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(This story is the second in a four-part series this month by Just the News on watchdogs who promote censorship.)

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,” as opposed to 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 company employs. 

Tellingly, News Guard doesn’t disclose who those journalists are, their credentials or the political parties with whom they are aligned but penalizes media outlets for the same, perceived a lack of transparency.

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 given lower marks than are legacy ones. 

Thus, right-leaning outlets such as Breitbart News and the Daily Wire scores Nutrition Labels of just 49.5%, while The Washington Post scores 100%. 

That 100% rating stands in contrast to facts that 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, financing, who’s in charge and potential conflicts of interest; whether an outlet clearly labels advertising; 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 at best. 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 flagging 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 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 July hearing, NewsGuard was also discussed, and one congressman claimed that its average rating for conservative outlets is 66% while it is 91% for liberal outlets. 

At the hearing, 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. 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. 

“NewsGuard aggressively fact checked and penalized websites that reported on the COVID-19 lab leak theory,” Carr’s letter also reads. NewsGuard, in fact, acknowledged that it mistakenly downgraded 21 news sites over their reporting of the lab leak theory and said it corrected the error.

Carr demanded from the four tech giants a list of their products that rely on NewsGuard as well as details on how they use NewsGuard in relation to their advertising services and the ad agencies they use, giving them until Dec. 10 to respond.

Even before Carr’s letter, the GOP-led House Committee on Oversight and Accountability launched an investigation into NewsGuard to determine its impact on protected First Amendment speech.

There are myriad examples of what conservatives might see as evidence of bias in how NewsGuard’s service seeks to influence those who search for news on the Internet.

When Trump said Liz Cheney, an ex-GOP Congresswoman and Trump critic, wouldn’t be so pro-war if she were the one doing the fighting, for example, a search for “Trump threatens Liz Cheney” revealed a hyperbolic headline from The Atlantic that read, “Trump Suggests Training Guns on Liz Cheney’s Face,” along with NewsGuard’s perfect rating of 100% for the outlet. 

Even MSN’s misleading, no-context headline, “Trump says Liz Cheney should be ‘shot in the face’ by nine guns in sickening fantasy,” was accompanied by a 64.5% NewsGuard rating.

But a far-more accurate and in-context headline from Breitbart News – “Trump Says Liz Cheney Might Not be Such a ‘War Hawk’ If She Had Guns Pointed At Her” – that appeared much further down in Google’s search results, was accompanied by a NewsGuard rating of just 49.5%.

NewsGuard gives Just the News a 69.5% rating and says the less-than-stellar rating is related to a 2023 article that accurately quoted Dr. Harvey Risch, Yale University’s professor emeritus of epidemiology, saying that hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin could effective treatments for COVID-19 if taken properly. The story also included Risch citing a study concluding that the more doses of the mRNA vaccine a person gets, the more risk they have of contracting COVID. “

These boosters are incrementally doing harm to the immune system in general,” Risch said.

NewsGuard, however, seized on the cited study falling short of declaring that multipole vaccine boosters were to blame for the results and that the authors called for further research into the correlation.

Since NewsGuard uses humans rather than algorithms, a representative reached out to John Solomon of Just the News for his response, and he said at the time: “We accurately quoted the study. Any claim to the contrary is arbitrarily false and malicious.”

In a similar case, after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended last year that children as young as six months old should get the latest version of the mRNA vaccine, Fox News published a story whereby Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo complained that the recommendation was “anti-human” and a “major safety concern.”

The story was true, given Ladapo was quoted properly and in context. 

But NewsGuard called the story misleading given that Fox News didn’t push back against Ladapo’s conclusions, even though the point of the story was that Ladapo was pushing back against the media’s usual narrative (and that of the CDC and Dr. Anthony Fauci, who at the time was director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases).

Just the News asked NewsGuard: “When an outlet cites a legitimate source, such as a Yale medical professor or a state surgeon general, pushing back against things Dr. Anthony Fauci or the CDC has said, NewsGuard penalizes the outlet under the guise that Fauci and/or the CDC’s position isn’t prominent in the story. Why does that not work in reverse? In other words, when Fauci’s and the CDC’s positions are promoted without alternative, credible detractors, why does NewsGuard not penalize the outlet for not presenting both sides?”

NewsGuard responded: ”When articles quote someone making an unsubstantiated claim for which there is significant countervailing evidence, the site typically includes countervailing evidence or notes that the claim is unsubstantiated.” 

Thus, when Fox News opinion show host Sean Hannity said in 2020 that 99% of healthy people quickly recover from COVID-19 (echoing what Dr. Fauci himself told Congress days earlier), NewsGuard still penalized the conservative-leaning news outlet for not citing CDC data and “research published by Chinese authorities,” that political analyst Rudy Takala wrote that year.

Takala, who has worked for Fox News, The Hill, Mediate and others, also noted that CNN spent a year dismissing the lab-leak theory and “botched the story about Biden’s laptop while heavily promoting the discredited Steele Dossier, of Russian collusion hoax infamy,” still earns an 80% from NewsGuard.

PragerU

One company pushing back against NewsGuard is PragerU, the video platform of radio host Dennis Prager that boasts more then 5 billion views. In 2022, NewsGuard rated it 57%, so low that its video hosting service dropped PragerU.

PragerU responded by asking fans to sign a petition “to expose NewsGuard and its cronies for suppressing free speech,” identifying the “cronies” as Big Tech, Big Pharma, the Defense Department, the American Federation of Teachers and the World Economic Forum.

PragerU also sent a string of emails addressed to Brill and Crovitz, as well as an editorial director and a health director.

The emails, reviewed by Just the News, indicated that one of NewsGuard’s specific complaints was that a PragerU video featuring America’s Frontline Doctors, a network of medical doctors who were skeptical of the efficacy and safety of the mRNA vaccine and of COVID-19 lockdowns and other protocols. The doctors also claimed that HCQ and Ivermectin were effective treatments.

NewGuard’s numerous complaints also included a PragerU video where a participant said that children weren’t dying of COVID and another, hosted by Lila Rose, that claimed Planned Parenthood does not want to show ultrasounds to women who seek abortions.

In all, NewsGuard had nine complaints, and PragerU addressed them all, citing studies, and also studies that refuted the ones that NewsGuard relied upon.

Thus far, PragerU’s petition and its emails have failed, as its rating hasn’t budged. The CEO of PragerU finished the correspondence by writing: “This chain of emails we’ve exchanged with you and your team has exposed your organization for what it is – an online media bully run by wealthy left-wing activists pushing their agenda. The public and your clients deserve better.”

In the third installment of this four-part series on Big Censorship, Just the News explores Media Matters for America.