I studied major media for three months to measure the dominance of the left-wing perspective within it. While the left-wing perspective is complete in its dominance of Silicon Valley and the major national media, it does not control Fox News nationally, the single biggest source for all US news, or local television and radio. Local TV and radio have more political power than national media because people trust them more, so the left's dominance is substantially offset.

While television and radio continue to play a large role in elections, perhaps social media paired with political websites represent the most potent media forces in elections and is our focus today. Donald Trump largely owes his 2016 election to social media, a technology that permits the full-scale bypass of legacy media. This newer form of media, social media and the political websites that occupy its pages, will increasingly dominate political discourse because of the ability for Americans to directly interact with the information and each other simultaneously.

Social media giants Facebook and Twitter, while also engaged in suppression of some thought deemed unacceptable by the left in America, nonetheless structurally stand in opposition to the efforts to substantially limit the reach of conservative and libertarian media made by Google and other corporate giants, albeit involuntarily. While one can justifiably criticize Twitter, and now Facebook, for banning speech it considers unacceptable or applying a double standard to political speech from the right as opposed to to the left, the nature of their business sets them against Google and the others.

Facebook and Twitter are handcuffed to an extent, such that if they go as far as Google in stifling speech they disagree with, their businesses will ultimately fail. Consider the explosion Parler experienced in recent days as the news rolled out that Twitter is labeling more Trump Tweets and Facebook has changed some policies in the face of pressure from "woke" corporations Unilever, Coke and others. Parler represents a competitor to Facebook and Twitter more committed to free expression.

If Facebook and Twitter shut down their conservative voices in a truly potent and complete way, they fail as businesses or shrink to irrelevancy. Conservatives bring enormous traffic to Facebook and Twitter, and very often dominate those particular media, as demonstrated on the metrics pages on this site. Conservatives still do very well on Twitter and Facebook despite the troubling reality of shadow banning or outright bans. You can see this on my Facebook and Twitter metrics pages. Google has no competitor that threatens its existence because it dominates Internet advertising. Google can regularly engage in the promotion of legacy media (left-leaning perspective) while limiting the number of conservative websites taking prominent places in their search results or recommended videos without serious threat to its existence or even its bottom line.

You can see this play out simply by opening your YouTube app. In the recommended news videos you will find almost exclusively legacy media videos. In addition to YouTube, Google search heavily promotes legacy media at the expense of independent voices. CNN, the New York Times and the Washington Post occupy the top spots on the first page of a politically oriented search on Google as a matter of course. One must add up the exposure of the next eight websites, most of them also left-leaning, to equal the exposure of these three news websites when a top trending political search is made. One can fairly state that Google promotes CNN, the New York Times and the Washington Post to a greater degree than other legacy media and the data shows it.

These three websites, more so than most legacy media, possess an agenda aimed at defeating President Trump. Jeff Bezos owned Twitch just banned Donald Trump's Twitch page for "hateful conduct," despite the fact that Trump has only used the service once this campaign season, quite a short leash. Bezos also owns the Washington Post, a paper that spends each day attacking the president.

The Washington Post reported that the US electricity grid was under threat from Russian hackers via a Vermont utility. The paper gradually walked back it's story as it became clear that the story was fake news. Neither the Russians or US power grid had anything to do with the malware.

The Post also stepped on a rake taking one squarely to the forehead when it reported that Russian propagandists had penetrated two hundred US websites, rendering them Russian propaganda peddlers. Unfortunately for the Post's credibility, the paper relied on an anonymous group that provided statistics which included sites such as the Drudge Report, antiwar.com and the Ron Paul Institute as Russian propaganda outlets.

The Washington Post consistently represents one of the top three search results on many of the top political searches on Google, a paper with an unmistakable bias against the president. Does this represent the most objective and reliable source for political information or is Google simply promoting the paper's mission of defeating Trump?

The Washington Post shares this high perch with the New York Times. The New York Times coverage of 2016 was so biased and dishonest against Trump that its ombudsman felt the need to "rededicate" itself "to the fundamental mission of Times journalism . . . to report America and the world honestly." This represents a stunning and implicit admission of dishonesty in its coverage in 2016. Has the Times covered Trump honestly since that apology? Even after the Mueller report, opinion contributors to the Times routinely argue that Trump colluded with Russia and lacks legitimacy as president based on no evidence. The news pages reluctantly acknowledged that Mueller found no Trump-Russian conspiracy, but one could fairly argue that the New York Times tends to abandon their journalistic standards when it comes to Trump.

