AllSides discovered Apple’s talk-to-text feature capitalizes mentions of “Black people” but not “white people.” This decision mirrors decisions by media outlets on the left, which also tend to capitalize “Black” as a racial, and/or cultural, signifier, but not “white.”
Screencapture of an AllSides employee using talk to text on Apple iPhone iOS 26.2, Feb. 5, 2026. (Note that Apple typically misspells AllSides as “Allsides” — the employee who tested this had already custom edited their phone features to fix this.)
RELATED: AllSides Analysis: How News Outlets Stylize “Black” and “White” in Coverage of Race
Media treatment of racial signifiers began to change significantly in 2020, when shifting standards and biased approaches emerged around the terms black and white. This year was the height of George Floyd protests, riots, and general civil unrest in America over racial issues. As a result, many news outlets started changing their standards in Summer 2020. AllSides wrote about which ones opted to start capitalizing “black” (and sometimes, “white”), and we had our team pen their own perspectives on the issue.
Newsrooms that changed their editorial standards include Associated Press (Left bias), USA Today (Lean Left bias), Los Angeles Times (Lean Left bias), Washington Post (Lean Left bias), NBC News (Lean Left bias), The Hill (Center bias), Columbia Journalism Review (Center), and Fox News (Right bias) which all publicly changed their standards on the emerging issue.
A 2023 AllSides analysis found the changes remained consistent across bias ratings — outlets on the left overwhelmingly capitalize “Black” (and typically, not “white”), while outlets on the right are much less likely to capitalize any racial signifiers.
Relatedly, AllSides has also extensively covered Big Tech bias, including bias in Google Search. A 2024 AllSides bias analysis of Google Search results found 68% of news media sources Google featured in results for select search terms were from outlets on the left. We’ve also uncovered similar bias in news aggregators, including Yahoo! News and Apple News, which curate primarily news from the left (Apple, for its part, curated less than 1% of articles from conservative media outlets).
RELATED: Perspectives: Newsrooms Capitalizing Black and White
Our 2023 analysis looked at 215 articles from 43 outlets on the AllSides Media Bias Chart™ to discover which outlets capitalize black and white when referring to race in their coverage. Of the 21 outlets on the left – including 6 outlets rated Left and 15 outlets rated Lean Left – every outlet except for one capitalized black in the articles analyzed.
Most news outlets that capitalize black do not also capitalize white; search for any outlet in our racial signifiers database here.
In summer 2020, AP wrote a blog post about its decision to keep white lowercase a month after announcing its decision to capitalize black: “There was clear desire and reason to capitalize Black. Most notably, people who are Black have strong historical and cultural commonalities, even if they are from different parts of the world and even if they now live in different parts of the world. That includes the shared experience of discrimination due solely to the color of one’s skin,” AP wrote.
“There is, at this time, less support for capitalizing white,” AP continued. “White people generally do not share the same history and culture, or the experience of being discriminated against because of skin color. In addition, we are a global news organization and in much of the world there is considerable disagreement, ambiguity and confusion about whom the term includes.”
The Washington Post, at the time, opted to capitalize both black and white, arguing that both groups have cultural and historical identities: “Stories involving race show that White also represents a distinct cultural identity in the United States. In American history, many White Europeans who entered the country during times of mass migration were the targets of racial and ethnic discrimination. These diverse ethnicities were eventually assimilated into the collective group that has had its own cultural and historical impact on the nation. As such, White should be represented with a capital W.”
Fox News also opted to capitalize all racial signifiers, including White and Brown.
AllSides opted to continue to lowercase “black” and “white” when referring to cultural and ethnic contexts in our staff writing and original news content. This is because both descriptors are broad and can include people from areas throughout the world. They are not geographic identifiers, such as Asian, African, European or Latino, nor more specific identifiers such as Nigerian, Nicaraguan, Japanese, Italian, or Scottish. Opinion writers on our Perspectives Blog are free to use capitalization as they please, and we do not edit content that we curate from other websites.
Conclusion
Bias can appear in all forms of media, including technology that aids and assists us. AllSides not only tracks news media bias, but bias as it appears in technological tools, such as Alexa, news aggregators, search engines, and AI. To support our work, consider becoming a Sustaining Member and unlock exclusive content.
Julie Mastrine is the Director of Communications and Bias Services at AllSides. She has a Lean Right bias.
This piece was reviewed by Emanuel Macuixtle, Policy Analyst and Research Assistant (Left bias) and Emily Allen, News Analyst and Social Media Editor (Left bias).
