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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The Post concluded its NewsGuard propaganda piece by parroting the struggles NewsGuard has to undergo now to maintain its sordid reputation as a Ministry of Truth:
Brill said the pressure from the right hasn’t cost the company any clients that he is aware of, but it has taken a toll on the company in other ways. Instead of focusing full-time on its misinformation research and news ratings, it has had to spend money on legal fees and time and energy explaining and defending its practices to politicians, clients and the public.
Oh, boohoo.
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