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2024-11-28 -Great Cultural Revolution
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Among the media watchdogs, NewsGuard, which often targets conservative outlets, is most feared
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| Long. Informative. Something to read with your hurried morning coffee before you start all the Thanksgiving things — if you’re hosting — or to enjoy over your leisurely breakfast if someone else has the responsibility. ;-) |
[JustTheNews] Part of President-elect Donald’s Trump plan to rein in censorship, which he disclosed on Nov. 9, involves tweaking section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996.
Section 230 gives social media companies liability immunity for user posts, though Trump wants it to apply only to those with “high standards of neutrality,” not just those who appear to routinely take down posts that lean conservative.
Without calling out by name Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube or a legacy media, Trump referred to “a sinister group of deep-state bureaucrats, Silicon Valley tyrants, left-wing activists and depraved corporate news media.”
Coinciding with Trump’s bold plan, Just the News has launched a four-part series exploring the media watchdogs who censor.
In the first part of this the series, we explored the Trusted News Initiative. In this second installment, we look at NewsGuard.
NEWSGUARD
Unlike the other media watchdogs in this series, NewsGuard is a for-profit company, making money in a variety of ways that include licensing its ratings, dubbed “Nutrition Labels,” that search engines and Internet Service Providers, or ISPs, use to warn users against news sources NewsGuard deems unreliable.
For $4.95 a month, consumers can attach NewsGuard’s nutrition labels to all of their Internet search results, allegedly so that they’ll know if what they are reading is true or not, based on the opinions of the dozens of researcher/journalists the company employs.
NewsGuard discloses who those journalists are and their credentials in a bio page.
In the five years since its founding, NewsGuard has ingrained itself into schools, libraries and hospitals, and it has struck contracts with the Defense Department (though the company told Just the News it does not currently generate revenue from the government).
Among its products is BrandGuard, used by advertisers and the agencies that represent them, to ensure their ads don’t appear alongside news stories and at media outlets to which NewsGuard assigns a low rating.
Thus, it wields unusual power for such a young company, given that media outlets that get a low grade will most likley suffer a decline in traffic and advertising revenue.
Its claim of nonpartisanship, though, appears dubious, given its team of human fact-checkers rarely deviate from the legacy media’s approved narrative, and outlets that stray – often conservative ones – are more often than legacy ones given lower marks.
Thus, right-leaning outlets such as Breitbart News and the Daily Wire score Nutrition Labels of just 49.5%, while The Washington Post scores 100%.
That perfect rating stands in contrast to the august newspaper insisted for months – until after the election – that first son Hunter Biden’s laptop was fake; appeared to frame stories to insinuate that Trump was acting as an agent for Russia during his first term as president; and dismissed the possibility that COVID-19 leaked from a lab in Wuhan, China. All these turned out to be false.
Insiders at multiple media outlets told Just the News that many companies arbitrarily choose a 70% NewsGuard rating as a minimum threshold before they’ll consider buying an ad, notably just above the 69.5% rating it gives to Fox News. NewsGuard, though, told Just the News that 60% is a more common threshold.
The Nutrition Labels are based on several categories including: false or misleading content; how an outlet gathers and presents news responsibly; effective practices for correcting errors; avoiding deceptive headlines; the disclosures of ownership and financing, potential conflicts of interest; whether advertising is clearly labeled; whether the names of an outlet's content creators are disclosed and their biographies are provided; and how an outlet handles the difference between news and opinion responsibly.
The New York Times lost 12.5 points in that latter category, depriving it of a perfect score.
“It’s nuts. They hold different outlets to different standards,” said one media executive who has dealt with NewsGuard. Indeed, media insiders pointed out that while the Daily Beast was penalized for reporting that Biden’s laptop was likely fake, more traditional outlets like The Post and The New York Times were not.
