The Watchdog with David Bozell

I spent part of this week shaking my tin cup in Colorado and California, asking friends of MRC to invest in the fight ahead. Somewhere between airport lounges and donor meetings, I opened the latest digital traffic numbers and couldn’t help but smile.

The gatekeepers are losing their grip.

Press Gazette, the gold standard for digital audience data, just released its latest rankings of America’s top news websites. The numbers are brutal.

For months, MRC 2.0 has exposed how the Big Four News Apps overwhelmingly elevate left-wing outlets while sidelining right-of-center reporting. Now the audience data shows the gatekeepers themselves are losing ground:

MSN: -29%
Google News: -19%
Yahoo News: -15%

Because Google News, Yahoo News, and MSN route their app traffic through the same domains as their websites, these declines reflect how the apps themselves are struggling. Apple News isn’t included because it exists strictly as an app.

And the story gets even better. The same apps that spent years propping up the legacy media are watching their preferred outlets fall right alongside them:

Newsweek: -74%
NPR: -29%
CNN: -27%
The Washington Post: -24%
USA Today: -21%
NBC News: -15%
The New York Times: -8%

For decades, these institutions acted as unelected editors of the national conversation. They decided which stories mattered, which voices were acceptable, and what millions of Americans would see.

Americans are finding other paths.

Since November, MRC’s Digital News Tracker has tracked more than 17,000 morning headlines on the Big Four News Apps. Seventy percent came from left-wing outlets. Just five percent came from the right.

Those numbers prove what millions of Americans already suspected: the gatekeepers were never neutral.

The collapse of the old gatekeepers is worth celebrating. Allowing a new group of gatekeepers to quietly replace them would be a disaster.

MRC 2.0 is focused on the apps, algorithms, and artificial intelligence systems shaping the next generation of news consumption. The old media may be fading, but the same left-wing assumptions are being coded into the tools that will determine what millions of Americans see tomorrow.

Thanks to your support, MRC is exposing the next generation of gatekeepers before they become as powerful and unaccountable as the last.

​​​​​​​Take it easy, 

David Bozell
President