As President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration draws closer, Google is still relentlessly working to bring down his cabinet-level picks and other nominees.
MRC researchers consistently found a glut of leftist articles and personal attacks when searching Google for the names of Trump’s cabinet nominees along with Brendan Carr and Kash Patel, his picks to head the Federal Communications Commission and the FBI, respectively. Using media bias ratings firm AllSides, MRC researchers found that Google consistently provided double-digit ratios in favor of leftist content in the general and News tab searches performed on Dec. 26 and Jan. 2. The search giant presented no fewer than 10 times more articles from leftist sources than right-leaning sources including a host of vicious media attacks on the nominees.
General Search
Notably, Google failed to include “lean right” or “right” results for 69 percent of the Dec. 26 general searches and for 84 percent of the Jan. 2 general searches.
Researchers found that on Dec. 26 general searches yielded 12 times as many leftist articles from sources such as MSNBC, ProPublica, The Daily Beast, CNN and The New York Times. The Jan. 2 general search yielded also 12 times more articles from hostile left-leaning sources than those from outlets that AllSides rated as right or lean right.
News Tab
The News tab results similarly had precious few “lean right” or “right” results to counterbalance the radical leftist propaganda boosted by Google such as climate cult publication Inside Climate News. Google failed to include a single “lean right” or “right” result for more than half the News tab searches on both dates.
Additionally, the News tab search results were almost as biased as the general search results, yielding 11 times as many leftist articles on Dec. 26 and 10 times as many leftist articles on Jan. 2.
Hostile Attacks on Nominees
Google also peppered its results with articles delivering personal attacks against the nominees, especially Patel, Pete Hegseth (the presumptive nominee for Defense Secretary) and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (the presumptive nominee for Health Secretary).
On Dec. 26 alone, at least six of the News tab search articles went after Patel. For example, MSNBC warned he would be a “dangerous FBI Director,” while WIRED used the headline "Kash Patel is the Hero Qanon has been waiting for.” Patel also came under fire from Newsweek, The Atlantic, The Times and NBC News.
On Jan. 2, nine out of ten articles Google provided in the News tab search results attacked Patel, using some of the same articles from the Dec. 26 search plus additional broadsides from ABC News, The Washington Post, The Bulwark and Politico. Google included an MSNBC article accusing Patel of “grifting” and indulging conspiracy theories and a New Yorker piece implausibly arguing that Patel would be a more dangerous FBI director than J. Edgar Hoover.
Both days of News tab results also went after RFK Jr. on many different fronts from a Rolling Stone article arguing that RFK Jr. would “Make America Sick Again” to arguing that RFK Jr. “can’t be taken seriously” or that America must “tame” him. These results also featured such radical publications as Mother Jones and The Daily Beast.
In Hegseth’s case, Google results hyped a woman’s allegations against him in both the News tab and general searches and featured articles accusing him of having a drinking problem. Both searches included a Times article using his mother against him. MRC also found negative articles by leftist taxpayer-funded websites PBS and NPR in both searches, as well as an all-out assault from The New Yorker, which aired out a wide variety of accusations against Hegseth such as drinking, financial mismanagement, infidelity, drunken statements, and more.
But Google didn’t just stack the results with leftist and legacy media and negative headlines. Google planted an atrocious short headline in the search results on both days MRC researchers did a general search for Hegseth’s name.
CNN was one of many outlets Google used to fill the results with negative headlines about Hegseth. While readers might draw negative inferences from the actual CNN title, “Police report reveals new details from sexual assault allegation against Trump’s defense secretary nominee,” Google made things far worse. People who googled Hegseth in the News tab on both dates would have found a shortened headline that says “Police report reveals new details from sexual assault,” which gives the impression that both the police and CNN agreed that there was a sexual assault.
Methodology
For this report, MRC Free Speech America analyzed the Dec. 26 and Jan. 2 Google Search and News tab results for the first and last names of 24 men and women nominated for cabinet-level positions in the second Trump administration as well as Trump’s choice for FCC chairman and Trump’s choice for FBI director. MRC Free Speech America created an algorithm to automate this process in a clean environment. A “clean environment” allows for organic search to populate results without 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.
This study included leftist anti-Trump publication The Bulwark as a “lean right” result multiple times since AllSides rates The Bulwark as “lean right.”
Nominees searched on December 26 and January 2 include Scott Bessent, Pamela Bondi, Douglas Burgum, Brendan Carr, Lori Chavez-DeRemer, Doug Collins, Sean Duffy, Tulsi Gabbard, Jamieson Greer, Kevin Hassett, Peter Hegseth, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Kelly Loeffler, Howard Lutnick, Linda McMahon, Stephen Miran, Kristi Noem, Kash Patel, Brooke Rollins, Marco Rubio, Elise Stefanik, Scott Turner, Russell Vought, Susan Wiles, Christopher Wright and Lee Zeldin.
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