, WILL BE MUCH TOUGHER THIS TIME. MAGA2024!”
The Daily Mail drew attention to Google’s search suppression in a July 28 report. Users who typed the words “assassination attempt on” were given autocomplete search suggestions finishing the search that did not include former President Donald Trump. Instead, Google finished the search with the names: “truman,” “reagan,” “ronald reagan,” “george wallace,” “lenin,” “gerald ford,” “franklin roosevelt,” “andrew johnson,” “fdr,” and “seward.”
Notably missing was the most recent assassination attempt against a former president just 15 days prior.
In Google’s explanation of how its search autocomplete feature works it claims: “To determine what predictions to show, our systems look for common queries that match what someone starts to enter into the search box.” The search giant alleged that it also considers factors such as the language, location and trending interest of the query as well as the user’s past searches.
However, Google Trends showed that the number of searches for “assassination attempt on trump” was significantly higher than “assassination attempt on truman” and “assassination attempt on reagan.” That was true for searches in the state of Virginia (where MRC researchers conducted the search), for searches conducted in the United States and also for searches conducted worldwide. Researchers also examined searches over the last 24 hours (July 28 and 29), the last 30 days, and the last 20 years.
[…]
Google Communications responded to the backlash in an X post claiming, “There was no manual action taken. Our systems have protections against Autocomplete predictions associated with political violence, which were working as intended prior to this horrific event. We’re working on improvements to ensure our systems are more up to date.”
Defending itself, the company downplayed the issue. “Of course, Autocomplete is just a tool to help people save time, and they can still search for anything they want to. Following this terrible act, people turned to Google to find high-quality information – we connected them with helpful results, and will continue to do so,” Google added
MRC Free Speech America Vice President Dan Schneider, however, called Google out for its lackluster response. “Note how Google says ‘no manual action take[n],’ admitting that its algorithm is designed to silence info about Trump.”
Mild inconvenience due to a certain term not appearing in autofill is not “search suppression” — indeed, neither Pariseau nor Schneider offered any evidence that any actual searches on the Trump assassination attempt were blocked. Still, Catherine Salgado spent an Aug. 7 post repeating this narrative and hyping right-wing lawmakers accusing Google of “erasing” the Trump assassination attempt from the internet — despite the fact that, again, nobody was actually blocked from searching for it — and claiming that not including certain things in autofill is “election interference.”
An Aug. 27 post by Cornelio repeated the baseless insistence that including credible news sources in news searches is somehow “election interference”:
Google is actively assisting Vice President Kamala Harris in maintaining her media honeymoon by keeping users in the dark about her radical policy views, including her support for abolishing ICE and threatening to end private health insurance, a new MRC Free Speech America study found.
The study revealed a staggering bias in Google’s favoring of left-leaning media by a nearly 10:1 margin in both Google Search and the Google News tab. MRC conducted the searches on Aug. 21, covering four search prompts across both Google Search and the Google News tab. These findings raise serious concerns about Google’s influence on the outcome of the 2024 election, echoing its interference in the 2022 midterm elections.
MRC completed the searches using a clean environment, discovering that Google has promoted left-leaning media sites at a shocking 17:2 ratio in Google Search results. The bias was equally pronounced in the Google News tab for search results, where left-leaning outlets appeared at a 19:2 ratio. This is a nearly 10:1 biased ratio on each tab.
MRC used the media bias chart by AllSides to determine the ideological leaning of the outlets featured in Google’s search results. Among the 19 media outlets that received favorable placements in the Google News tab results were The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC, Politico, Slate, Vox and The Guardian. In contrast, only three right-leaning media outlets — The Federalist, New York Post and The Washington Times — were scarcely featured.
Cornelio ofered no evidence that those “leftist” media outlets are actually leftist, at least to the extreme that the Federalist, Washington Times and New York Post are explicitly right-wing — and, of course, he never examined any of the articles from those “leftist” outlets for purported bias. He added:
This new study followed the release of a Media Research Center/McLaughlin & Associates survey showing that between 71 and 86 percent of Democratic and Independent Biden voters are unaware of Harris’s previous support for radical policies.
ConWebWatch has documented that this is a meaningless and deceptive push poll bought by the MRC from Donald Trump’s election pollster — a reminder that the MRC cares about getting Trump elected, not about “media research.”
The MRC played this game again in a Sept. 25 post by Pariseau:
Google has a long history of interfering in American elections in favor of the most liberal politicians. In the lead-up to the 2024 election, like the most recent presidential debate, Google is giving Americans the rigged ABC treatment.
In the past, Google buried the campaign websites of Republican candidates. Now the search giant very clearly pads its search results about political candidates with leftist legacy news articles, many of which are hostile to Republicans and either neutral or favorable toward Democrats. Readers will have to sift through the biased news before they even see the organic results of their searches, let alone a candidate’s website.
MRC Free Speech America researchers conducted searches on Sept. 6 for “donald trump presidential race 2024” and “kamala harris presidential race 2024” to determine where Google Search would position each candidate’s presidential campaign website. In both searches, news from leftist-biased legacy outlets like CNN and The New York Times populated the top of the search results.
