NewsBusters Podcast: Big Tech's 'Reliable Sources' Are Liberal Sources

November 14th, 2025 8:25 AM

Whether it's Google News or Apple News or Wikipedia, too often the media outlets defined as "reliable sources" are the elitist liberal sources. People cruising their phones or digging into search engines are force-fed NPR, CNN, NBC, The Washington Post, The New York Times. Conservative sites are classified as unreliable. Wikipedia smeared NewsBusters as "unreliable."  

MRC's Free Speech America director Michael Morris and FSA staff writer Tom Olohan joined the show to discuss how the aggregators carefully select only the most liberal sources for your "news" diet on your cell phone or your internet browsers.

Tom found Google News, Microsoft’s MSN, Yahoo! News and AOL News largely hid the scandals related to Democrat candidates in key election races across America, only allowing a total of 14 stories mentioning the scandals to be published on their sites out of 2,240 prominently placed stories they pushed in the four weeks leading to election day. We discussed their other recent\ findings:

X-owner Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok endorsed Virginia Democrat candidates for governor, lieutenant governor, attorney general, and even a few local offices, while recommending zero Republicans. As part of this unabashedly partisan answer, Grok boasted that “These recommendations prioritize progressive policies on education, affordability, and equity.” Grok made zero mention of Virginia’s Democratic nominee for attorney general, Jay Jones’ text message scandal.

Big Tech behemoths have gone to great lengths to promote Wikipedia. Now, Google has been busted actively suppressing an emerging competitor. Google Search offered an outrageous response to users searching for Musk’s creation: “Did you mean: Wikipedia?” Immediately below this, Google taunted users with the least impartial source possible: a Wikipedia article on Grokipedia.

Wikipedia editors greenlit the Qatari government-funded Al Jazeera, giving a pass to Hamas defenders on the same “reliable sources” list that MRC Free Speech America exposed earlier this year, which at the time effectively blacklisted every right-of-center source on the AllSides Media Bias Chart while approving the vast majority of radical leftist and elitist media sources. In fact, editors cited Al Jazeera 139,754 times across Wikipedia, including 48,229 citations for Al Jazeera’s English-language content.

On its “Reliable sources/Perennial sources” page, Wikipedia editors outrageously called the overtly biased publication “generally reliable.” However, Wikipedia editors made a tepid concession to reality: “Most editors seem to agree that Al Jazeera English and especially Al Jazeera Arabic are biased sources on the Arab–Israeli conflict and on topics for which the Qatari government has a conflict of interest.”

Google News is the only major Big Tech news aggregator that consistently highlights Al Jazeera, a network so sympathetic to radicalism that MRC’s Dan Schneider refers to it as “Hamas News.” Google propped up the leftist Qatari-funded media outlet Al Jazeera a staggering 15 times in recent weeks. Headlines like this on October 7, 2025: “Updates: Israel’s genocide continues in Gaza two years since start of war.”

By the way, while Wikipedia's "reliable sources" page touts MSNBC, Mother Jones, and The Nation as reliable, this is the Wikipedia entry on MRC on the Reliable Sources page:

“There is consensus that the Media Research Center and its subdivisions (e.g. CNSNews.com, MRCTV, and NewsBusters) are generally unreliable for factual reporting. Some editors believe these sources publish false or fabricated information.” 

Outrageous! Enjoy the podcast below, or the audio is here. We'll reliably notify you of all the annoying leftist messaging that passes for "news."