I think it is related to the fight against "fake news", "hate speech", etc... People don't tolerate a truly neutral search engine, because it will reflect human

I think it is related to the fight against "fake news", "hate speech", etc... People don't tolerate a truly neutral search engine, because it will reflect human nature and human nature is not always pretty. I remember the time when Google returned antisemitic websites when searching for "jew", they refused to do anything about it because "jew" is used mostly by antisemites and therefore, an antisemitic website is what people searching for that term most likely want, the search engine did its job. I don't think it will fly today. So search engines now have to get the "truth", preferably the politically correct one, and since you can't rely on the crowd for that, you have to introduce bias, and "pre-approved news outlets" are the most obvious choice.