“It’s not an unbiased tool. It’s arbitrary categories with arbitrary weighting from people who think they know best because they were once journalists,” the media insider also said. “It’s terrible to begin with, and a shame it ever got traction.”
Just the News asked NewsGuard why, if the disclosure of financing is important, does it not take into account revenue from advertisers, given how often media companies are accused of bias in favor of pharmaceutical companies, for example, because they are the nation’s largest buyer of ads.
NewsGuard replied: “Simply receiving some ads from an industry that a site also covers, among many other ads from other industries, would not cause a site to lose points.”
NewsGuard told Just The News that it employs 40 "analysts" to rate news outlets. It wouldn’t say whether more are Democrats or Republicans, though an insider familiar with the situation estimates 65% lean left.
NewsGuard also argues many conservative outlets score higher than liberal ones, using as an example Fox News' 69.5% compared to MSNBC's 49.5%.
BULLYING AS A BUSINESS MODEL
NewsGuard also pointed out that co-CEO Gordon Crovitz is a long-time conservative writer for The Wall Street Journal, the Heritage Foundation and Regnery Publishing.
If a media outlet scores poorly, NewsGuard will tell it what to do to raise its rating.
Sometimes the advice is ambiguous. One media executive told Just the News that his outlet was informed that NewsGuard was “uncomfortable” with some of their opinion pieces.
“Who are they to say to say what our audience and advertisers should be comfortable with?” said the executive, who chose to remain unnamed. “It’s like they saw a space to launch a company to bully conservative news sites and promote the ones they like. They don’t look at every story, they pull out the ones they disagree with to downgrade your newsroom.”
NewsGuard said its criteria is based on “apolitical criteria of journalistic practice,” and that it was founded as “an alternative to government censorship or the continued dominance of the secret ratings of news publishers by the social media companies and left-wing advocacy groups.”
But conservatives don’t buy it, hence a House Judiciary Committee report criticized the company for its stories that correctly reported that a Gaza hospital explosion was due to a misfired Hamas rocket but not penalizing outlets that falsely reported that Biden’s laptop was "Russian disinformation." (NewsGuard penalized the Daily Beast until it corrected its reporting, two months after The New York Times and Washington Post, which were not penalized, corrected theirs).
One interesting aside is that retired General Michael Hayden, who in 2020 along with 50 other former security operatives signed the now-infamous and debunked statement positing the Biden laptop as fake, serves as an "advisor" to the board of NewsGuard. A congressional report indicated that the statement was drafted and circulated by then Biden campaign staffer Antony Blinken.
GLOBAL ALLIANCE FOR RESPONSIBLE MEDIA
Republicans also held a hearing on July 10 to explore possibe collusion in the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, another watchdog accused of censorship that was sued by X (formerly Twitter) and Rumble in August and folded a few days later.
At the hearing this summer, the Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro testified that NewsGuard “has penalized us openly for being a conservative site. When we mention that we are actually honest about our bias, what they said is, ‘Well, that means you are not objective,’ as opposed to other outlets which claim to be objective but actually are biased toward the left.”
As first reported by Newsmax, on Nov. 13, FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr wrote a letter about NewsGuard to the CEOs of Alphabet (the parent company of Google and YouTube); Meta (the parent of Facebook and Instagram); Microsoft; and Apple.
Just as Trump referenced how tech companies risk liability protection under Section 230 if they don’t act in good faith by allowing diverse viewpoints, so does Carr, whom Trump has picked to lead the agency.
But the major point of his letter, reviewed by Just the News, is to seek intel on how the four major tech companies employ “the Orwellian named NewsGuard,” as Carr put it.
“NewsGuard has consistently rated official propaganda from the Communist Party of China as more credible than American publications,” writes Carr, pointing to a report from the conservative Media Research Center. The report includes that NewsGuard co-founder and co-CEO Steven Brill went on CNBC in 2020 to claim the laptop story was probably a Russian hoax. 
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Posted by Skidmark 2024-11-28 00:00||
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