Yes, the Media Does Treat Obama Better Than Trump -- and Google Just Proved It
The appearance of overt bias against, and censorship of, conservative and Republican voices by tech giants and social media platforms has become a big issue, particularly as those concerns have been amplified by President Donald Trump in recent days and weeks.
In a two-part tweet Tuesday, Trump claimed a Google search for the words “Trump News” produced results heavily slanted toward left-leaning media outlets. He claimed this was proof of Google censoring conservative media voices.
“Google & others are suppressing voices of Conservatives and hiding information and news that is good. They are controlling what we can & cannot see. This is a very serious situation-will be addressed!” he tweeted.
On Wednesday, Trump again called out Google’s bias specifically and shared a short video which showed how Google had promoted former President Barack Obama’s State of the Union speeches on its home page, but failed to do so similarly for Trump.
#StopTheBias pic.twitter.com/xqz599iQZw
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 29, 2018
We decided to test the president’s theory for ourselves and conducted two separate searches on Google using similar search terms in order to compare the results.
The dual Google searches were for the keywords “Trump without evidence” and “Obama without evidence,” and the results that were returned on those two searches were notable for their differences.
For the “Trump without evidence” search, Google returned 127 million results in 0.43 seconds. The first page of those results — the highest-ranking returns — were all links to liberal mainstream media outlets reporting on how Trump accused — “without evidence” — NBC of “fudging” an interview in 2017 about Russia, or how he blamed — “without evidence” — China for hacking Hillary Clinton’s emails.
The second page of results offered slightly more diversity, in that it included links for articles about Trump making claims against Google, about social media discrimination, about voter fraud, about the Miss Universe pageant and about FBI documents. The third page offered similarly anti-Trump articles, and so on.
Meanwhile, a Google search for the keywords “Obama without evidence” only returned 59 million results in 0.37 seconds. Virtually all of the results on the first page were either defending Obama from accusations made against him or referencing things Trump had said about his predecessor.
The second page of results was wholly focused on liberal media outlets slamming Trump for his claims against Obama, with similar links for the third page of search results.
To be sure, there are a number of varying factors that are included in Google’s search algorithms, so those of you playing along at home may find slightly different results for a similar experiment. But odds are your results won’t be far off from our own.
Furthermore, and slightly in Google’s defense, the search results are merely displaying what has been published online by the collective of mainstream media, alternative/conservative media and smaller blogs — though obviously the mainstream outlets get top billing over all others — meaning these disparate results are showcasing the media’s predominately liberal bias just as much, if not more so, than Google’s own liberal bias.
Regardless, it is abundantly clear that there is ample bias against conservatives and Republicans — and Trump especially — on the part of the mainstream media, social media platforms and the big tech companies like Google.
The media likes to talk a lot nowadays about the rights of a free press and how they are accorded a guarantee of the right to free speech by the First Amendment of the Constitution. That is indeed true and isn’t being disputed.
But what goes unmentioned is that inherent in the right of a free press to speak freely is also a responsibility to provide fair and objective coverage, something the overtly biased liberal media has failed miserably at for years.
This sort of one-sided bias and, essentially, censorship of conservative voices in the news and social media, and by big tech companies like Google, is unacceptable and must addressed immediately. News and social media platforms are supposed to be open forums where all voices are given an equal opportunity to be heard, not just the voices the liberal side agrees with.
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