NewsGuard welcomes assessments of our work. However, we were disappointed by Jonathan Turley’s recent critique under the provocative headline, “The most chilling words today: I’m from NewsGuard and I am here to rate you.”
I agree that, to rate the reliability of news sources, an organization must meet a high bar to earn the trust that it does so apolitically, treating all news sites equally, whether they’re conservative or liberal, new or old, small or large.
Indeed, when we launched NewsGuard in 2018, my co-CEO Steve Brill and I pledged that our ratings criteria would meet this test, writing in The Hill that our ratings would be designed to “arm readers with the information they might want about who’s feeding them the news and what their standards are. That’s what librarians have been doing since the invention of libraries: banning nothing but giving readers guidance about what they’re reading.”
When we launched NewsGuard it was to create an alternative to the two sources of secretive, unaccountable ratings that were — and are — assigned by others. The algorithms of the Silicon Valley platforms give secret preference to some news sites and ban others. They don’t disclose their criteria, and there’s no way for the people running the websites to find out how they were rated.
The only other entity rating news and information sites at the time we launched was Global Disinformation Index (GDI), a left-wing advocacy group, which like the digital platforms does not disclose its criteria or let publishers know their rating. When GDI’s top 10 list of “risky” sites was made public, it included only conservative and libertarian sites, many of which get high ratings from NewsGuard.
As a long-time conservative editorial writer, columnist and publisher of The Wall Street Journal, I wouldn’t trust the online platforms or a left-wing advocacy group either. We launched NewsGuard as the transparent, apolitical and accountable alternative to Big Tech and government censorship, to give news consumers basic information about websites they encounter online.
NewsGuard analysts reached out to Turley in the process of rating his blog, which recently made it onto the NewsGuard list of the top 95 percent of news and information websites in terms of engagement.
If he had asked, we would have explained that we contact websites to be sure we correctly assess sites based on our nine credibility and transparency criteria. We’re a journalistic enterprise, so we always reach out for comment before concluding a site fails any of our criteria. Even when a site doesn’t fail any of our criteria, we quote the people running it to provide context about their site. More than a quarter of the websites we’ve rated have taken steps, usually relating to greater transparency, in order to get higher ratings.
NewsGuard treats liberal, conservative and libertarian sites equally. Here’s a sampling of right-wing and libertarian news sites that get a generally reliable NewsGuard rating: Fox News, the New York Post, the Washington Examiner, the Daily Caller, National Review, Reason, Spectator, Commentary, the Western Journal, the Post Millennial, the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute.
Indeed, there are more conservative news sites on NewsGuard’s inclusion list for advertising than there are liberal sites.
Other right-wing sites do get low NewsGuard ratings, such as OAN and Newsmax. That’s not because of their politics, but because our analysts found that they publish significant false claims, such as repeatedly spreading claims about fraud by Dominion Voting Systems in the 2020 election.
Turley claimed that “it does not appear” that we expect left-wing sites to disclose their point of view to readers, giving as examples HuffPost and The New Republic. However, HuffPost fails NewsGuard’s criterion for separating news and opinion because it fails to disclose its liberal perspective. The New Republic passes this criterion because it does disclose its left-leaning orientation on its About Us page.
Likewise, the website for MSNBC fails our criterion relating to news/opinion because it fails to disclose its left-wing orientation. MSNBC scores lower than Fox News using our criteria because MSNBC fails to disclose its liberal point of view whereas the website for Fox News does disclose its conservative point of view. MSNBC also fails our criterion for gathering and presenting news responsibly due to various false claims about Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis, Steve Bannon, and others.
We welcome feedback based on what we actually publish, rather than on what someone claims we “appear” to have published. Our ratings criteria and process are explained in detail in 4,241 words on our website, and all our ratings are available through a browser extension for free on Edge and for $4.95 a month on Chrome, Safari and Firefox. Publishers all get copies of their ratings and updates.
We’ve spent more than $20 million creating our reliability ratings for news sites and our Misinformation Fingerprints database of provably false claims. The plague of misinformation is now so serious that many advertisers refuse to support any news sites.
At a recent congressional hearing, a senior advertising agency executive disclosed that only 1.28 percent of advertising now goes to online news. In 1980, newspapers and magazines got 62 percent of advertising. Our inclusion lists of generally reliable news sites, such as The Hill (NewsGuard rating 100/100), enable advertisers to remain brand-safe by restoring much-needed ad revenues to news sites — conservative, middle-of-the-road, and liberal.
NewsGuard analysts are also often the first to identify so-called pink slime websites that are secretly funded by political action committees and other partisan groups and masquerade as independent local news sites. This is done by partisans of all sides. Liberal networks of secretly partisan local websites include one backed by George Soros (Courier Newsroom network) and another launched by Democratic operative David Brock (American Independent network).
Our analysts also analyze Russian, Chinese and Iranian disinformation targeting Americans and our allies. We’re proud that Pentagon analysts have used our work as they counter this information warfare. We recently detailed how John Mark Dougan, a fugitive from U.S. justice now operating from Moscow, created a network of 167 Russian disinformation websites claiming to be independent local news sites with names such as DC Weekly, Chicago Chronicle and London Crier.
Government censorship is the worst alternative, but continuing to rely on digital platforms or a liberal advocacy group are also bad alternatives. Doing nothing is no solution.
Consumers deserve access to apolitical information, such as from NewsGuard, about who is feeding them the news, including about secretly partisan sites pretending to be independent or malign foreign influence operations spreading falsehoods to influence us. That’s not censorship. That’s free speech about other speech — the marketplace of ideas in action.
I’ll end with the same commitment we made here previously when we launched NewsGuard, to “treat all [news outlets] alike and be wholly transparent about our criteria and processes.”
If we don’t, “the alternative shouldn’t be that the government should step in, or that this work should be left to non-accountable algorithms, but, rather, that the free market will produce a competitor that will replace us. That, too, is another core American value.”
Gordon Crovitz is co-CEO of NewsGuard and former publisher of The Wall Street Journal.