Just now I went to RT.com and searched various article titles verbatim on DDG, they came up near the bottom half of results. I repeated this test with WSJ and found the link as the #1 result. From this it wouldn't be unreasonable to believe that either you or the sources you pull from are engaging in arbitrary website throttling/downranking.
I hear you when you say you don't remove content, but do you, or to what extent do you throttle/downrank websites?