Karoline Leavitt Pushes Right-Wing Report Claiming Google News is ‘Massively Biased’

(Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call via AP Images)

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt bashed Google on Wednesday by sharing a new Breitbart report that said the tech giant is “massively biased” against conservative outlets.

The right-wing outlet’s report is based on a fresh study from The Media Research Center that said only a handful of conservatives publications slipped past “Google News’s iron grip on information domination.” The MRC found Google pushed only 11 stories from right-leaning outlets last month, compared to 314 left-leaning stories.

“Just 2% of Google News’s top morning stories in February came from sources rated right-leaning by media ratings firm AllSides,”  the study said. “Google’s leftist bias is only further underscored by the fact that it completely shut out right-leaning outlets for over half the month.”

Breitbart explained a bit more about the study:

MRC researchers examined the top 20 stories featured on Google News each day at approximately 8:30 a.m. ET throughout the 28-day period from February 1 through February 28.

According to the findings, Google News featured zero right-leaning articles for 17 days during the month. On days when right-leaning outlets did appear, only one such article was included, and in 45 percent of those instances, the article appeared near the bottom of the top 20 list. The study identified four right-leaning outlets that received coverage: Daily Mail, Fox News, New York Post, and the Bulwark.

The MRC is a nonprofit conservative watchdog founded in 1987. Its mission statement says it it “winning the battle against online censorship, Big Tech interference in elections, and anti-Americanism from Silicon Valley-related entities.” Its website adds that its NewsBusters division — which often shares media clips on X — is dedicated to exposing and “neutralizing liberal media bias.”

Google has been accused of having a left-leaning bias for years by many Republicans, including President Donald Trump. 

The president accused Google’s search results of being “RIGGED” in 2018, and Missouri’s Republican Attorney General Andrew Bailey felt the same way in 2024 when he launched an investigation into Google for “censoring conservative speech.” Google said that was “totally false,” and the probe appears to have fizzled out.

There have been some other odd things that have happened in the past few years that have made conservatives question Google — like when it helped voters get directions to vote for Kamala Harris in 2024, but not Trump. And YouTube — which has the same parent company as Google — agreed to pay Trump $24.5 million last year for blocking him from posting videos following the 2021 Capitol Riot.

A rep for the $3.73 trillion company pushed back on MRC’s study in a statement shared with Breitbart.

“This report is wildly inaccurate. It checked Google News once a day from a single account, ignoring the fact that it automatically updates throughout the day, and shows news personalized to your interests and location,” the rep said. “You can also easily select sources you want to see more often in News and Search.”

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