Trump FTC Threatens Apple With A Fake Investigation Into Its Nonexistent ‘Liberal News Bias’

Here we go again.

The Trump FTC has threatened Apple and CEO Tim Cook with a fake investigation claiming that Apple News doesn’t do a good enough job coddling right wing, Trump-friendly ideology.

The announcement and associated letter pretends that Apple is violating Section 5 of the FTC Act (which “prohibits unfair or deceptive acts or practices”) because it’s not giving right wing propaganda outlets the same visibility as other media in the Apple News feed (which the letter falsely claims are “left wing”):

“Recently, there have been reports that Apple News has systematically promoted news
articles from left-wing news outlets and suppressed news articles from more conservative
publications. Indeed, multiple studies have found that in recent months Apple News has chosen not to feature a single article from an American conservative-leaning news source, while simultaneously promoting hundreds of articles from liberal publications.”

This is all gibberish and bullshit. Their primary evidence is a shitty article from Rupert Murdoch’s right wing rag The New York Post, which in turn leans on a laughable study by the right wing Media Research Center. That “study” looked at a small sample size of 620 articles promoted by Apple News, randomly and arbitrarily declared 440 of them as having a “liberal bias,” and then concluded Apple was up to no good.

Among the outlets derided as “liberal” sits papers like the Washington Post, which has been tripping over itself to appease Trump and become, very obviously, more right wing and corporatist than ever under its owner Jeff Bezos, who recently vastly overpaid Donald Trump’s wife to make a “documentary” about her.

The FTC’s fake investigation obviously violates the First Amendment. Even if it were true that Apple was biased in what sources it had in Apple News (which the evidence doesn’t actually support), that’s… still legal, based on Apple’s First Amendment rights. If the Biden FTC had gone after Fox News for “anti-liberal bias” everyone (including many Democrats) would call out the obvious First Amendment problem. But even ignoring the First Amendment problems of all this, claiming that this is covered by Section 5 is laughable. I’ve watched for years as the FTC has struggled to legally defend genuine investigations into obvious corporate instances of very clear fraud and still come out on the losing end due to the murky construction of the law.

This inquiry has no legal legs to stand on.

I suspect FTC boss Andrew Ferguson is leaving soon and wanted an opportunity to put his name in lights across the right wing propaganda echoplex as somebody who is “doing something to combat the wokes” with a phony investigation, much like the FCC’s Brendan Carr does. It’s likely this is mostly being driven by partisan ambition.

There doesn’t need to be any legally supporting evidence (or hell even an actual investigation), the point is to have the growing parade of right-wing friendly media make it appear as if key MAGA zealots are doing useful things in service of the cause. And to threaten companies with costly and pointless headaches if they don’t pathetically bend the knee to Trumpism (which Cook has been very good at so far).

So while the “investigation” may be completely bogus, the threat of it still has a dangerous impact on free expression in a country staring down the barrel of authoritarianism. Somewhere, Tim Cook is shopping around for another shiny bauble to throw at the feet of our mad, idiot king.

Here’s where I’ll mention that if you ask an actual, objective media scholar here on planet Earth, they’ll be quick to inform you that U.S. media and journalism pretty consistently has a center-right, corporatist bias.

As the ad-driven U.S. media consolidates under corporate control, it largely functions less and less as a venue for real journalism and informed democratic consensus, and more as either an infotainment distraction mechanism to keep the plebs busy, or as a purveyor of corporate-friendly agitprop that coddles the narratives surrounding unchecked wealth accumulation by the extraction class.

From the Washington Post to CBS, from Twitter to TikTok, to consolidation among local right wing broadcasters, the U.S. right wing is very clearly buying up U.S. media in the pursuit of the same sort of autocratic state television we’ve seen arise in countries like Russia and Hungary.

This effort is propped up by an endless barrage of claims that the already corporatist, center-right U.S. press is secretly left wing, and that the only solution is to shift the editorial Overton window even further to the right. These folks genuinely will not be satisfied until the entirety of U.S. media resembles the sort of fawning, mindless agitprop we see in countries like North Korea.

This is not hyperbole. They’re building it right in front of your noses. It’s yet to be seen if fans of free speech, democratic norms, and objective reality can muster any sort of useful resistance.