The MRC’s Loud And Lame War On NewsGuard, Part 7
The Media Research Center cheered right-wing lawfare against NewsGuard -- then got angry that the Washington Post pointed out the right-wing war against the company.
(Previously: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6)
Last year, the Media Research Center took a brief break from its yearslong war on NewsGuard for pointing out the shoddiness of right-wing media by undermining its own narrative, courtesy of a July 31 post by Catherine Salgado:
Even a broken clock is right twice a day, and so-called media ratings firm NewsGuard halted its usual anti-free speech activity to “fact check” leftist fake news.
NewsGuard’s Reality Check published a fact check of leftist hysteria about the much-maligned Project 2025 on July 29. The firm identified and called out four false narratives surrounding The Heritage Foundation-led project, pushed by high-profile leftists, including Vice President Kamala Harris and actor Mark Hamill.
NewsGuard specifically called out Harris for claiming that Project 2025 proves President Donald Trump “intends to cut Social Security and Medicare” if elected. NewsGuard countered, “The Project 2025 policy playbook, titled ‘Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise,’ does not mention any proposed changes to Social Security.”
NewsGuard continued its debunking, stating the project does not aim to ban Muslims from entering America. It “includes no mention of a Muslim ban or any religion- or ethnicity-specific entry ban.” NewsGuard added that the conspiracy theory that women, under Project 2025, would be forced to track their periods apparently originated on a satire site.
Salgado then tried to clean up by insisting the old narrative is still in force and repeating its discredited attacks:
Despite the honest fact checking described above, NewsGuard usually displays strong bias in favor of leftist outlets. In December 2023, MRC researchers found for the third year running that NewsGuard gave an average “credibility” rating of 91/100 for “left” and “lean left” outlets, versus 65/100 on average for “right” and “lean right” outlets.
The MRC eventually got back on narrative, starting with a Sept. 19 post by Joseph Vazquez listing NewsGuard co-CEO Steven Brill as among this with “Objectivity-Wrecking Ties to Democrats” because he has donated to Democratic candidates. (No mention, of course, of the MRC’s donations in kind to Donald Trump and other Republicans wrecking its objectivity.) An Oct. 25 post by Tom Olohan noting Free speech Week rehashed its partisan attacks:
Organizations purporting to promote “media literacy” such as NewsGuard and Ad Fontes routinely work to demonize right-leaning media outlets.
MRC Free Speech America Associate Editor Joseph Vazquez has exposed NewsGuard’s rampant bias in three successive studies, showing that the media ratings firm has routinely granted highly favorable ratings to left-leaning news outlets.
The MRC finally served up some newish material in an Oct. 29 post by Salgado cheering on right-wing lawfare against NewsGuard:
Republicans on the House Oversight Committee have taken leftist, biased media ratings firm NewsGuard to task for its ties to the Biden-Harris administration.
Committee Chairman James Comer (R-KY) sent a letter to NewsGuard Co-CEOs Steven Brill and Gordon Crovitz on Oct. 25, according to a committee press release. Comer asked the online ratings firm for all documentation related to past or present potential partnerships with and grants from the federal government. “The Committee on Oversight and Accountability is continuing to investigate the impact of NewsGuard on protected First Amendment speech and its potential to serve as a non-transparent agent of censorship campaigns,” Comer wrote.
[…]
Comer continued: “Our investigation has particularly focused on abuse of government authority to censor American citizens under the guise of protecting them from so-called misinformation.”
NewsGuard previously provided information to the committee on its contracts with the Department of Defense (DOD), the press release on Comer’s letter noted, but the collusion doesn’t stop there. Comer’s letter explained that NewsGuard admitted in a briefing to working with the leftist anti-free speech interagency Global Engagement Center (GEC) and the Cyber National Mission Force within the U.S. Cyber Command. GEC funded NewsGuard and the Global Disinformation Index, which deliberately blacklist conservative sites from ad revenue. NewsGuard even coordinated with a foreign government entity, the Joint Research Centre of the European Union.
The letter included a list of requests for documents related to potential NewsGuard collusion with the DOD, the State Department — including the infamous censorship-funding GEC — and any other federal entity.
Vazquez cheered out more anti-NewsGuard lawfare in a Nov. 15 post:
Federal Communications Commissioner Brendan Carr utilized Media Research Center analysis to put Big Tech and so-called media ratings firm NewsGuard on notice.
Carr sent a letter Wednesday to the respective CEOs of Google, Microsoft, Meta and Apple accusing them of “improper conduct” in silencing Americans’ exercising free speech on political, religious and scientific issues. Carr specifically ordered these tech giants to acquiesce to surrendering any documents related to their work with “the Orwellian named NewsGuard” given its history of targeting right-leaning websites by bullying their advertisers.
