President Trump may have been googling himself during his executive time, or he may have been reading PJ Media.
Trump on Tuesday said that Google News had "rigged" search results to unearth negative articles about him, questioning whether the phenomenon of his unpopularity may be "illegal." He complained that most search results were from "left-wing media," while "voices of conservatives" were suppressed.
Toronto Star reporter Daniel Dale pointed out that the complaint sounded suspiciously similar to a recent article from the right-wing site PJ Media. The conservative blog wrote that it had discovered "blatant prioritization of left-leaning and anti-Trump media outlets."
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"CNN was the big winner," the site wrote, echoing Trump's note that "Fake CNN is prominent" in results. Trump tweeted that 96 percent of results are from "left-wing" news sites, just as the blog claimed. PJ Media went on to lament the fact that "PJ Media did not appear in the first 100 results," nor did other conservative sites that are decidedly outside of the mainstream, like The Blaze.
Meanwhile, the article continued, major outlets like NBC News and The Washington Post appeared on the first page of results. Dale noted that Trump's gripe appears to be rooted in the fact that Google's "News tab for Trump brings up ... news sites ... rather than right-wing opinion sites."
Much like Trump's frequent parroting of Fox & Friends, it looks like right-wing theories have tunneled their way directly to the desks of federal officials. Trump has tweeted links to PJ Media stories before, so it's plausible his angry morning tweets were a direct result of his reading the recent article, which gained traction in conservative circles since its publishing Saturday.
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