MRC Founder and President Brent Bozell blasted the top brass at leftist internet traffic cop NewsGuard for once again trying to malign research exposing its bias rather than addressing its own shortcomings.
NewsGuard co-CEOs Steven Brill and Gordon Crovitz spear-headed their company’s “Social Impact 2023” annual report in which they whined about MRC’s third study exposing that the firm drastically favors leftist media outlets in its ratings. MRC’s latest analysis, using the AllSides Media Bias Chart, showed how NewsGuard blessed left-leaning media (e.g. The New York Times, The Washington Post, TIME, CNN and Vox) with a stellar average score of 91/100 while slapping right-leaning media (e.g. New York Post, The Washington Times, Breitbart and Washington Examiner) with an abysmally low 65/100 score.
NewsGuard panned the analysis as “fatally flawed” and arbitrarily accused MRC — AGAIN — of having “cherry-picked” the websites we researched and analyzed using its so-called “apolitical ratings.” That’s despite the fact that the MRC relied on another organization’s list entirely.
Bozell blasted Brill and Crovitz in response: “Thank you for recognizing the work of the Media Research Center in your annual report, even if it was to mischaracterize our widely recognized study of NewsGuard’s bias.”
He continued, calling out the ratings firm co-CEOs for their blatant dishonesty: “Rather than address the obvious flaws in your system, you have again attempted to conceal from investors your firm’s demonstrable bias by falsely claiming that our reviewers ‘cherry-picked’ the media outlets analyzed in our work. As explained in the third study, which again exposes your organization’s broken ratings system, MRC Free Speech America relied on the data provided by an actual independent ratings firm, AllSides, to evaluate NewsGuard’s work.”
MRC didn’t pre-determine how the results of any of the analyses would turn out. And after three studies, the needle of NewsGuard’s leftist bias has barely budged.
Bozell pointed out that Brill and Crovitz shouldn’t be in the business of complaining about how misinformation is supposedly threatening democracy, given that Brill himself notoriously spread misinformation of his own. Bozell wrote:
“For example, contrary to your assertion that ‘there’s a high likelihood [the Hunter Biden laptop] story is a hoax, and maybe even a hoax perpetrated by the Russians,’ even the Biden Justice Department now admits that the laptop is Hunter’s and its contents are his. Nevertheless, your ratings firm continues to prop up the legacy media outlets that maligned the New York Post’s bombshell reporting on this story while downgrading the firms that exposed the Biden bribery scandal.”
Read Bozell’s entire letter to NewsGuard.