Moreover, Carr excoriated the CEOs for participating in “a censorship cartel that included not only technology and social media companies but advertising, marketing, and so-called ‘fact checking’ organizations as well as the Biden-Harris Administration itself” to suppress viewpoints, harm websites’ profitability and delist them by smearing them as “high risk” to advertisers.
Carr relied on MRC studies to make his case that Big Tech platforms working with NewsGuard raise questions about whether this relationship constitutes “good faith” actions within the meaning of the Section 230 liability protections in the Communications Decency Act of 1996 that they enjoy.
[…]
Carr called for the ties of leftist ratings firms like NewsGuard, the government and Silicon Valley to be dismantled: “This censorship cartel is an affront to Americans’ constitutional freedoms and must be completely dismantled. Americans must be able to reclaim their right to free speech. Indeed, our democracy depends on freedom of expression.”
The fact that Carr is relying on shoddy and biased MRC “studies” to smear NewsGuard should disqualify this effort as being credible.
Salgado returned to pile on even more lawfare in a Dec. 10 post:
It looks like the Federal Communications Commission under Brendan Carr won’t be the only agency looking to tear down the government-backed dystopian activities of website traffic cop NewsGuard.
Federal Trade Commissioner Andrew Ferguson issued a statement Dec. 2 joining his colleague Commissioner Melissa Holyoak in urging the agency “to investigate online platforms for unfair acts or practices relating to their opaque, unpredictable processes for banning users and censoring content.” Ferguson stipulated that “we must vigorously enforce the antitrust laws against any platforms found to be unlawfully limiting Americans’ ability to exchange ideas freely and openly.” Part of Ferguson’s antitrust push includes cracking down on unlawful, facilitated advertiser boycotts of right-leaning outlets by leftist media sentinels like NewsGuard and the World Federation of Advertisers’ Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) initiative.
“NewsGuard ‘goes to great lengths to create the appearance of nonpartisanship and objectivity,” but it seems to give a free pass to deceptive and biased news coverage by major left-leaning outlets,” Ferguson rebuked. “NewsGuard is, of course, free to rate websites by whatever metric it wants. But the antitrust laws do not permit third parties to facilitate group boycotts among competitors.”
Salgado didn’t explain how, exactly, it’s “dystopian” to point out false and misleading claims made by right-wing media, let alone how doing so makes NewsGuard “leftist” when the MRC has never disputed the accuracy of its observations.
More partisan attacks
Catherine Salgado served up some right-wing stenography in a Dec. 26 post:
Senate Commerce Committee ranking member Ted Cruz (R-TX) has called out a major tech giant for its ties to a dystopian online rating firm.
Microsoft has long had a partnership with website traffic cop NewsGuard, including for its Edge browser and for educational initiatives, and Cruz now aims to find out exactly what the latter partnership entails. Cruz wrote in his Monday letter, “Given growing concerns about NewsGuard’s ideological bias and its efforts to manipulate young minds, I ask for transparency regarding Microsoft’s involvement in and financing of this Orwellian censorship project.”
Microsoft claims to support “free expression,” Cruz wrote in the letter, but that is grossly undercut by the fact that it openly partners with an entity that targets right-leaning media outlets by working to strip away their advertising dollars. MRC has repeatedly exposed NewsGuard’s egregious bias against right-leaning media. “Microsoft is actively promoting and funding NewsGuard’s so-called ‘Media Literacy’ tool, which is being rolled out to schoolchildren across the country,” Cruz wrote.
The senator cited NewsGuard’s skewed ratings for left-leaning versus right-leaning outlets, which MRC Free Speech America has revealed. “Your company’s financial support for NewsGuard is especially troubling given Microsoft’s purported commitment to protecting free expression online,” Cruz wrote.
The next day, Salgado complained that NewsGuard called out false right-wing attacks against it, under the snotty headline “Oh Cry Us a River”:
After Federal Communications Commissioner Brendan Carr challenged NewsGuard’s blatant bias against right-leaning media, the ratings firm actually complained about supposedly unfair targeting. No, we’re not kidding.
In November, Carr, recently picked by President-elect Donald Trump to chair the FCC, wrote a letter obtained by Newsmax to the CEOs of Microsoft, Apple, Meta and Alphabet (Google) to challenge the tech companies on censorship and potential ties to Orwellian “media monitors” like NewsGuard. NewsGuard fired back a letter in December, manipulating and denying facts to cry foul. MRC has repeatedly exposed the egregious leftism infused in NewsGuard’s ratings system across multiple studies.
NewsGuard co-CEOs Gordon Crovitz and Steven Brill denied that NewsGuard “favors censorship,” asserting, “The opposite is true and is imbued in everything NewsGuard does. NewsGuard was founded in 2018 explicitly as an alternative to government censorship of the internet.” Undermining the claim, however, is the fact that NewsGuard received funding from the U.S. federal government.
