A conservative media watchdog group says Apple News promoted dozens of negatively framed stories about Republican policy priorities in the weeks before the midterm elections, without featuring a single positively framed story on the same topics.
The Media Research Center (MRC) reviewed Apple News’s top 20 stories each day from September 15 to September 30 and found 84 headlines that cast Republican priorities — including immigration, law and order, and drug enforcement — in a negative light. The group says it found zero stories during that period that portrayed those same GOP priorities positively.
According to the MRC’s count, that works out to roughly five negatively framed stories per day appearing in front of users of the app, which comes preinstalled on every iPhone sold in the United States.
MRC President David Bozell criticized the findings sharply.
“Apple News ran 84 negative headlines on Republican priorities and zero positive ones. Zero! My dentist finds more good news in a root canal.”
Bozell argued the imbalance suggests Apple’s editorial choices favor one party over the other.
“Millions of voters open that app before they vote, and Apple’s editors are in there like a bartender who waters down only one party’s drinks. Come on, Apple, tell us who picks these stories and why Republicans got the whole bad-news buffet.”
MRC staffers Luis Cornelio and Madison Van Zant, who conducted the study, described specific patterns in how issues were framed. They said immigration coverage centered on court defeats and sensationalized stories, the economy was framed around high gas prices, law and order coverage featured positive portrayals of police abolition efforts, proposed cuts to government were framed as radical, foreign policy coverage portrayed America’s adversaries favorably as “warriors,” and efforts to reduce government waste were characterized as unlawful.
“This review adds to MRC’s growing body of evidence that the platform’s editors continue to curate its feeds to push a left-wing political agenda, even as the news app faces scrutiny from the Trump administration,” Cornelio and Van Zant said.
Bozell went further, raising the question of whether Apple News’s story selection amounted to election interference ahead of the midterms.
Apple News has faced repeated accusations of left-leaning bias in the past. Earlier this month, separate MRC research reported that the app had hidden stories about the Democratic National Committee’s weak finances and mounting debt in the run-up to the midterms.
