Apple’s leadership once thought Apple News could be an antidote to bad information online, and serve as a lifeline for a struggling news industry displaced by powerful tech platforms. And the platform, which mixes highbrow political news sites with pop culture sources like People, has quietly emerged as a major force in the US information space. Its app is a natural source for anyone with an iPhone, including former President Joe Biden.
Last week, the Federal Trade Commission sent a letter to Apple warning that it could be violating a consumer protection law by omitting explicitly conservative coverage from its app.
The letter came after months of mounting pressure by conservative media activists with the White House’s ear. Since last fall, the Media Research Center, a right-wing organization that criticizes legacy media outlets, has turned its attention on Apple News’ story selection. A February survey of stories by MRC claimed that Apple News largely ignores stories from explicitly conservative sources in its news application, saying the outlet highlighted 620 stories from left-leaning or centrist outlets and zero from right-leaning news outlets.
MRC President David Bozell told Semafor that late last summer, the organization noticed in the Press Gazette that news aggregators consistently ranked in the top ten for monthly news traffic in the US. Bozell said it prompted the MRC to dedicate some resources to focusing on how aggregators send traffic and partnership revenue to news publishers.
“We’ve got a ‘fish where the fish are’ mentality,” Bozell told Semafor in an email. “What we’re discovering is that so-called ‘legacy’ outlets are garnering millions of website hits from these aggregators, despite declining ratings and declining believability rates.”
The organization took some strong liberties with the data. Apple News content appears differently for each user, as it prompts users to select what news outlets to follow; users have the opportunity to follow conservative and right-leaning outlets, many of which are Apple News partners. In other instances, MRC’s classifications made little sense: It called the Wall Street Journal, one of Apple News’ preferred partners within the app, centrist, despite the obvious right-leaning nature of its opinion content, which is heavily featured within the app.
Still, the MRC’s tactics worked. The February study made the rounds among the White House and its allies in conservative media, who shared it in unison on X last week. It had also caught the attention of regulators at the FTC, who had been simultaneously in the process of drafting a letter to Apple over its coverage. They quickly sent that message on Wednesday.
The White House, the FTC, and Apple did not respond to requests for comment.
First Appeared on
Source link
Leave feedback about this