Study Finds Taxpayer-Funded NewsGuard Is Outrageously Biased Against Conservatives; In the Name of ‘fake news,’ NewsGuard Extorts Sites to Follow the Government Narrative

Study Finds Taxpayer-Funded NewsGuard Is Outrageously Biased Against Conservatives:

‘That which government is constitutionally prohibited from doing, it cannot contract with others to do.’

In a study published Tuesday, Media Research Center (MRC) Free Speech America found that NewsGuard, the taxpayer censorship giant self-tasked with rating media outlets on reliability, “overwhelmingly favored left-leaning outlets over right-leaning ones.” This is the third year MRC Free Speech America has exposed NewsGuard for its partisanship, and, according to MRC, NewsGuard has become “even worse” than years prior.

Using AllSides, an organization that classifies media outlets by their “right” to “left” bias, “MRC researchers determined that NewsGuard provided a stellar average ‘credibility’ rating of 91/100 for ‘left’ and ‘lean left’ outlets (e.g., The New York Times, The Washington Post, TIME, Vox),” wrote MRC researchers. Meanwhile, “right” and “lean right” outlets, such as Fox News, the New York Post, and The Daily Wire, were given “an outrageously abysmal average score of 65/100.”

“NewsGuard’s rating for right-leaning outlets in particular was worse than the still-low 66/100 average rating it slapped on right-leaning media across the prior two MRC studies released Jan. 6, 2023 and Dec. 13, 2021,” MRC noted. 

The Double Standard

One of the strongest examples of NewsGuard’s brazen bias is how it excused legacy media outlets’ false labeling of the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story as “Russian disinformation” back in 2020.

The Washington Post, USA Today, and Politico — all outlets that discredited the story — were given “flawless 100/100 scores.” The seriousness of what these legacy media organizations did cannot be understated. As MRC noted, polling indicates that suppression of the laptop story played a deciding role in the 2020 election.

According to MRC, NewsGuard’s decision to ignore the discrediting of the laptop story isn’t surprising, given that NewsGuard itself contributed to its suppression. Indeed, “NewsGuard co-CEO Steven Brill joined CNBC just before the 2020 election to castigate the Hunter Biden laptop story as a probable Russian ‘hoax,’” MRC wrote in its report.

While outlets that engaged in journalistic malpractice and election interference are given gold stars, NewsGuard severely punishes conservative outlets like The Federalist. NewsGaurd gives The Federalist a failing 12.5/100 score. “After roughly two years,” wrote MRC, “NewsGuard is still criticizing The Federalist’s questioning of the efficacy of masks for COVID-19.” At the same time, liberal CNBC, which has a “95” NewsGuard rating, “cited a study showing that cloth masks were only 37 percent effective at filtering out virus particles,” wrote MRC. —>READ MORE HERE

In the name of ‘fake news,’ NewsGuard extorts sites to follow the government narrative:

Half a century ago, George Orwell, writing on literary censorship, wrote that “unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban.”

That dynamic now broadly extends to an opaque network of government agencies and self-proclaimed anti-misinformation groups that have repressed online speech.

There’s no official ban on discussing the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines or criticizing American involvement in the Ukraine-Russia war, but editors and journalists have realized that writing on such topics can come at a cost. News publishers have been demonetized and shadow-banned for reporting dissenting views and the bureaucratic means for enforcing this form of control are under increasing scrutiny.

NewsGuard, a for-profit company that scores news websites on trust and works closely with government agencies and major corporate advertisers, exemplifies the problem.

The startup was founded in 2018 and quickly gained favor among establishment voices concerned with “fake news.”

NewsGuard’s core business is a misinformation meter, in which websites are rated on a scale of 0 to 100 on a variety of factors, including headline choice and whether a site publishes “false or egregiously misleading content.”

Such an endeavor might appear as an objective public service, but the devil is in the details.

Editors who have engaged with NewsGuard have found that the company has made bizarre demands that unfairly tarnish an entire site as untrustworthy for straying from the official narrative.

The Daily Sceptic, a libertarian-leaning British site, is one such example. In a series of emails over the last two years, editor Toby Young reached out to NewsGuard, hoping to improve the Daily Sceptic’s 74.5 rating.

NewsGuard took issue with the website’s criticism of lockdowns, calling them “unnecessary, ineffective and harmful,” and cited academic literature on the topic.

Young went so far as to add postscripts to his articles, relaying the issues raised by the fact-checkers and providing additional information. —>READ MORE HERE

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