Former NBA player Enes Kanter Freedom declared for the Women’s National Basketball Association draft under the league’s unclear eligibility rules, but readers of Apple News likely wouldn’t know it since the news aggregator didn’t share a single headline in its morning feed covering the so-called women’s sport group’s recent “transgender” controversies.
The tech titans’ overt bias presents not just an obvious preference for leftist media outlets but also a more insidious bias via omission. The complete lack of coverage belies the cultural upheaval surrounding the WNBA.
Since Indiana Fever Guard and social media lightning rod Sophie Cunningham explained her “common sense” position on preventing biological men from competing in women’s sports through this past weekend when Freedom was ejected from a WNBA game, Apple News headlines have failed to cover the “transgender” issue.
Apple News has not been shy when it comes to promoting sports stories, however. Since MRC began tracking on Nov. 3, 2025, the leftist news aggregator has pushed hundreds of stories from sports-focused outlets, including: 255 from The New York Times’s The Athletic, 45 from ESPN, 12 from Yahoo Sports. That’s not to mention the dozens of stories from NBC News, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and USA Today’s sports pages.
The current WNBA collective bargaining agreement eligibility rules state that “Only players who are women are eligible to play in the WNBA,” but the rules do not provide any qualifications for the now-viral question, “What is a woman?”
In early August, Freedom and fellow NBA alum Royce White declared themselves eligible for the 2027 WNBA draft. On August 23, Freedom was ejected from a WNBA game after Chicago Sky guard Natasha Cloud instigated a confrontation with him. Freedom was wearing a shirt to the game that simply provided a clear definition of a woman as an “adult female human.” Front Office Sports reported Aug. 24 that Freedom and White were ineligible to play in the WNBA, according to unnamed league sources, but Freedom has disputed such reports.
Between July 22 and Aug. 24, Apple News featured a total of 643 AllSides-rated stories among its featured morning headlines. Of those stories, 17 were from The New York Times’s The Athletic and five came from ESPN. And while Apple News featured three stories about the WNBA, none of those stories’s headlines featured the WNBA’s “transgender” controversy:
Read Full Article: https://newsbusters.org/blogs/free-speech/heather-moon/2026/08/31/apple-news-sidelines-headlines-wnba-trans-controversy