“The fact that NewsGuard can claim to be an alternative to government censorship while receiving funding from the government defies logic,” MRC Free Speech America Vice President Dan Schneider blasted. “It’s doublespeak! NewsGuard is in fact a prototype of the very kind of dystopian Ministry of Truth that Americans should be unnerved about. For Crovitz and Brill to brazenly attempt to pull the wool over everyone’s eyes now and play the victim is more proof why nobody should take anything they say seriously without a bucket of salt.”
Salgado spent a Dec. 30 post complaining that “Egregiously biased online ‘credibility’ arbiter NewsGuard rates several right-leaning U.S. media outlets as less reliable than several state media outlets from tyrannical foreign powers Qatar, communist China and Russia.” There was the usual whining about foreign outlets were rated better than certain right-wing U.S. outlets:
For instance, NewsGuard gives a Qatari state media outlet a score of 82.5/100: Al Jazeera English. Al Jazeera is funded by and answerable to the Qatari government, which actively harbors Islamic terrorists. Al Jazeera also gives voice to pro-terrorist propaganda, particularly Hamas.
[…]
South China Morning Post (SCMP) is owned by Alibaba, a company founded by Jack Ma and largely owned and controlled by the CCP, according to The National Pulse and Forbes. NewsGuard gives SCMP a stellar rating of 85/100 credibility rating. NewsGuard does not acknowledge SCMP’s CCP ties, though it does admit that the site has become noticeably more pro-China in recent years.
Contrast the ratings NewsGuard gives Al Jazeera and CCP-run CGTN with the 20/100 credibility rating for American media site Newsmax. NewsGuard rates Newsmax as lacking credibility because it disagrees with the authorities that Newsmax cites and claims that certain evidence-based opinions on the media site are false. One of NewsGuard’s main complaints is that Newsmax published an article based on research made public by the surgeon general of Florida, Dr. Joseph Ladapo. NewsGuard denies that the surgeon general is a credible medical authority and instead picked a medical authority, Dr. Paul Offit, who pushed the left’s narrative on COVID-19 vaccines.
Salgado, as usual, made no effort to disprove any of the claims by those foreign outlets. In fact, both Ad Fontes and AllSides don’t consider the South China Morning Post to be egregiously biased. Salgado curiously did not link to NewsGuard’s complaint about Ladapo; instead, she linked to a Ladapo press release in which he demanded that the federal government stop using COVID-19 vaccines, something more authoritative medical experts have denounced.
Salgado further complained:
As always, NewsGuard rates websites as lacking credibility based on whether or not the website promotes sources and opinions with which NewsGuard agrees. Yet one of the categories in which NewsGuard rates Newsmax so badly is handling the difference between news and opinion and gathering and presenting information responsibly. NewsGuard outlandishly claims on one hand that Newsmax, OANN and LifeNews fail to present information responsibly and publish false content, while at the same time claiming Al Jazeera and SCMP have a positive score in both of these categories. It further rates CGTN and Global Times well as far as supposedly not repeatedly publishing false content. NewsGuard also absurdly uses the same language for LifeNews and OANN as it does for RT and CGTN: “severely violates basic journalistic standards.” But it appears that NewsGuard is the one severely violating basic journalistic standards.
Of course, it can also be argued that the reason Salgado is running to Newsmax’s defense is because because it promotes sources and opinions with which Salgado and the MRC agree. Not that she will admit to that hole in her logic, of course.
Bashing a defender
This particular torrent of anti-NewsGuard propaganda was seemingly driven by a Washington Post profile of NewsGuard. The MRC finally went after the Post profile itself in a Jan. 3 post by Joseph Vazquez:
The Washington Post made a pathetic attempt to paint website traffic cop NewsGuard as some kind of victim of right-wing oppression, all while downplaying the years-long dystopian vendetta it waged against right-leaning media.
“This company rates news sites’ credibility. The right wants it stopped,” cried The Post in a 2,282-word salad for Christmas Eve. “NewsGuard, which prizes its nonpartisan criteria, has become a prime target of the GOP’s battle against disinformation watchdogs,” (emphasis added). Yes, despite the results of a congressional investigation and significant evidence to the contrary, The Post actually had the gall to characterize the disgraceful Orwellian operation as “nonpartisan.” The Post’s shill campaign came after Federal Communications Commissioner Brendan Carr ordered Big Tech platforms to surrender any documents pertaining to any partnership they may have had with NewsGuard. Perhaps The Post was incentivized by the fact that NewsGuard gives the leftist rag an unblemished 100/100 credibility score, but readers wouldn’t know that because The Post didn’t disclose as much.
