Apple News, the popular newsreader app that comes installed on every iPhone, is the latest media property to be warned by a regulator appointed by President Donald Trump over charges of liberal bias.
On Wednesday, Federal Trade Commission Chairman Andrew Ferguson sent a letter to Apple chief executive Tim Cook expressing concern about “reports that Apple News has systematically promoted news articles from left-wing news outlets and suppressed news articles from more conservative publications.”
While he wrote that “the FTC is not the speech police,” Ferguson warned that the iPhone maker could be violating laws against deceptive business practices if its choice of news articles is found to be inconsistent with either its terms of service or “the reasonable expectations of consumers.”
The letter did not threaten an investigation or legal action but placed pressure on Apple to feature more conservative outlets in its app, which offers articles from more than 500 different publications and has been billed by the company as the No. 1 news app in the United States.
The letter added to a recent moment of tension between Apple and the Trump administration that has broken a pattern of warm relations. The company has long skirted much of the criticism that Trump has leveled at other tech companies. In August, Cook presented him with a plaque on a 24-karat gold base at a news conference in which the president announced new investments by Apple in American jobs and suppliers.
Earlier this week, Apple sponsored the Super Bowl halftime show by the Puerto Rican artist Bad Bunny that Trump criticized as an “affront to the greatness of America.” The company now finds itself drawn into the Trump administration’s aggressive campaign to reshape the coverage of media outlets perceived to be biased against the president.
Apple did not respond to a request for comment for this story. A spokesperson for the FTC declined to comment beyond Ferguson’s letter.
Since Trump returned to office last year, his picks to lead the FTC and Federal Communications Commission have publicly pressed numerous media outlets, tech companies and nonprofits over their editorial choices — a practice known as “jawboning” that can sometimes run afoul of the First Amendment.
On Wednesday, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr posted on X that Ferguson’s warning to Apple was “exactly right,” adding that the company “has no right to suppress conservative viewpoints in violation of the FTC Act.”
Ferguson’s letter sent on Wednesday cited a report from the nonprofit Media Research Center, a conservative media watchdog, that reviewed the top 620 stories featured by Apple News in January and found that none came from a right-leaning media outlet. To define right-leaning and left-leaning outlets, the report relied on media bias ratings from another company, AllSides.
On Tuesday, President Trump shared a New York Post article about the Media Research Center report on Truth Social.
Alex Abdo, litigation director at Columbia University’s Knight First Amendment Institute, said the FTC letter appeared to be part of a “concerted jawboning campaign” by the administration to get online platforms to stop moderating conservative viewpoints. “The FTC has no constitutional power to tell the platforms how to moderate their news offerings,” Abdo said, but a company like Apple might opt to comply with the implied message out of fear of retribution.
Douglas Farrar, a former FTC official who served under President Joe Biden, criticized the letter as frivolous and a waste of the agency’s resources.
“It’s an attempt at censorship in violation of the First Amendment masquerading as being tough on Big Tech,” he said. “This doesn’t do one single thing to address Apple’s monopoly power and the ability to use it to keep prices high for American consumers.”
David Bozell, president of the Media Research Center, countered that the FTC “has every right to scrutinize dominant technology platforms when there is credible evidence of systemic discrimination that affects competition and consumer access to information.” He added that “platforms that function as primary gateways to news for millions of Americans should not quietly tilt the playing field while presenting themselves as broad, representative aggregators.”
The agencies’ efforts to influence the media have so far had mixed results. Last year, CBS News agreed to hire an ombudsman who has been a Trump donor ahead of the FCC’s approval of an $8 billion merger between Skydance and its parent company Paramount.
ABC put comedian Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night TV show on hiatus in September over comments about the slain conservative activist Charlie Kirk that triggered criticism from Trump allies and an X post by Carr that many read as a veiled threat against the network’s parent company, Disney. Kimmel’s show was reinstated one week later.
In August, a federal judge ordered a halt to the FTC’s investigation of the liberal nonprofit media watchdog Media Matters, finding that it likely violated the organization’s First Amendment rights. Last week, NewsGuard, a company that rates online news sites’ credibility, filed a similar lawsuit alleging that the FTC is trying to drive it out of business because the agency disagrees with its ratings.
Shira Ovide contributed to this report.
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