MRC Free Speech America caught an anti-free speech organization with its hands in the cookie jar. Ad Fontes, the notably leftist media ratings firm, reacted to MRC articles that criticized its left-wing bias by giving these articles unfavorable ratings. We kid you not!
The left-wing censorship firm, presenting itself as the arbiter of truth, pummelled two MRC articles—explicitly about Ad Fontes—with negative scores. In essence, Ad Fontes claimed articles accusing its system as biased and unreliable were … biased and unreliable.
The joke writes itself. After recognizing how ridiculous Ad Fontes looked targeting articles that questioned its ratings, the company enacted a new policy – it will no longer rate articles about itself. Tellingly, this decision was only made after being confronted by MRC staff.
MRC reached out to Ad Fontes for comment on Jan. 15, 2024. In response, Ad Fontes admitted that rating articles about itself looked bad in retrospect. Citing growing scrutiny and an internal discussion, Ad Fontes founder and CEO Vanessa Otero declared to MRC that they “decided that moving forward, we won't rate any articles that are about us or tangentially mention us.”
MRC Free Speech America Vice President Dan Schneider rebuked the fact it required MRC questioning for Ad Fontes to admit its blatant bias and change its policies. “Just like how the Soviet Union judges skewed their scoring in the 1980 Summer Olympics, Ad Fontes wanted to be its own referee,” Schneider said. “To think that Ad Fontes thought they could get away with this reveals its lack of trustworthiness and credibility.”
Initially, MRC published a bombshell report headlined, “MRC ORIGINAL: Media Literacy Firm Rigged to Favor Left-Wing Media,” which showed how Ad Fontes’ ratings disproportionately favored left-leaning media over right-leaning media after examining all media that it rated in its database. Four months later, Ad Fontes limited the ability for outside organizations to access and analyze its data. However, Ad Fontes claimed that users can still view its data via its app. Following the change, MRC published a follow-up story headlined: “Nothing to See Here! Leftist So-Called ‘Media Literacy’ Firm Pulls Curtains After MRC Exposé.”
Ad Fontes inexplicably targeted both these articles to denigrate. First, Ad Fontes gave MRC's initial exposé—published on Sept. 21, 2023—a scathingly low-reliability score of 5.33. This review placed the story near what Ad Fontes considers “Fabricated” or “Misleading” content. Ad Fontes later removed the rating completely, according to archived links reviewed by MRC Free Speech America.
Months later, Ad Fontes targeted another MRC article daring to call out the journalism gatekeepers at the firm. This time, the company selected MRC reporting on Ad Fontes’s decision to partially pull the curtain shut on its data following our exposé. The MRC report relied on an Ad Fontes mass email telling its subscribers that it took drastic measures to limit its previously available trove of data.
Despite MRC using Ad Fontes’s own words, the company punished the article with yet another low-reliability score of 8.33. Similar to when it walked back its review of MRC’s initial exposé, Ad Fontes again removed its score for the second article on Jan. 15, 2023, hours after MRC Free Speech America reached out to the media ratings firm with questions about the increasingly glaring conflict of interest.
The critical ratings of MRC’s articles contrast strikingly with Ad Fontes’s overtly favorable ratings of debunked stories pushed by leftist publications. For instance, at the time of the publication of MRC’s Ad Fontes exposé, the rating firm gave a high 50.63 reliability score to a 2020 Washington Post article calling the COVID-19 lab-leak theory a debunked “fringe” theory, despite Biden’s own Department of Energy acknowledging the laboratory leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology as the likely cause of COVID-19. Any score above 40 is considered “reliable” by Ad Fontes.
As recounted in MRC’s report, Ad Fontes also rubber-stamped an article by The Root, headlined “They’ll Erase Us from the Future.” With a generous reliability score of 46.0, the article baselessly claimed that twice-failed gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams won the 2018 Georgia election. Abrams notably lost the election by 1.4 percentage points despite refusing to concede.
Conservatives are under attack. Contact ABC News (818) 460-7477, CBS News (212) 975-3247 and NBC News (212) 664-6192 and demand they report on Ad Fontes’s egregious left-wing bias.
