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.
Cruz further called out NewsGuard’s partnership with the leftist American Federation of Teachers (AFT) union, accusing its dystopian “Media Literacy” program of “pushing a left-wing ideological agenda while censoring conservative perspectives.” He added, “NewsGuard's marketing of its services to schools appears to be less about education and more about ideological conformity.”
Cruz wouldn’t let up in his scathing critique: “Instead of encouraging critical thinking, NewsGuard's extreme bias limits young minds from questioning authority and forming independent opinions. This distorts media literacy by limiting the range of ideas to which students are exposed.”
MRC Free Speech America released three studies of NewsGuard’s ridiculously skewed ratings system across three consecutive years consistently showing NewsGuard heavily favoring left-leaning publications like The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the now-defunct BuzzFeed News (which infamously published the notorious Steele Dossier) over right-leaning media. MRC’s most recent study revealed that NewsGuard gave “left” and “lean left” outlets an average “credibility” rating of 91/100, whereas “right” and “lean right” outlets got slammed with an abysmal 65/100 score—a 26-point disparity.
Conservatives are under attack. Contact your representatives and demand that Big Tech be held to account to mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency, clarity on “hate speech” and equal footing for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us using CensorTrack’s contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.
