As eyes worldwide were turning to Italy for the 2026 Winter Olympics, Apple News editors pushed stories on immigration — including ICE and the Department of Homeland Security — relying on leftist and center outlets while excluding right-leaning media altogether.
Over the first two weeks of February 2026, Apple News ran 57 headlines, all from leftist or center news outlets, about immigration, ICE and the threat to DHS funding. Apple News’s ICE, DHS and immigration coverage accounted for 20 percent of the total headlines that Apple ran in its daily morning top 20 news stories. Not a single story about this highly partisan topic came from a right-leaning outlet as determined by AllSides media bias ratings. 
Apple News relied the most on the following elitist media outlets to push a leftist narrative on immigration during the period analyzed:
- The Associated Press - 10
- The Washington Post - 8
- NBC News - 5
- Apple - 4
- National Public Radio (NPR) - 3
- The Wall Street Journal - 3
Examples of biased headlines highlighted by Apple News include: “Hard hats and dummy plates: Reports of ICE ruses add to fears in Minnesota;” “Migrants languish in US detention centers facing dire conditions and prolonged waits” from the Associated Press and “‘A profound sense of being hunted’: with all eyes on Minneapolis, ICE arrests continue quietly across the US” from The Guardian.
Apple News’s coverage of the immigration topic nearly doubled its Olympics coverage over the first two weeks of February, though the 2026 Winter Olympics in Milano and Cortina d'Ampezzo, Italy, began during the same time period and is held only once every four years. Apple News pushed just under 12% of its total daily top 20 morning headlines on the Olympics.
And to make matters worse, Apple News did not use a single right-leaning outlet in its Olympics coverage either.
Instead, it offered politically-charged headlines from elitist media outlets such as: “Climate change is making the Winter Olympics harder to host” from The Washington Post; “Team USA, Vance Booed in Frosty Reception at Italy’s Winter Olympics” from The Wall Street Journal and “US skater Amber Glenn faces fallout over politics and issues with music copyright after Olympic gold” from The Associated Press.
The findings for the first two weeks of February 2026 continue to demonstrate that Apple News editors consistently suppress the right-leaning media perspective on controversial topics instead of providing balance. Given the tumultuous nature of events surrounding the immigration situation, it is even more important for the Big Four News Apps (Apple News, Google News, MSN and Yahoo News) to provide balance.
According to a report from the Reuters Institute, “engagement with traditional media sources such as TV, print, and news websites continues to fall, while dependence on social media, video platforms, and online aggregators grows,” particularly in the United States. Indeed, according to Pew Research Center, 86% of Americans turn to their digital devices for news “at least sometimes.” With Apple News coming preinstalled on every iPhone and Google News being standard on Android devices, 99.74% of U.S. smartphone users are exposed to at least one of the Big Four News Apps by default.
Methodology: During the time period Feb. 1 - 14, 2026, MRC researchers examined the top 20 stories featured on Apple News each day at approximately 8:30 AM ET. MRC researchers used the AllSides media bias ratings, which categorize an outlet as “left,” “lean left,” “center,” “lean right” or “right” to determine the overall bias presented by Apple News and analyzed the results. MRC researchers analyzed the headlines of each story to determine the total number of headlines that focused on immigration, and the total number of headlines that focused on the 2026 Winter Olympics. (Immigration stories analyzed included headlines focused on ICE, DHS, the DHS government shutdown and immigration generally.)
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