journalist Michael Shellenberger, who was giving evidence of America’s pub- lic-private censorship regime in March before the GOP’s newly created House Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. Shellenberger responded that News-
Guard and the not-for-profit Global Dis- information Index (GDI) were “both U.S.- government-funded entities . . . working to drive advertiser revenue away from disfavored publications and towards the ones that they favor.” GDI, which according to the Wash-
ington Examiner creates blacklists that cast right-of-center outlets, including Newsmax, as its “riskiest” or “worst” offenders for disinformation, received hundreds of thousands of dollars from two State Department-backed groups. NewsGuard, which also targeted Newsmax, received nearly $750,000 via a Pentagon award in 2021, as jour- nalist Matt Taibbi documented. NewsGuard applies “subjective
‘risk’ or ‘reliability’ scores to media out- lets, which can result in reduction in revenue,” Taibbi tweeted. Gaetz told the committee that this represented “the directing of revenue to certain media companies over other media companies designed and imple- mented with U.S. government funding and support.” “That is . . . astonishing,” the con- gressman concluded, later tweeting
NewsGuard’s bent seems to flow naturally from its backers, advisers, and employees.
“The @Weaponization Subcommittee must investigate NewsGuard.” One could argue NewsGuard has
become a victim of its own “success.” The roots of the “disinformation
complex” can be found in the anti- free speech ethos that has taken firm hold on college campuses — speech that runs afoul of progressive ortho- doxy constitutes violence and must be snuffed out. The logic is now all too familiar: If
you raise questions about the integ- rity of mail-in elections, you are an insurrectionist; the safety and efficacy of vaccines, a murderer; America’s involvement in the Russo-Ukrainian war, a Putin puppet; teaching critical race theory in schools, a bigot, if not a domestic terrorist. NewsGuard’s bent seems to flow
naturally from its backers, advisers, and employees. Among its chief investors is the Pub-
licis Groupe, a major advertising and PR company that has taken progres- sive positions on issues in the past.
Online educational video purveyor PragerU said its former
video host, JW Player, dropped PragerU because NewsGuard blacklisted it. Conservative columnist David Marcus recently told The
Megyn Kelly Show, “I have literally spoken to editors who told me . . . [that] there’s true, accurate stories that we didn’t run because we knew if we ran into NewsGuard [someone would] flag us. “It was going to cost us money and we were going to have to spend all day dealing with it.”
WHAT IS NEWSGUARD? According to an opinion piece in Politico written by NewsGuard’s CEO Gordon Crovitz, rather than simply being a fact-checking company that can only debunk stories after they go viral, NewsGuard rates entire websites’ trustworthiness. NewsGuard publishes lengthy “nutritional labels,” rating websites on various criteria of journalistic importance, wherein
It funded NewsGuard in part to
serve clients concerned about “brand safety,” a push driven by something of a progressive protection racket, where- by leftist activists have targeted brands to get them to stop advertising on con- servative outlets. Another top investor is Nicholas Penniman V, former executive direc- tor of the Huffington Post Investiga- tive Fund and editor of the progressive American Prospect. The left-leaning Knight Founda-
tion, which Taibbi notes has funded other key players in the disinforma- tion industrial complex, also funds NewsGuard. One will look in vain on News-
Guard’s staff for those who have worked for right-of-center outlets, save perhaps for Crovitz. He has vigorously sought to defend NewsGuard against charges of bias and government influence, claim- ing in response to recent criticisms that “we are not ‘funded’ by the U.S. government.” “We oppose government censorship,
and” in contrast with GDI, “our rat- ings of news sources are done in a fully transparent and apolitical manner.”
Benjamin Weingarten is editor at large at RealClearInvestigations, a senior contributor to The Federalist, and a columnist at Newsweek and The Epoch Times.
NewsGuard outlines its reasons for giving certain ratings. But the American Institute for Economic Research reported that
NewsGuard falls far short of the very same criteria for accuracy and transparency that it claims to apply to other websites. Most of the company’s fact checkers lack basic qualifications in the scientific and social-scientific fields that they purport to arbitrate, AIER said. NewsGuard’s own track record of commentary on the COVID-19 pandemic reveals unreliable and misleading claims that required subsequent corrections. A revealing example is NewsGuard’s treatment of the “lab
leak” hypothesis for COVID-19’s origins. Political figures, including President Joe Biden, now consider the lab leak theory “plausible” and have called for an investigation of the Wuhan facility. For over a year prior to these recent developments, however,
NewsGuard aggressively “fact checked” and penalized other websites for even raising the possibility of a lab leak.
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