For years, Apple has marketed its sleek devices as neutral tools — but critics now say one of its most influential apps is anything but neutral.

The spotlight is back on Apple’s powerful news aggregator, the Apple News app, preloaded on millions of iPhones across the country. What was once praised as a carefully curated alternative to chaotic social media feeds is now facing pointed questions about whether it’s serving readers a steady diet of left-leaning headlines — and little else.

At the center of the controversy is Lauren Kern, a longtime magazine editor brought in by Apple in 2017 to oversee content decisions. Kern’s résumé boasts stints at New York Magazine and The New York Times Magazine, elite institutions firmly rooted in the legacy media establishment.

Back in 2018, The New York Times ran a glowing profile portraying Kern as a quiet powerhouse shaping the daily news diet of millions. The paper reported she leads a team of former journalists tasked with “selecting the news that tens of millions of people will read.”

Kern herself emphasized the weight of that responsibility, saying, “We put so much care and thought into our curation. It’s seen by a lot of people, and we take that responsibility really seriously.”

And a lot of people is no exaggeration. In 2020, Apple boasted that Apple News “draws over 100 million monthly active users in the US, UK, Australia and Canada.” With reach like that, the Times suggested Kern had “quietly become one of the most powerful figures in English-language media.”

At the time, Apple News was portrayed as the grown-up in Silicon Valley — relying on human editors instead of opaque algorithms. The Times even declared the app had “so far avoided controversy.”

Fast-forward nearly eight years, and that narrative is cracking.

A new analysis from the conservative watchdog Media Research Center paints a very different picture. The group reviewed 620 articles promoted by Apple News between January 1 and January 31. Their findings? 440 stories came from outlets rated as left-leaning. The remaining 180 were classified as centrist. Not a single one — zero — originated from right-leaning sources.

For critics, the numbers confirm what many conservatives have long suspected: Big Tech’s human “curation” may simply be ideological filtering by another name.

The findings quickly caught the attention of Andrew Ferguson, Chairman of the Federal Trade Commission. In a sharply worded letter to Apple CEO Tim Cook, Ferguson raised the possibility that Apple’s practices could run afoul of Section 5 of the FTC Act, which bars unfair or deceptive acts.

He made clear that constitutional protections aren’t a blank check for corporate giants.

“The First Amendment protects the speech of Big Tech firms. But the First Amendment has never extended its protection to material misrepresentations made to consumers, nor does it immunize speakers from conduct that Congress has deemed unfair under the FTC Act, even if that conduct involves speech,” Ferguson wrote.

In other words: free speech doesn’t shield deceptive conduct.

Apple and Kern have so far remained silent in response to requests for comment — a silence that will likely fuel even more scrutiny.

For millions of Americans who simply want balanced news on the device in their pocket, the question now looms larger than ever: Is Apple News delivering the full story — or only half of it?