Looking to add additional content to the predownloaded news app on the iPhone? The Apple News+ subscription service 
provides plenty of bias and leaves much to be desired.
Potential subscribers to Apple News+ might wonder whether shelling out $12.99 per month to get what Apple itself describes as “Access [to] top stories from over 500 leading publications” is worth it. Media Research Center researchers looked at the publications that Apple says are included in the monthly fee to determine if users are getting what they pay for. The results were overtly biased and largely underwhelming.
MRC’s Findings:
- Apple News+ is unmistakably biased in favor of the left. Of the AllSides-rated outlet articles included in Apple’s subscription service Apple News+, there are 51 left-leaning outlets to only three right-leaning outlets.
- Apple News+ purports to offer a robust subscription service. An analysis of its offerings demonstrates otherwise.
- Apple claims its subscription service Apple News+ offers “over 500 outlets,” but the news aggregator subscription only offers roughly 450 outlets in its list of “All Publications” on its website when accounting for duplicated outlets.
- Several of the articles you pay for in the Apple News+ subscription, you can read for free by going directly to the host website.
“Apple, once again, shows its true colors. Apple’s 51 to three disparity is less a news service, and more a megaphone for one side,” said MRC President David Bozell. “When a tech giant becomes a gatekeeper favoring one side of the news, it betrays its duty to deliver balanced perspectives. If Apple wants credibility as a news aggregator, it must commit to genuine fairness in the marketplace of ideas.”
MRC researchers consulted Apple News’s publicly available list of “All Publications” that are included in its Apple News+ subscription service and checked the AllSides Media Bias ratings for each outlet. Given the blatant bias that Apple News has routinely deployed in its free service, there was little surprise that the results were heavily biased toward leftist outlets.
In total, the Apple News+ subscription — which is in addition to the predownloaded Apple News app — includes 162 outlets with an AllSides rating. The paid service provides 51 leftist outlets, while only providing three right-leaning outlets.
The three right-leaning publications that users who pay Apple a subscription fee get access to are National Review, The Dispatch and British outlet The Telegraph. None of the right-leaning outlets in Press Gazette’s top 50 most viewed U.S. outlets — including Fox News, the New York Post, Daily Mail, Breitbart, The Gateway Pundit and Newsmax — appear on its subscription list, though Apple News has on rare occasion provided Fox News stories in its free service.
On the other hand, Apple News+ provides subscribers access to 51 left-leaning outlets, including radical left-wing outlets like: Cosmopolitan, Haaretz, Mother Jones, Out, Slate, The Atlantic, The Daily Beast, The New Republic, Vox, and WIRED.
The problems with the Apple News+ subscription are not limited only to political bias. While Apple touts that it provides access to “over 500” outlets in its Apple News+ subscription service, it only lists roughly 450 outlets when accounting for duplicated outlets. Apple appears to frequently change its lineup of outlets, yet has not updated the total number it claims to offer.
A large number of the outlets on the Apple News+ subscription list are small, local or regional news outlets that are not big enough for AllSides to provide a bias rating for. But that does not mean they are not biased. It just means there has not been an independent investigation into their bias.
MRC Free Speech America VP Dan Schneider explained: “It’s a pretty safe bet that Apple pushes the same left-wing agenda at the local news level that we have documented at the national level. I grew up in Kansas, but I have less than zero interest in The Kansas City ‘Communist’ Star, the Wichita Eagle or the Topeka Capital-Journal,” said Schneider. “I already have a subscription to my centrist, unbiased hometown paper. But Apple’s awful subscription service doesn’t give me an option to that good outlet, only to the three politicized outlets.”
If that weren’t enough, some of the articles that Apple requires users to pay a subscription fee to view appear to be available for 
free at the original source. In other words, Apple is charging users to read something that can be read for free elsewhere. Several examples of this include articles as diverse as: “The Long-Awaited Showdown Between Rick Pitino and Bill Self Has Finally Arrived” from Sports Illustrated; “The great Saturday Night Live gamble – will Brits fall for a US classic?” from British outlet The Times; “From streets to murals, the erasure of Cesar Chavez is fast underway in California” from the Los Angeles Times; and “Trump administration asks U.S. Supreme Court to strip over 350,000 Haitians of TPS” from the Miami Herald. Attempts to read such articles on the free version of the Apple News app are unsuccessful if a user is not a paid subscriber to Apple News+, but each of the aforementioned articles can be read for free by clicking directly over to the original outlet.
Methodology: MRC researchers examined the Apple News+ subscription service on March 21, 2026, including the list of “All Publications.” MRC researchers used the AllSides media bias ratings, which categorize an outlet as “left,” “lean left,” “center,” “lean right” or “right” to determine the bias of the publications included in an Apple News+ subscription and analyzed the results.
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