Only right-wing partisans like Vazquez would think that pointing out the shoddiness of right-wing media is a “dystopian vendetta” — you’d think that the right-wing dishonesty would be the “dystopian” part.
Vazquez continued pushing the laughable narrative that it’s “censorship” to point out right-wing media dishonesty:
In a brazen display of doublespeak, The Post tried victimizing NewsGuard as the target of a government censorship vendetta. “NewsGuard, backed by legal experts, argues that Carr’s letter may violate the First Amendment by threatening the speech rights of private companies,” The Post whined. What The Post buried in the 26th paragraph of its story was that NewsGuard is the recipient of government funding, to the tune of at least $749,000 in taxpayer dollars from the Biden-Harris administration. This alone puts NewsGuard squarely within the sphere of Biden’s notorious, years-long efforts to collude with tech companies to censor disfavored speech. But The Post excused this away too, suggesting the so-called media ratings firm’s censorship efforts are a benevolent act at safeguarding Americans from foreign actors. “NewsGuard has also been targeted by conservative regulators over its grants from the Pentagon to track disinformation efforts by Russia, China and Iran targeting Americans and U.S. allies,” wrote The Post.
The MRC Censorship Investigation Project uncovered how the Department of Homeland Security actively used tax dollars from its terrorist prevention program to censor conservative viewpoints nationwide. Part of this endeavor included pushing educators to put censorship tools like NewsGuard into American classrooms to act as a quasi Ministry of Truth for students. Did The Post bother mentioning this? Nope.
Well, yeah, most normal people would consider lies and misinformation to be “disfavored speech” — and Vazquez offered no reason that it should be treated otherwise. He served up another bit of deceptive whining:
Conveniently, while propping up NewsGuard’s gaslighting-laced response to Carr denigrating his censorship concerns as filled with “factual errors,” The Post completely neglected to address the blatant falsehoods and obfuscations NewsGuard spewed. For example, NewsGuard claimed that Carr “falsely” suggested that “we claim the Hunter Biden laptop was not his or that it was a Russian operation. We never made such assertions.” Here’s the problem: NewsGuard co-CEO Steven Brill, who is featured in the paper’s cover photo for its long-winded puff story, was caught on video doing just that. During an interview on CNBC, Brill explicitly called the laptop scandal a “hoax” perpetrated by the Russians just before the 2020 elections in October.
Vazquez offered no evidence that Brill was speaking for everyone at NewsGuard aside than himself — and he failed to mention there was good reason to doubt the veracity of the laptop when the story first broke, given that the story was being pushed by Trump operatives and Trump-aligned media like the New York Post, which offered no evidence at the time to prove its claims. He whined further that right-wing media was being held to standards:
Another prevarication The Post ignored was NewsGuard’s retort to Carr on the issue of Chinese Communist Party-tied media being treated better by its metrics than several American outlets: “The letter suggests that NewsGuard rates Chinese state media outlets as credible while criticizing domestic outlets … In fact, we do not rate any Chinese state media outlets as credible … .” Whether Chinese outlets got stellar scores or not wasn’t the issue Carr was raising. Carr was specifically referencing a 2022 MRC analysis showing that Chinese outlets were rated better than three U.S.-based outlets.
China Daily (44.5/100), the Global Times (39.5/100), China Global Television Network (CGTN) (44.5/100) and People’s Daily (39.5/100) all had significantly higher scores at the time over U.S.-based media outlets The Federalist (12.5/100), One America News (25/100), Newsmax (15/100), Life News (17.5/100) and LifeSite News (17.5/100). NewsGuard, in effect, was arguing a straw man to draw attention away from this. Not that The Post cared.
Vazquez, of course, didn’t bother to prove that these right-wing outlets have the credibility he assumes. As we pointed out when the MRC made that claim, there are legitimate reasons why those right-wing outlets are considered to be less than credible — which the MRC hid from its readers at the time and Vazquez makes no effort to correct.
Vazquez then recycled an old attack line:
The Post did, however, regurgitate a canned NewsGuard talking point that “[t]he claim that advertising firms use NewsGuard to censor conservative views, for instance, is belied by more conservative outlets being rated as credible than liberal ones, NewsGuard said.” Did The Post bother verifying this claim? No. In fact, MRC Free Speech America released three studies of NewsGuard’s ridiculously skewed ratings system across three years gauging how the dystopian outfit habitually elevates left-leaning media while denigrating right-leaning media. The most recent MRC study revealed that NewsGuard gave left-leaning outlets a stellar average “credibility” rating of 91/100, while rating right-leaning outlets 26 points lower at 65/100 on average.
As the MRC frequently has done, Vazquez made no effort to actually disprove the credibility rating, nor does he make a case for better treatment of right-wing outlets solely because of their political slant.