Published: 17 minutes ago
Since 2018, NewsGuard has built a business offering advertisers nonpartisan assessments of online publishers - backed by a team of journalists who assess which sites are reputable and which can’t be trusted. It uses a slate of nine standard criteria, such as whether a site corrects errors or discloses its ownership and financing, to produce a zero to 100 percent rating.
At a time when social media, podcasts and partisan outlets are displacing the mainstream media as news sources, the battle over NewsGuard’s future is symptomatic of a broader societal struggle over who gets to arbitrate the truth. And Carr’s letter potentially heralds a Trump administration prepared to wield state power to win that battle.When NewsGuard launched, fighting disinformation was still a bipartisan battle.
A recent Google search for “government shutdown,” with NewsGuard’s ratings enabled, turned up articles from Rolling Stone magazine, which scored 87.5 percent; NBC’s Austin affiliate, which scored 92.5 percent; and World Socialist Web Site, which scored 7.5 percent. Clicking on the rating for each brings up NewsGuard’s assessment of the site.
Brill, left, and Crovitz, center join NewsGuard colleagues at a daily meeting in their New York offices. The rise of generative artificial intelligence has expanded the potential market for NewsGuard’s products. No major AI company wants its flagship chatbot parroting falsehoods it found on fake news sites. Brill and Crovitz declined to say which ones they’re working with other than Microsoft.Six years after its launch, NewsGuard has attained what Brill called “sustainable profitability.” But he and Crovitz no longer enjoy friendly bipartisan audiences in Washington.
Williams’s Small Business Committee produced a 66-page report in September on what it called the “censorship-industrial complex,” which criticized the State Department and Defense Department for awarding hundreds of thousands of dollars in grants to NewsGuard. The report found that NewsGuard selects “winners and losers in the news media space” through its ratings and products for advertisers.
NewsGuard replied to Carr in a Dec. 10 letter, saying his letter cited factual errors about its work that had been reported by Newsmax. The claim that advertising firms use NewsGuard to censor conservative views, for instance, is belied by more conservative outlets being rated as credible than liberal ones, NewsGuard said.Carr was also wrong about the companies that use its products, the company said.
Reached via email, Newsmax chief executive Chris Ruddy called Brill “a longtime Democratic Party activist” and said: “Brill is free to make up any ratings he wants, but any business or ad agency that uses them is clearly taking political sides.”
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