Pariseau brought a certain “liberal bias”-obsessed co-worker to whine about this:
MRC Free Speech America worked alongside MRC NewsBusters Executive Editor Tim Graham who analyzed these articles for bias. He noted that not every story needs to show a blatant leftist bias to be problematic because Google credentials the news sources by elevating them in search results. “Google [is] telling the reader that the most reliable sources of campaign news are CNN, NBC, The Times, The Post, Politico and The Economist—liberal sources all.”
The Washington Post live updates page, which showed up in the results for both searches, featured slanted headlines in its list of articles about the election.
“This is not neutral, there are snotty headlines and opinion pieces,” Graham said. He cited headlines like: “Analysis: Trump’s sudden move to re-litigate sexual abuse claims goes off the rails,” “Hunter Biden’s tragedy and turmoil shadowed the Biden presidency” and “Nikki Haley says she’s willing to campaign for Donald Trump, but he hasn’t asked her.”
How convenient that Graham doesn’t have to actually prove bias in a specific story because he’s already painted the outlet with the broad brush of “liberal bias.” Graham also didn’t explain how exactly those headlines he cited are inaccurate, however much he finds them “snotty.” Still, he continued:
The Economist article titled “Donald Trump v Kamala Harris: who’s leading the polls?” included subtle but still evident bias.
“Averaging the polls seems fairly neutral, but the descriptions of the candidates can sound loaded,” said Graham. “Writers highlight negatives for both campaigns but suggest Harris is not an ideologue, and that Trump is very divisive. Apparently, Democrats can say the worst things about Trump and his supporters and it’s never viewed as divisive. It’s merely implied that it’s accurate.”
Again, Graham never actually proves any of this is inaccurate, nor does he demand that right-wing media similarly act in a fair and neutral manner. Meanwhile, Pariseau went on to complain:
Although Google included stories from many of the top-20 most viewed news outlets, according to Statista, notably missing is the third most-viewed news site, Fox News Digital. Not a single Fox News article appeared among the first news options in either of the two searches MRC Free Speech America conducted.
Pariseau didn’t mention that one reason this might be is because Fox News — whose right-wing bias Pariseau didn’t label — discredited itself by deliberately lying to its viewers about “election fraud” after the 2020 election, which resulted in a $787 million settlement with voting-tech company Dominion. If you’ll recall, Graham thought Fox News deserved a pass for lying to people because nobody watches Fox News to learn the truth, only to have their partisan biases reinforced.
Graham rehashed all this in his Sept. 30 podcast:
Imagine if you could start from scratch and search Google without a previous internet search history. How would Google twist the results without knowing the user who is asking for it?
MRC Free Speech America VP Dan Schneider explains their latest research into Google. Gabriela Pariseau reported that a clean Google search on September 6 for the presidential candidates would lead you inevitably to Democrat media sources (Politico, New York Times, Washington Post). No one imagines those sources are going to provide anything objective on Trump, not when they rail against him as killing democracy in darkness. But they are the “trustworthy” sources, and conservative media are treated as pure misinformation.
Graham offered no evidence to back up his claim that those outlets are “Democrat media sources” or offer any evidence that they are not trustworthy.
The MRC’s dishonesty about Google searches continued in an Oct. 1 post by Tom Olohan:
Google is at it again, forcing users to dig through 13 pages of search results before finally finding a story by Fox News in one search, and 14 pages before finding a story by the New York Post in another. These two results were the first U.S.-based right-of-center publications in two separate searches using the leftist search platform. Is Google living up to former President Donald Trump’s accusations of election interference?
Using the media list provided by AllSides that classifies publications based on their “right” to “left” bias, MRC researchers found that tech giant Google blanketed search results for “kamala harris presidential race 2024” and “donald trump presidential race 2024” with leftist, legacy media sources like CNN, The New York Times, NBC News and Politico. On Oct. 1, MRC researchers did not find any U.S.-based “lean-right” media outlets until Fox News appeared as the fifth result on the 13th page of Google search results for the aforementioned Harris search prompt. Likewise, Google buried the first U.S.-based “lean right” result for the aforementioned Trump prompt as the third result on the 14th page, as Google featured an article by the New York Post.
As we’ve documented, AllSides’ labeling methodology is highly dubious and subjective — indeed, it’s laughable for AllSides and the MRC to portray mainstream outlets like CNN, The Washington Post, NBC News, Politico and CNN as “leftist.” Further, no evaluation was performed on any of the articles from those outlets for their individual bias, so Olohan can’t possibly know if any bias actually exists, so he can’t prove that any of those mainstream sources are as far to the left as Fox News is to the right. Even more laughably, Olohan tried to smear a fact-checker by whining that “FactCheck.org—a member of the George Soros-funded Poynter Institute’s International Fact-Checking Network—appeared before any U.S.-based sources on the right.” He offered no proof that the fact-check in question was somehow “leftist.”
Pariseau did something similar in an Oct. 2 post:
Google didn’t get the memo. At the Tuesday night debate, J.D. Vance said that the real “threat to democracy is censorship, but an MRC Free Speech America study performed this morning found that Google’s priority is promoting 100 percent leftist news, not preserving American freedoms.
