Yahoo’s AI-powered news tool has a clear bias against conservative viewpoints — with just 3% of its featured articles coming from right-leaning outlets in the past three months, according to a new analysis released Thursday.
Media Research Center – a conservative watchdog that has previously called out Apple News, Google and other aggregators for alleged bias — conducted a review of the “Yahoo 100” feed. The tool “uses AI to identify emerging stories and generate summaries” to provide “a real-time snapshot of what the internet is talking about,” according to Yahoo.
Of a total of 1,218 articles reviewed from May through July, 859 — or about 70% — came from news outlets that are classified as left-leaning. Meanwhile, a paltry 35 stories — or just 3% — came from right-leaning outlets like The Post, Fox News, or The Telegraph.
“Yahoo claiming its new trending feed reflects genuine cultural conversations across the internet is a total sham. MRC Free Speech America’s latest findings prove that Yahoo is falling right in line with the rest of the biased news aggregators — Apple News, Google News and MSN — in aggressively slanting what the public sees,” MRC President David Bozell said in a statement.
“Across all four platforms, Big Tech is actively rigging the news feed to suppress conservative voices and insulate millions of readers in a left-wing echo chamber,” Bozell added.
MRC noted that Yahoo 100 also features content from the site’s “Yahoo Scout” tool, which was built using Anthropic’s Claude model – which itself has faces allegations of bias in its responses.
Yahoo says Scout uses “Microsoft Bing’s grounding API” to ensure that its AI-generated answers “are informed by authoritative sources from across the open web.”
MRC alleged in a blog post about its findings that “authoritative sources” are a “leftist catchphrase often used to excuse censorship of media sources that run afoul of the left’s narrative.”
To conduct their analysis, MRC’s researchers reviewed the top 20 articles featured on the “Yahoo 100” feed from May 1 through July 31 of this year. The articles were collected each day at 8:30 a.m. ET to ensure uniform results.
MRC relied on media bias ratings from AllSides, a nonpartisan outlet that uses a multi-partisan panel of experts — with two members from the left, two from the center and two from the right – that are trained to spot media bias. It also conducts blind surveys of ordinary Americans to gauge how they perceive coverage from particular outlets.
Last April, AllSides found in its own study that Apple News, Google News, Yahoo and Microsoft Bing all displayed rampant left-wing bias on their aggregated news feeds.
A Yahoo News spokesperson pushed back at the time, arguing that the company works with hundreds of outlets from both sides of the political spectrum, including right-leaning outlets like Fox News and The Post.
MRC drew national attention, including that of President Trump himself, last February when it first called out Apple News for excluding right-leaning outlets on its newsfeed.
The watchdog’s study prompted a formal warning letter from FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson, who warned Apple CEO Tim Cook that the company could be violating consumer protection laws.
Representatives for Yahoo, Anthropic and Microsoft did not immediately return a request for comment.