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The Roman poet Juvenal famously asked in Satire VI: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?, or Who will guard the guards themselves? Thus it is with NewsGuard. Who will guard NewsGuard itself?

At Just the News, Paul Bond demonstrates why we need a NewsGuard guard in “Among the media watchdogs, NewsGuard, which often targets conservative outlets, is most feared.” NewsGuard is a brick in the wall meant to protect us from “misinformation.” It is a danger to those such as us. Here let me reiterate a story I told earlier this year.

In 2021 we were contacted by NewsGuard with a set of emailed questions about Power Line. According to a 2019 New York Times story, NewsGuard has given its stamp of approval to outlets including the Times itself. NewsGuard’s site lists scores of prominent institutional clients and explains:

NewsGuard deploys a team of expert journalists to rate and review the reliability of news sources across the open web, social media, and content platforms based on a set of apolitical criteria of journalistic practice.

Accessible via web dashboard, API or cloud datastream, our ratings have become the trusted source for understanding media reliability for research institutions, technology platforms, news aggregators, artificial intelligence providers, advertising companies, and news consumers worldwide.

This was Question 3 submitted to us by NewsGuard deputy editor John Gregory:

We’ve noticed that the site has repeatedly stated as fact in its article[s] that Joe Biden has dementia, both during the 2020 election cycle and since he became president. Why does the site make this claim without providing credible evidence that he has dementia?

Gregory cited John’s post “Are Biden’s aides afraid of him?” (August 22, 2021), in which John observed: “Is it plausible that White House aides are afraid of Joe Biden? Like many elderly people suffering from dementia, he can be querulous in public. We can imagine what he must be like behind closed doors.” In July 2023, Alex Thompson vindicated John’s imagination precisely in his Axios story “Old yeller: Biden’s private fury.”

Gregory also cited “Biden’s decline continues apace” (July 8, 2021). Here John made this observation:

Joe Biden’s downhill slide into dementia continues. What is remarkable is not so much that Biden has lost most of the modest faculties he once possessed, although he is rather young to be so badly impaired. What is remarkable is that we have a press determined not to notice that our president lacks normal–let alone outstanding!–mental function.

As we all know, John was on the money, both with respect to Biden’s cognitive impairment and the cooperation of the corporate press in covering it up.

Here let us take a detour into the wild world of Bob Woodward, the Washington Post’s two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning associate editor. Woodward is out with a new book that takes up the issue of Biden’s visible decline. In the passage below, Woodward cites the June 2023 observation of my youngest daughter’s father-in-law (Bill Reichblum) and grandfather-in-law (former Ambassador Alfred Moses):

Woodward writes: “I would learn the significance of these fundraisers as early markers [sic] of Biden’s decline only a year later, in June 2024.”

Woodward is half of the duo that purportedly uncovered the Watergate scandal (but see Ed Epstein’s classic Commentary essay “Did the press uncover Watergate?”). The Washington Post employs a large staff of political reporters, columnists, and editors. Coverage of the presidency is central to its mission. If I understand correctly, we are to believe that no one at the Post staff itself noticed Biden’s senility before these Biden donors in 2023.

NewsGuard didn’t see it that way. The Washington Post didn’t see it that way. As Bond notes in the JTN story linked above, however, the Washington Post scores a perfect rating of 100 percent by NewsGuard. Someone needs to guard us against NewsGuard.