The Media Research Center thinks its bullying war against NewsGuard is having some tangible results in allegedly scaring the website-ratings firm into being slightly more reflective of right-wing narratives. Joseph Vazquez tried to claim victory in an April 9 post:
NewsGuard discovered that The New York Times was never worth its flawless 100/100 score, but apparently only after MRC Free Speech America repeatedly called it out.
NewsGuard finally downgraded The Times’ perfect score Feb.1 to a lukewarm 87.5/100. NewsGuard’s beef with the legacy leftist publication was that it “no longer meets NewsGuard standards for handling the difference between news and opinion responsibly.” Wow, what a revelation! Has the dystopian website traffic cop been living under a rock?
The head-turning move by the media ratings firm came after MRC released three studies of NewsGuard’s ridiculously skewed ratings system across three consecutive years consistently showing NewsGuard heavily favoring left-leaning publications like The Times over right-leaning media. MRC has repeatedly called NewsGuard out for attempting to legitimize The Times as an effectively flawless, balanced outlet, despite mountains of evidence showing otherwise. MRC even released a mini-documentary in February 2023 on the firm’s bias.
“The New York Times has been the same left-wing rag for decades,” said MRC Free Speech America Vice President Dan Schneider in a statement. But suddenly, said Schneider, after MRC research led Congress to get serious about “preventing the Department of Defense from funding the NewsGuard censorship regime, the folks at NewsGuard finally found some religion and are starting to better reflect what The Times has always been: An extreme, left-wing biased outlet.”
In fact, those studies did not prove that NewsGuard has a “ridiculously skewed ratings system” — they simply proved that the MRC has irrational anger about the shoddiness of right-wing websites being documented, and it did nothing to prove the credibility of those operations. And Schneider discredits himself by slinging overheated and inaccurate terms like “left-wing rag” at the Times while providing absolutely no comprehensive research to back it up. He would never describe, say, the New York Post as a “right-wing rag” despite the fact that it’s much more slavishly devoted to its right-wing agenda than the Times is to any “left-wing” one.
Vazquez joined in the baselessly vicious invective by lashing out at the paper’s 1619 Project as “racially charged” (given the project focused on the history of slavery, why wouldn’t it be?), “discredited” (he cites the right-wing National Review smearing it, hardly an objective analysis) and “anti-American” (why would it be “anti-American” to know more about one’s history?), then smearing the writer in charge of it, Nikole Hannah-Jones, as an “insufferable activist” (we suspect she’s not as insufferable as Vazquez). He then whined that the paper “doesn’t properly distinguish between news and opinion” — an accusation neither he nor any other MRC employee has ever hurled at any right-wing media organization, even when that lack of separation is painfully blatant.
An April 12 post by Nicholas Fondacaro then tried to bully NewsGuard into downgrading another non-right-wing that has long been the target of the MRC’s ire and was the target of another partisan war:
On Tuesday, National Public Radio business editor Uri Berliner blew the whistle on the station’s “assembly line” of liberally biased reporting, which he said was being cranked out “one story after another” framed with the leftist worldview. The expose put NPR under the microscope and put a serious blemish on the organization. But the question now is: will that blemish finally force media-scoring agency NewsGuard to downgrade NPR’s perfect 100/100 rating?
In his essay entitled “I’ve Been at NPR for 25 Years. Here’s How We Lost America’s Trust,” Berliner explained: “There’s an unspoken consensus about the stories we should pursue and how they should be framed. It’s frictionless—one story after another about instances of supposed racism, transphobia, signs of the climate apocalypse, Israel doing something bad, and the dire threat of Republican policies. It’s almost like an assembly line.”
Berliner appeared on NewsNation with host Chris Cuomo Tuesday night and described the current company culture as “a much narrower kind of niche thinking, a group think that’s really clustered around various selective progressive views that don’t – they don’t allow enough air and enough spaciousness to consider all kinds of perspectives.”
That certainly didn’t sound like the type of environment that would be conducive to fair, objective, and unbiased reporting. Especially if their default framing for reporting was that Republican policies were considered a “dire threat” to the country.
But as of the publication of this piece, NewsGuard still had NPR rated at perfect 100/100.
Fondacaro offered no evidence that NewsGuard offered instantaneous ratings changes in response to partisan activism.
When newsGuard refused to concede to the MRC’s partisan demands, Fondacaro spent an April 17 post whining about it:
Last week, now-former NPR business editor Uri Berliner drew the ire of the station’s new, far-left CEO after he called out NPR for allowing the liberal worldview to dominate the newsroom. Berliner’s act of journalistic integrity ultimately cost him his job; he was suspended and ultimately resigned. But despite NPR’s retaliation against a whistleblower and others coming forward to corroborate Berliner’s claims, left-wing media rating organization NewsGuard maintained NPR’s perfect 100/100 rating.
[…]Berliner’s criticisms of NPR weren’t business or employment-related (such as pay or working conditions) and had everything to do with the politics influencing the news product the organization was putting out. And thus, was an issue NewsGuard should’ve been taking seriously, especially considering that Berliner was getting support from other former NPR staffers.
At this point, a lack of action by NewsGuard to downgrade NPR’s score appeared to be in defiance of the facts and in opposition to the support Berliner was receiving from many right-wingers.
Or,. you know, it’s evidence that NewsGuard isn’t easily cowed by partisan activists devoting serious money and resources to try and destroy it. Fondacaro concluded by rehashing other score-settling by claiming that NewsGuard “recently downgraded The New York Times after the Media Research Center called them out multiple times.”