Considering the Federal Trade Commission’s Double Standard on Media Bias

It’s an interesting time to be an organization that conducts media bias research in the United States. Depending on the results of your research, you may find the Federal Trade Commission using it to justify an inquiry directed at another company; or you may find yourself the target of an FTC investigation. The first scenario was reflected in FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson's recent letter to Apple CEO Tim Cook. In his letter, Ferguson noted that recent research from self-described conservative media watchdog organization the Media Research Center indicated that Apple News, the company’s news aggregation app, “systematically promoted news articles from left-wing news outlets and suppressed news articles from more conservative publications.” NewsGuard, a self-described non-partisan media watchdog organization that rates news outlets based on the reliability of their reporting, is experiencing the second scenario. Like the Media Research Center, NewsGuard conducts media bias research; although some of its findings are critical of conservative news outlets. Unlike the Media Research Center, NewsGuard is being investigated by the FTC for its work, rather than seeing its work used by the FTC.

[Philip M. Napoli is the James R. Shepley Professor of Public Policy and the Director of the DeWitt Wallace Center for Media & Democracy in the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University.]