Right....
Are you saying that XYZ outlets being on the first page of search results is not an indicator that they are better at SEO? Is that the quality you are talking about? If so, you're an idiot who doesn't know what he's talking about. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It's the act of optimizing a web page, and the overall site, to rank well in search engine results.
You would be correct that a better ranking in Google results does not necessarily imply a better quality of news reporting. It does, however, imply better quality SEO. Or--perhaps it would be more accurate to say it implies better SEA (search engine attraction). Google gave up on providing quality search engine results a long time ago, now more interested in providing high volume low quality results that overwhelm the user, thereby encouraging users to click the top "results" (i.e. ads), while also drive an increased reliance on advertising by businesses and websites who can no longer rely on organic search traffic. Part of that strategy is for Google to prioritize large, well known companies whose public awareness and brand recognition for whom lost organic search wouldn't matter much (thus, they have little incentive to use Google advertising to replace that lost traffic). Google passes this off with the ideas of domain authority and reputation. The full details aren't known, but generally speaking it boils down to large websites that receive high traffic, have been established for a long time, and are generally well known in the public. Sites and businesses that most need the organic search (and may have far more relevant content to offer the user) are buried underneath those sites that aren't going to pay for advertising anyway. Since adopting this approach about a decade ago, Google's profits have gone through the roof.
Google rationalizes this by saying that prioritizing the largest, most popular websites and businesses, they are providing "safer" results to users because users can already have a good idea of what they are getting if they click on that result. It's really just about profit. Google's algorithms are pretty big and constantly changing, and word has it that for proprietary reasons nobody has access to the whole picture, except for an exclusive handful of high ranking individuals whom you could count on one hand. So, inserting a substantive political bias would be difficult. There is a degree of direct human evaluation that's involved, which could yield subjective results based on some individuals' biases. But at the end of the day, the old fashioned profit motive is 100 times more effective at explaining this whole thing.