The morning after the debate, MRC Free Speech America conducted a search in the Google News tab for “jd vance.” MRC analysis revealed that 100 percent of the results came from outlets with a leftist political bias. Google News tab did not display a single article from an outlet that did not have a predominantly leftist political bias
This overt leftist bias is especially concerning considering that according to a November 2023 Pew Research survey, a rising number of American adults receive their news from search. The study found that 15 percent of U.S. adults prefer to get their news from search engines which is up from 13 percent in 2022 and 11 percent in 2021.
The leftist news outlets Google News tab provided in its results for “jd vance,” included articles from the likes of The New York Times, BBC, CNN, TODAY, CBS News, USA Today, NBC News, The Hill, The Washington Post and Politico. One of the most slanted headlines was: “The Moment When Vance Dodged a Question but Said Plenty” published by The Times. The Postalso piled on with an opinion piece headlined “At debate, Vance whines: You weren’t supposed to fact check me!”
In a follow-up search for “tim walz,” Google wasn’t much better. MRC analysis found that 90 percent of the results came from leftist outlets. Just one of the results came from America’s third most-viewed online news site, according to Statista, Fox News Digital.
The Google News tab results for “tim walz” included articles from The Guardian, BBC, CNN, The Post, Fox News, USA Today, NPR, CBS News, Slate and The Times.
Again, Pariseau did not examine the accuracy or even the purported bias of any of those articles she’s attacking — it’s just a lazy blanket attack based on the dubious analysis of others.
Pariseau returned with more shoddiness in an Oct. 4 post:
Google, for four days in a row, engulfed its Search with nine times as many articles from leftist media outlets than outlets without a predominantly leftist bias. This comes a week after the Big Tech platform attempted to dismiss an MRC Free Speech America search study as a mere one-off.
This week, MRC researchers conducted the same searches for “donald trump presidential race 2024” and “kamala harris presidential race 2024” every day for four days starting Sept. 30. Google continued to flood its search results with articles from leftist media outlets and videos above former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign websites. Altogether, Google displayed 45 articles from leftist, U.S.- and U.K.-based media outlets compared to just five without a predominantly leftist bias: NewsNation, Fox News and C-SPAN.
“Google owes the MRC and the American people an apology for its election interference,” said Media Research Center Founder and President Brent Bozell. “Google has been caught misrepresenting the facts.” “”
Google’s overt leftist bias is especially concerning considering that according to a November 2023 Pew Research survey, a rising number of American adults receive their news from search. The study found that 15 percent of U.S. adults prefer to get their news from search engines, which is up from 13 percent in 2022, and 11 percent in 2021.
The leftist, U.S.-based media outlets that Google credentialed by pushing them to the top of search results were as follows: The Washington Post, MSN, The New York Times, CNN, Politico, USA Today, Los Angeles Times, The Economist, The Hill, NBC News, MSNBC, Forbes, NPR, CNBC, CBS and CBS News Bay Area.
The search engine also produced articles and videos from three leftist, U.K.-based outlets including The Independent, BBC and The Guardian.
Pariseau still refused to check any individual article for purported bias — further demonstrating that this is all for partisan show and to generate right-wing clicks. Despite Bozell’s partisan posturing, no “election interference” or fact manipulation has been identified.
The dishonesty returned in an Oct. 15 post by Olohan:
With only three weeks remaining before the election, Google continues to heavily push leftist media coverage of Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump in search results.
On Oct. 15, MRC researchers once again used AllSides “right” and “left” bias ratings and found that Google Search results for “kamala harris presidential race 2024” and “donald trump presidential race 2024” were dominated by a deluge of legacy media and far-left outlets. The results prominently featured CNN and The New York Times, and publications owned by leftist billionaires, such as Jeff Bezos’s The Washington Post and Marc Benioff’s Time. Not a single right-leaning outlet appeared in Google search results until Fox News was displayed on page eight for the Harris prompt and on page seven for the Trump prompt.
Tellingly, when searching for the aforementioned Harris prompt, Google did not display a single media outlet that AllSides rated as “lean-right” or “right” until a Fox News video appeared as the fourth result on page eight of the search results. For an actual “lean right” or “right” article, users had to go all the way to the fifth result of page 14 to find a New York Post piece.
Google buried the first “lean right” or “right” outlet as the third result on the seventh page when MRC researchers analyzed results for the Trump prompt, as Google finally displayed a Fox Business article in this spot. Google did not display another right-leaning outlet until The Telegraph appeared as the fourth result on page 11.
[…]
Previous MRC Free Speech America studies have consistently exposed Google for its leftist bias in search results, which invariably favor leftist media outlets.
Once more: None of this is based on actual research — it’s just subjective partisan labeling. Rather than do any actual work, Olohan simply parroted the company line by claiming that “the MRC has conducted 23 studies on Google’s election-related search bias (19 at the time of Google’s dismissive response) and documented the search giant’s long history of election interference dating back to 2008.” But we’ve shown that those so-called studies are rife with dubious research and inflated numbers, so these partisan results can’t be trusted.