We’ve documented how the Media Research Center launched a war against website-ratings service Ad Fontes for the sin of pointing out the shoddiness of right-wing media (and it’s a shoddy and partisan war, just like its loud and lame attacks on similar service NewsGuard). The MRC has unsurprisingly continued to smear Ad Fontes.
A Nov. 3 post by Luis Cornelio huffed that “Media ratings firm Ad Fontes turned a blind eye to several of the leftist media outlets that infamously ran the Hamas-driven Gaza hospital hoax, thus shielding their favorable ratings. But he offered no evidence that Ad Fontes did instantaneous ratings on news articles. This manufactured rage was undercut by the “editor’s note” (read: correction) that was added to the post on Jan. 19:
An earlier version of this article reported that Ad Fontes did not rate The New York Times’ infamous hospital hoax story. However, Ad Fontes did rate The Times’ story, giving it a relatively low score of 23.67 for reliability and 0 for bias. Ad Fontes’ highly favorable ratings for innocuous articles such as the obituaries remain on the media ratings firm’s page for The Times.
Cornelio returned for a Dec. 6 post whining that Ad Fontes changed company policies to reduce the amound of data available to subscribers:
Disgraced media ratings firm Ad Fontes shut the curtains and hid damning data from paying subscribers following MRC Free Speech America’s scathing exposé on the self-dubbed arbiter of truth and facts. So much for the company’s claims of being transparent.
Ad Fontes, a powerful tool in the left’s arsenal as it attempts to destroy right-leaning media, will limit users’ ability to review the company’s dubious ratings, according to a press release from the company. Strikingly, the move came after MRC researchers used this now-limited data to expose the company’s partisan targeting of right-leaning media.
Ad Fontes issued a mass email to its subscribers on Nov. 21 — exactly three months after MRC’s exposé — announcing the drastic change. According to the new policy, Ad Fontes will only allow users to review a scant total of 250 media entities, a stark contrast to its previous policy that permitted users to freely view its ratings of over 7,000 media entities.
[…]Ad Fontes claimed that its dramatic limits are necessary “to grow sustainability as a business.” In an email, Ad Fontes declared, “Unfortunately, we’ve experienced too many instances of users working around our paywalls and/or buying low-cost individual memberships to scrape our data for commercial purposes.”
Again, the MRC’s so-called research provide no evidence of “partisan targeting” — it’s not Ad Fontes’ fault that right-wing websites produce such shoddy work. It could also be argued that the MRC misused Ad Fontes data for “commercial purposes: — it needs to generate these kinds of partisan attacks to keep the donations flowing. And, again, the post required a later “editor’s note” to clean up errors:
This article has been updated to clarify that Ad Fontes did not rate “some” of the leftist outlets that falsely the infamous Gaza hospital hoax story. Ad Fontes rated The New York Times’ infamous reporting, giving it a relatively low score of 23.67 for reliability and 0 for bias. Some of the largest media outlets reporting the hoax — Politico, Reuters and TIME Magazine — did not receive Ad Fontes ratings.
Cornelio unironically concluded: “In other words: Don’t believe your lying eyes, there’s nothing to see here, folks.” Cornelio and the MRC, of course, don’t want their partisan attacks on Ad Fontes to be questioned and exposed for the political hackwork they are.
When Ad Fontes downgraded the MRC for its shoddy attacks, Cornelio screeched in a Jan. 25 post:
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.”
[…]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.
Cornelio didn’t explain why Ad Fontes should be forbidden from responding to the MRC’s shoddy, bad-faith attacks. And Ad Fontes withdrawing its rating on the articles doesn’t change the fact that the the MRC’s attacks are, in fact, misleading and unreliable, as illustrated by the fact that two previous attacks required “editor’s note” corrections.