Remember last August when Tim Cook showed up at the White House with that gaudy 24-karat gold plaque? The internet had a field day with it. People called it obsequious, embarrassing, peak corporate groveling.
Cook walked out with a handshake deal: Apple would invest $600 billion in the US, and Trump would spare the company from his electronics tariffs.
Smart play, right? This is classic Tim Cook diplomacy. Except now Apple’s getting a warning letter from the FTC about Apple News supposedly suppressing conservative outlets, and that whole August charm offensive looks like feeding a bear that’s still hungry.
The interesting part about this news is that nobody actually uses Apple News. I’m serious. It comes bundled with Apple One, sits there on your home screen, and most people never open it. It’s the app you shove into a folder with Stocks and Tips and forget about until someone mentions it exists.
This is a feature that generates roughly zero cultural conversation until a politician decides to make it a problem.
The FTC chairman, Andrew Ferguson (a Trump appointee, naturally), cites a report from the Media Research Center claiming that Apple News didn’t feature any “right-leaning outlets” among its top 20 morning stories in January.
The outlets they’re mad about not seeing? Breitbart, The Gateway Pundit, Daily Mail. Speaking as someone who’s covered media for over a decade, calling the Daily Mail a news source is generous. It’s a tabloid rag that happens to publish celebrity gossip faster than American outlets.
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Ferguson’s letter says Apple might be violating the FTC Act by suppressing content based on political viewpoint.
But then he admits in the same breath that “the FTC is not the speech police” and doesn’t have authority to dictate content curation.
So this is basically a strongly worded suggestion with regulatory letterhead. What’s Tim Cook supposed to do here?
He already tried playing nice. He made the investment pledge and commissioned that ridiculous gold plaque that looked like something you’d win at a regional sales conference. He bent over backwards to keep Apple out of the tariff crosshairs.
And here we are, anyway, with the company being publicly criticized for an app most people have deleted or hidden.
The smart move would’ve been staying out of the news curation business entirely. Let news apps fight that battle. Let publishers deal with the political heat.
Apple makes phones and computers. They’re really good at it. But services revenue became the growth story Wall Street wanted to hear, so now we’ve got Apple News, Apple Fitness Plus, Apple TV Plus, and all these side projects that pull focus while basic product issues go unaddressed.
You can’t appease your way out of a situation where the rules keep changing based on whoever’s mad that day.
Cook is learning that lesson the expensive way because that gold plaque turned out to be just an expensive paperweight after all.
