Early Tuesday morning, President Donald Trump jumped on Twitter to whine that when he Googled "Trump news" - only the "Fake New [sic] Media" appeared in the results. The president suggested Google was "rigging" the internet and "shutting out" right-leaning news sites.
Specifically, Trump claimed that 96 percent of "results on “Trump News” are from National Left-Wing Media, very dangerous."
Trump accused Google of "suppressing voices of Conservatives and hiding information and news that is good." Google is "controlling what we can & cannot see," the president asserted. "This is a very serious situation-will be addressed!"
At first glance, these tweets appear to be another example of Trump deriding news he doesn't like as "fake." But he didn't pull the "96 percent" statistic out of thin air.
The Toronto Star's Daniel Dale found that Trump was citing a right-wing opinion site, PJ Media, which since Saturday has been yammering about actual news showing up when people search Google - for news.
Dale tweeted on Tuesday that a PJ Media article published over the weekend "complains that the News tab for Trump brings up...news sites...rather than right-wing opinion sites...like PJ Media."
Indeed, this is exactly what the article said.
Dale shared the "bias" alleged by PJ Media, which he called "very silly."
"PJ Media did not appear in the first 100 results, nor did National Review, The Weekly Standard, Breitbart, The Blaze, The Daily Wire, Hot Air, Townhall, Red State, or any other conservative-leaning sites except the two listed above," Paula Boynard of PJ Media wrote. All of the sites Boynard listed are right-wing opinion sites - not news.
"CNN has a disproportionate number of articles returned when searching for "Trump" — nearly 29 percent of the total," Boynard added. "In fact, left-leaning sites comprised 96 percent of the total results."
CNN, The Washington Post, and NBC were the three most-frequent results for a "Trump news" Google search - because they are news sites.
For the president and his followers, this is apparently a problem. For people who care about news, it's how Google is supposed to function.
Here's what Twitter had to say about the president "rage-Googling" himself.
Even God jumped in.
Others pounced on Trump's threat to throttle Google and interfere with a free and open internet.
Sorry, Mr. President, that's just not how the internet works.
Trump would know something about press manipulation, though.
