This was Media Literacy Week, and the Chicago Tribune’s contribution was an op-ed by the executive editor of NewsGuard, a supposed warrior against media misinformation.
For-profit NewsGuard purports to rate news-source credibility, offering a subscription services you can buy and it even appears in classrooms teaching media literacy.
In truth, its bias is shameless and it’s part of the cesspool of government efforts rigging news to support its narrative. NewsGuard is now subject to a lawsuit over just those government connections.
Among NewsGuard’s partners are the U.S. State Department, the Defense Department, and the World Health Organization, whose establishment views it dogmatically endorses as undisputed fact. The Defense Department has given it at least $749,000.
As reported in Just The News, in 2020 NewsGuard began a partnership with the National Security Innovation Network, which is a joint State and Defense Department program dedicated to finding solutions for the agencies to track “disinformation.” NewsGuard boasted of its collaboration with the government in a press release saying that its “human intelligence approach proved a unique and valuable offering.”
Perhaps worst of all, NewsGuard has partnered with the American Federation of Teachers to spread use of NewsGuard throughout schools. That’s the teachers’ union is headed by Randy Weingarten, who championed prolonged school closings because of Covid and now dishonestly claims otherwise.
“We’ve been able to get our news reliability ratings tool into more than 800 public libraries, where 7 million public library patrons use NewsGuard when they go to the library for their broadband access,” boasted NewsGuard in its AFT announcement. “And we’re already being used in dozens of public schools and universities, as well as independent schools.”
NewsGuard’s advisors include former CIA director and retired Air Force General Michael Hayden, who signed the original letter warning about Hunter Biden’s laptop being a Russian information operation shortly before the 2020 election. He thereby helped cover up the laptop story and the multiple scandals it pointed to. Most recently, Hayden essentially said that a U.S. senator he didn’t like should be removed “from the human race.”
A report by Media Research Center showed that NewsGuard has for years rated left-leaning, establishment news sites consistently higher than conservative news sites.
I can personally attest to that bias. I subscribed to NewsGuard over recent months to see for myself. Its bias is brazen in its 0 to 100 rankings for credibility, with 100 being best.
These rankings may have changed a bit since I unsubscribed, but I, too, saw that left-leaning and establishment sights got far higher rankings than comparable conservative ones. The left’s Axios, for example, which actually tells you what progressive viewpoint you are supposed to think is important in every article, got a perfect 100. Fox got 69.5 but CNN got 80. Radically left Mother Jones got 87.5 but the conservative Federalist got a horrible 12.5. Our local Cook County Record, which is excellent though leans a bit conservative, got a paltry 32. The ridiculously biased and widely ridiculed Politifact got a perfect 100. The list goes on and on.
Most of the rankings that I saw were based on whether the publication adhered to CDC and government messages on Covid. It’s as if NewsGuard is oblivious to how much of that establishment Covid information has been discredited.
Most importantly, and unsurprisingly, the biggest establishment outlets that flak for the government establishment and the left got perfect 100 ratings from NewsGuard — The New York Times, Washington Post, Associated Press and National Public Radio. Those are the very sources that suppressed, before the 2020 election, news about the Hunter Biden laptop and multiple scandals it points to. They continue to suppress news about those scandals.
At long last, NewsGuard is getting sued, as discussed here by media critic Matt Taibbi. This week, Consortium News sued NewsGuard for labeling it as a purveyor of “disinformation,” “misinformation,” and “false content,” and, worst of all, “anti-U.S.” The Biden Administration is also a defendant, and the lawsuit also named the Pentagon’s Cyber Command for “contracting with NewsGuard to identify, report and abridge the speech of American media organizations that dissent from U.S. official positions on foreign policy.”
Elon Musk chimed in labeling NewsGuard a “scam,” and additional dirt on NewsGuard is summarized here, among many other places.
The author of the Tribune op-ed mentioned above, NewsGuard’s executive editor, is Jim Warren, formerly with the Tribune. I remember him as an interesting columnist. Why he would have sold out to an operation that disgraces journalism as badly as NewsGuard truly baffles me. It’s not the first op-ed the Tribune has published by Warren on behalf of NewsGuard.
Meanwhile, Gallup reported last week that public trust in media remains at an all-time low, with less than a third of Americans placing any trust in it.
Who needed a Gallup poll to know that?