The New York Times responded this week to reports alleging Facebook intentionally suppresses right-leaning news sites with a headline suggesting the story originated with a few conservative cranks.
“Conservatives Accuse Facebook of Political Bias,” read the newspaper’s headline.
However, conservatives aren’t responsible for the reports alleging the social media platform indulges in discriminating against certain political viewpoints. Rather, the very non-right-leaning tech news site Gizmodo takes credit for breaking news of Facebook’s supposed suppression of conservative thought.
“Facebook workers routinely suppressed news stories of interest to conservative readers from the social network’s influential ‘trending’ news section,” the site reported, citing a “a former journalist who worked on the project.”
“This individual says that workers prevented stories about the right-wing CPAC gathering, Mitt Romney, Rand Paul, and other conservative topics from appearing in the highly-influential section, even though they were organically trending among the site’s users,” the report added.
The Washington Examiner was named as one of the websites Facebook employees reportedly block from appearing in the “trending” news section.
For the Times, though, the story isn’t so much that the social media group is reportedly smothering right-leaning viewpoints, but that conservatives reacted at all to the news.
This isn’t the first time that the newspaper’s coverage of a alleged scandal has focused more on the right’s reaction, and less on the supposed controversy.
In April, for example, after the outgoing president sent Congress his Guantánamo Bay closure plans, and members of the GOP reacted, the Times ran with a headline titled, “Republicans Seize on Guantánamo Fears in Re-election Races.”
Earlier, on Dec. 4, 2015, after two Islamic jihadists went on a killing spree in San Bernardino, Calif., the Times published a headline focusing on reactions from Republican lawmakers.
“GOP Candidates Seize on Shootings in California as Proof of Terror Threat,” read the story’s original headline.
In August 2015, when Republican lawmakers were first arguing that the IRS did not have the authority to issue subsidies to states operating under the federal health insurance exchanges, the Times published a headline reading, “House Republicans, Seizing on Health Law, Challenge Executive Branch.”
In 2013, after the IRS admitted to targeting conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status, the Times published a story that was actually headlined, “IRS Focus on Conservatives Gives GOP an Issue to Seize On.”
The year before that, during the 2012 presidential election, the Times’ coverage of the deadly Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on U.S. facilities in Benghazi, Libya, included a headline that read, “New Front in Campaign as G.O.P. Seizes on Libya Attack.”
Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., announced Tuesday he would investigate Facebook, which has, not surprisingly, denied the Gizmodo report.
