The Media Research Center’s loud and lame war against NewsGuard continued with a flurry of partisan attacks on the private company around the turn of the year. Catherine Salgado served up some right-wing stenography in a Dec. 26 post:
Senate Commerce Committee ranking member Ted Cruz (R-TX) has called out a major tech giant for its ties to a dystopian online rating firm.
Microsoft has long had a partnership with website traffic cop NewsGuard, including for its Edge browser and for educational initiatives, and Cruz now aims to find out exactly what the latter partnership entails. Cruz wrote in his Monday letter, “Given growing concerns about NewsGuard’s ideological bias and its efforts to manipulate young minds, I ask for transparency regarding Microsoft’s involvement in and financing of this Orwellian censorship project.”
Microsoft claims to support “free expression,” Cruz wrote in the letter, but that is grossly undercut by the fact that it openly partners with an entity that targets right-leaning media outlets by working to strip away their advertising dollars. MRC has repeatedly exposed NewsGuard’s egregious bias against right-leaning media. “Microsoft is actively promoting and funding NewsGuard’s so-called ‘Media Literacy’ tool, which is being rolled out to schoolchildren across the country,” Cruz wrote.
The senator cited NewsGuard’s skewed ratings for left-leaning versus right-leaning outlets, which MRC Free Speech America has revealed. “Your company’s financial support for NewsGuard is especially troubling given Microsoft’s purported commitment to protecting free expression online,” Cruz wrote.
The next day, Salgado complained that NewsGuard called out false right-wing attacks against it, under the snotty headline “Oh Cry Us a River”:
After Federal Communications Commissioner Brendan Carr challenged NewsGuard’s blatant bias against right-leaning media, the ratings firm actually complained about supposedly unfair targeting. No, we’re not kidding.
In November, Carr, recently picked by President-elect Donald Trump to chair the FCC, wrote a letter obtained by Newsmax to the CEOs of Microsoft, Apple, Meta and Alphabet (Google) to challenge the tech companies on censorship and potential ties to Orwellian “media monitors” like NewsGuard. NewsGuard fired back a letter in December, manipulating and denying facts to cry foul. MRC has repeatedly exposed the egregious leftism infused in NewsGuard’s ratings system across multiple studies.
NewsGuard co-CEOs Gordon Crovitz and Steven Brill denied that NewsGuard “favors censorship,” asserting, “The opposite is true and is imbued in everything NewsGuard does. NewsGuard was founded in 2018 explicitly as an alternative to government censorship of the internet.” Undermining the claim, however, is the fact that NewsGuard received funding from the U.S. federal government.
“The fact that NewsGuard can claim to be an alternative to government censorship while receiving funding from the government defies logic,” MRC Free Speech America Vice President Dan Schneider blasted. “It’s doublespeak! NewsGuard is in fact a prototype of the very kind of dystopian Ministry of Truth that Americans should be unnerved about. For Crovitz and Brill to brazenly attempt to pull the wool over everyone’s eyes now and play the victim is more proof why nobody should take anything they say seriously without a bucket of salt.”
Salgado spent a Dec. 30 post complaining that “Egregiously biased online ‘credibility’ arbiter NewsGuard rates several right-leaning U.S. media outlets as less reliable than several state media outlets from tyrannical foreign powers Qatar, communist China and Russia.” There was the usual whining about foreign outlets were rated better than certain right-wing U.S. outlets:
For instance, NewsGuard gives a Qatari state media outlet a score of 82.5/100: Al Jazeera English. Al Jazeera is funded by and answerable to the Qatari government, which actively harbors Islamic terrorists. Al Jazeera also gives voice to pro-terrorist propaganda, particularly Hamas.
[…]South China Morning Post (SCMP) is owned by Alibaba, a company founded by Jack Ma and largely owned and controlled by the CCP, according to The National Pulse and Forbes. NewsGuard gives SCMP a stellar rating of 85/100 credibility rating. NewsGuard does not acknowledge SCMP’s CCP ties, though it does admit that the site has become noticeably more pro-China in recent years.
Contrast the ratings NewsGuard gives Al Jazeera and CCP-run CGTN with the 20/100 credibility rating for American media site Newsmax. NewsGuard rates Newsmax as lacking credibility because it disagrees with the authorities that Newsmax cites and claims that certain evidence-based opinions on the media site are false. One of NewsGuard’s main complaints is that Newsmax published an article based on research made public by the surgeon general of Florida, Dr. Joseph Ladapo. NewsGuard denies that the surgeon general is a credible medical authority and instead picked a medical authority, Dr. Paul Offit, who pushed the left’s narrative on COVID-19 vaccines.
Salgado, as usual, made no effort to disprove any of the claims by those foreign outlets. In fact, both Ad Fontes and AllSides don’t consider the South China Morning Post to be egregiously biased. Salgado curiously did not link to NewsGuard’s complaint about Ladapo; instead, she linked to a Ladapo press release in which he demanded that the federal government stop using COVID-19 vaccines, something more authoritative medical experts have denounced.
Salgado further complained:
As always, NewsGuard rates websites as lacking credibility based on whether or not the website promotes sources and opinions with which NewsGuard agrees. Yet one of the categories in which NewsGuard rates Newsmax so badly is handling the difference between news and opinion and gathering and presenting information responsibly. NewsGuard outlandishly claims on one hand that Newsmax, OANN and LifeNews fail to present information responsibly and publish false content, while at the same time claiming Al Jazeera and SCMP have a positive score in both of these categories. It further rates CGTN and Global Times well as far as supposedly not repeatedly publishing false content. NewsGuard also absurdly uses the same language for LifeNews and OANN as it does for RT and CGTN: “severely violates basic journalistic standards.” But it appears that NewsGuard is the one severely violating basic journalistic standards.
Of course, it can also be argued that the reason Salgado is running to Newsmax’s defense is because because it promotes sources and opinions with which Salgado and the MRC agree. Not that she will admit to that hole in her logic, of course.