Two of the United States’s leading news distributors suppressed negative coverage of former Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner for months, according to a new study.
Platner was the Democratic Party’s nominee in the race against Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) in the 2026 election. He ended his campaign last week after months of controversies, which culminated with one of his ex-girlfriends accusing him of rape.
Apple and Google News published zero stories on their daily morning news drop for millions of smartphone users between November and May about the high-profile controversies that rocked Platner’s campaign, including headlines about his Nazi tattoo and contentious Reddit posts, according to an analysis by Media Research Center, a conservative watchdog group. The two news sites declined to promote more than 100 stories that scrutinized Platner during that time frame, according to the group.
MRC accused the leading news aggregators of “intentional censorship” for the blackout that it said began during the Democratic Party primary when polling indicated only Platner would defeat Collins in a hypothetical matchup. The blackout “slightly ebbed” after the New York Times’s May 30 report on sexting allegations against Platner, and “completely collapsed ” after polling published on June 30 showed he would likely no longer defeat Collins, according to the group. MRC said that news aggregators then promoted 12 negative stories about the embattled candidate on July 7 and 8.
“For months, while Platner looked like the one Democrat who could beat Susan Collins, the two most powerful news apps in America buried scandal after scandal,” MRC President David Bozell said. “Then the polls turned, Platner became a liability, and suddenly the blackout ended. News judgment had nothing to do with it.”
Google News denied claims it engaged in systematic censorship, saying the analysis is “totally false and based on a completely flawed methodology.” It suggested that the analysis “mistakes volume of news for bias, and said that results on Google News “are curated automatically by our systems, not by editors.”
“The study checked Google News once a day from a single account, ignoring the fact that Google News automatically updates throughout the day, and shows news personalized to your interests and location,” the company told the Washington Examiner. “You can also easily select sources you want to see more often in News and Search.”
MRC pushed back, saying the news aggregators failed to deny that it suppressed “at least 112 significant stories” and did not point “to a single piece of evidence” proving the analysis wrong.
“Google wants us to believe that checking their platform once a day missed the magic window where they actually allowed negative news about Graham Platner to exist,” Bozell said. “That is an insult to the intelligence of every consumer and investor.”
The Washington Examiner reached out to Apple News for comment, but did not receive a response.
The Maine Senate race is one of the most closely watched in the country because the Republican Party’s control of the upper chamber could hinge on its outcome. With Collins viewed as a highly vulnerable incumbent, Democrats selected Platner as their nominee to challenge her in November.
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Platner’s exit has thrown the race into mayhem. Democrats are now scrambling to elect a replacement by 5 p.m. on July 27.
Candidates to replace Platner must declare their campaign to do so by 5 p.m. on July 15. Then, they will take part in a whirlwind convention held by the Maine Democratic Party to select the new nominee by July’s end.