The paper recently reported that Trump received a briefing on a US intelligence finding that Russia engaged in paying for the killing of American troops. The report, however, lacked the support of the intelligence community on which the paper falsely relied. After much hand wringing in the press as a result of the New York Times unsubstantiated report, NBC reports"there is intelligence about Russians' offering a bounty to kill Americans but that officials disagree about the implications and significance of the plot." The NBC report further states, "the officials said that the intelligence wasn't corroborated broadly within the intelligence community and that there was disagreement about it." Soon after the New York Times report the media frenzy quickly grew to a fever pitch, with reports of mothers of killed American soldiers demanding investigations as Google trumpeted the unfounded report at the top of its search results. Perhaps the New York Times may owe yet another apology after the 2020 election.

Finally, CNN represents Google's top recipient of its highly sought after search recommendations, the news source one can expect to see most often in a political search. CNN's president claimed that his network's coverage remains "pro-truth," but acknowledges that what he considers pro-truth may come off as "anti-Trump." Is it a commitment to truth that causes CNN to appear as anti-Trump?

Since his election, CNN stood at the forefront of the effort to remove Trump from office. CNN laid the predicate for the publication of the so-called Russian dossier by Buzzfeed with this report, "Intel chiefs presented Trump with claims of Russian efforts to compromise him." To its credit, CNN didn't initially publish the false dossier, but one can reasonably argue that the effort to remove Trump required a news organization to inject the "fake news" story into the nations news cycle, and CNN played that role. An op-ed appearing on CNN acknowledged that a media organization could not verify the dossier.

CNN employs as a contributor James Clapper, a harsh Trump critic and player in the Trump alleged deep state effort to undermine the president. Clapper has speculated, without evidence, that the president might be a Russian asset. Clapper said this after stating to the FBI that, “I never saw any direct empirical evidence that the Trump campaign or someone in it was plotting/conspiring with the Russians to meddle with the election.” Democrat law professor Jonathan Turley pointed out in 2018 that Clapper likely committed perjury and illegally leaked information to CNN to harm Trump politically, yet Clapper remained a contributor at CNN.

CNN had to fire three reporters and retract their report that then Trump ally Anthony Scaramucci was connected to a ten billion dollar Russian investment fund.

CNN reported that President Trump and Donald Trump Jr. had early access to Wikileaks documents harmful to Democrats that were dumped before the 2016 election. It turned out that the email CNN was referring to was sent the day after Wikileaks story broke publicly, a fact CNN was forced to acknowledge in a correction. Long-time reporter Glenn Greenwald calls this the "most humiliating debacle in ages," one that CNN "refuses all transparency over."

When weighing these evidences of CNN's bias against Trump one should consider how hard the stories hit at the time. In each case that majority of the media ran with the stories wall-to-wall. The headlines blared and the pundits howled in each case, yet each report turned out false. One could reasonably question the wisdom of placing CNN at the top of political search results, but Google does so as a matter of course.

When one performs a political search on Google he or she can anticipate that answers will come from a paper owned by an anti-Trump crusader that has explicitly stated that Trump must meet defeat. Or perhaps his or her answer will come from a paper that had to apologize for its dishonesty in 2016 in covering Trump and continues to struggle with reporting honestly. If Google recommends neither of those sources, a high likelihood exists that a network that has suffered no less than four journalistic humiliations that should render it worthy of fringe status will provide the answer. It is reasonable based on the evidence to conclude that Google possesses the same mission of these three untrustworthy political news sources, to defeat Trump.

While Google search demonstrates a clear Democratic bias, does YouTube (a Google company) follow suit? While others have demonstrated that legacy media holds a place of high respect on YouTube, remarkably the conservative leaning channels hold their own on the app. While YouTube pushes legacy media channels nonstop all day, the conservative channels have to fight it out on their own. As you can see on my YouTube metrics page, they compete well with the legacy media despite their disfavored status. Again, I do not argue that Google should not exist. I simply aim to outline the information landscape as it exists in a free nation.