The News
Apple maintained public silence in response to a pressure campaign from Trump administration officials who want to see more MAGA-sympathetic content in its popular news app.
But the technology giant has shown in recent months that it can be swayed.
In September 2025, the Daily Mail claimed in a filing to UK government regulators that it had been “arbitrarily” blocked from joining Apple News and Apple News+ in the UK multiple times since 2022. Apple never said anything publicly in response to the filing. But after coming onto the radar of regulators, Apple quickly worked to reverse the decision, partnering with the Mail to launch its UK program, Semafor has learned.
The reversal drew little public attention, and few outside the UK noticed any change. But the reversal underscores how Apple News is a powerful source of information in the US — and one that will respond to political pressure, if regulators get involved.
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Apple’s leadership once thought Apple News could be an antidote to bad information online, and serve as a lifeline for a struggling news industry displaced by powerful tech platforms. And the platform, which mixes highbrow political news sites with pop culture sources like People, has quietly emerged as a major force in the US information space. Its app is a natural source for anyone with an iPhone, including former President Joe Biden.
Last week, the Federal Trade Commission sent a letter to Apple warning that it could be violating a consumer protection law by omitting explicitly conservative coverage from its app.
The letter came after months of mounting pressure by conservative media activists with the White House’s ear. Since last fall, the Media Research Center, a right-wing organization that criticizes legacy media outlets, has turned its attention on Apple News’ story selection. A February survey of stories by MRC claimed that Apple News largely ignores stories from explicitly conservative sources in its news application, saying the outlet highlighted 620 stories from left-leaning or centrist outlets and zero from right-leaning news outlets.
MRC President David Bozell told Semafor that late last summer, the organization noticed in the Press Gazette that news aggregators consistently ranked in the top ten for monthly news traffic in the US. Bozell said it prompted the MRC to dedicate some resources to focusing on how aggregators send traffic and partnership revenue to news publishers.
“We’ve got a ‘fish where the fish are’ mentality,” Bozell told Semafor in an email. “What we’re discovering is that so-called ‘legacy’ outlets are garnering millions of website hits from these aggregators, despite declining ratings and declining believability rates.”
The organization took some strong liberties with the data. Apple News content appears differently for each user, as it prompts users to select what news outlets to follow; users have the opportunity to follow conservative and right-leaning outlets, many of which are Apple News partners. In other instances, MRC’s classifications made little sense: It called the Wall Street Journal, one of Apple News’ preferred partners within the app, centrist, despite the obvious right-leaning nature of its opinion content, which is heavily featured within the app.
Still, the MRC’s tactics worked. The February study made the rounds among the White House and its allies in conservative media, who shared it in unison on X last week. It had also caught the attention of regulators at the FTC, who had been simultaneously in the process of drafting a letter to Apple over its coverage. They quickly sent that message on Wednesday.
The White House, the FTC, and Apple did not respond to requests for comment.
Max’s view
The new pressure campaign will test how far Apple will be willing to go to defend a product that’s not core to its business, but which has proven to be one of the last platforms meaningfully dedicated to providing accurate, written news content.
The media company has largely ignored reporters’ inquiries about the letter. And within the company it’s been business as usual, with few signs that anyone was feeling the heat.
On its merits, the FTC’s complaint is fairly weak; the FTC said it believed Apple could be in violation of its terms of service by not sharing viewpoints equally, though Apple’s terms of service say essentially the opposite, acknowledging that Apple does not promise any sort of results in its content. The complaint itself also doesn’t acknowledge how many conservative media partners participate in Apple News, like The Free Press, The Daily Wire, and the National Review, and how their content shows up for many readers.
But the concurrent PR pressure from the White House and regulatory pressure from the FTC represent an acknowledgment by the right’s media antagonists that the terrain has shifted, creating new pressure points for conservative media activists to pressure the giant tech platforms that filter much of the world’s news.
In terms of revenue, the news platform is a rounding error for Apple. The company hasn’t mentioned Apple News in its earnings since 2021, when it garnered a brief mention as one of a handful of subscriptions the company offered to iPhone users.
But it has developed an outsized importance to the news industry: Since its launch in 2015, Apple News has chugged along relatively unbothered while quietly growing a massive audience of free users and paid subscribers for its Apple News+ program. As Semafor wrote in 2024, despite having just a small staff of editors, curators, and some journalists with its Apple News podcast, the platform is read by tens of millions of people, who might casually scroll the platform or check out stories via push alerts.
It has also become a crucial lifeline for many legacy magazine and news publishers which get a material share of their revenue through the platform.
CEO Tim Cook has also said that his own love of newspapers and magazines helped fuel the program. “We know that democracy only exists when there is a free and open media, so we really want to play a key role in helping the media,” Cook said when the program launched.