Apple News’ editorial team has been deliberately excluding conservative media outlets from the popular app’s handpicked “top stories,” according to a bombshell new study.
AllSides, a nonpartisan group that classifies news outlets by their political leanings, reviewed a total of 166 articles that appeared on Apple News over a two-week period last October.
The study specifically focused on sections of the app that can’t be personalized by users – namely the “top stories” and “trending stories” sections.
Not one of the 82 articles displayed in the curated “top news” section were written by outlets classified as “right-leaning,” according to AllSides.
Overall, just 2% of the articles reviewed for the study came from conservative outlets, while a whopping 50% came from left-leaning outlets and 23% from centrist outlets.
“Apple News’ model inflames political polarization in America by ensconcing readers inside a one-sided bubble of information that can manipulate and blind them,” said Julie Mastrine, director of AllSides’ media bias rating system and one of the study’s authors.
“One-sided news consumption not only creates anxiety about current events, it prevents Americans from understanding one another,” she added.
Apple has faced heat since The Post reported last week on a study by conservative watchdog Media Research Center, which showed Apple News was aggressively promoting articles from left-leaning outlets while stifling right-leaning news groups.
President Trump shared the report on his Truth Social account hours after it was published.
Following The Post’s exclusive report, FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson sent a letter last week warning Apple CEO Tim Cook that the company could be in violation of consumer protection laws. Ferguson demanded that Cook conduct a “comprehensive review” and “take correction action swiftly.”
“By primarily showcasing news outlets that Americans and a panel of experts rate as left biased, Apple prevents Americans from considering the full range of views and information and deciding what they think for themselves,” Mastrine added.
To craft its ratings, AllSides uses a multi-partisan panel of experts trained to spot media bias as well as blind surveys of Americans from across the political spectrum.
It also conducts blind surveys of ordinary Americans, then averages both sets of results to come up with a rating.
Just two of the 65 media outlets that were featured on Apple News during the study were classified as right-leaning – Fox News, which appeared three times, and The Telegraph, which appeared once.
The outlets that appeared most frequently were the Wall Street Journal (rated as centrist), BuzzFeed (unrated), the Washington Post (rated as lean-left) and HuffPost (rated as left), the study found.
AllSides said it collected stories from Apple News at 10 a.m. ET each day from Oct. 6 through Oct.19, 2025 for the sake of consistency. The trending stories section is auto-populated based on what users are reading most.
The study’s findings closely matched AllSides’ data about Apple News from a similar analysis conducted in 2023, which found that 53% of articles in the “top news” section came from left-leaning outlets and just 1% from the right.
In AllSides’ 2023 review of the 10 most popular news aggregations services, Apple News was given a “lean left” rating, with only Yahoo News and Bing News deemed to be more skewed toward liberal views when curating stories.
Apple declined to comment.
Apple’s in-house editorial team has been led since 2017 by editor-in-chief Lauren Kern, who formerly held editor roles at New York Magazine and the New York Times Magazine.
In 2018, the Times declared that Kern had “quietly become one of the most powerful figures in English-language media” due to Apple News’ massive reach.
When initially confronted with Media Research Center’s allegations of bias, Apple said its news app users “can tailor the app to their interests by choosing to follow or block specific publications or topics.”
Apple News went 99 straight days without featuring a conservative news story before it promoted a Fox News article about the death of actor James Van Der Beek last Friday.
The drought ended just two days after the FTC sent its warning letter.
