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.”
Previous statements from NewsGuard leadership also undermine the co-CEO’s claim. Brill, who falsely accused the Hunter Biden laptop scandal of being a Russian “hoax” in 2020 (even though the new letter denied NewsGuard ever labeled it Russian disinformation), slammed the concept of free speech and urged “gatekeepers” to censor it by saying earlier this year, “The idea that everybody can have an opinion, [for instance] about who won the election … I think that is a dangerous idea.”
Brill also openly advocated for financial censorship: “There is no way that any social media platform should be free … just to publish that stuff [Covid-19 debates] and get the associated advertising revenue.” NewsGuard participates in such censorship by helping redirect ad revenue from sites supposedly deemed untrustworthy by its arbitrary standards. In 2021, NewsGuard partnered with publisher ad platform PubMatic to ensure only sites NewsGuard approves would receive ad revenue. Brill and Crovitz even shockingly asserted that criticizing NewsGuard is an attack on free speech, claiming there is a “censorship threat” against NewsGuard. NewsGuard as usual is trying to flip the narrative by framing itself as a victim.
The co-CEOs tried to obfuscate their company’s infamous history by claiming, “Many conservative sites get higher ratings from NewsGuard than liberal sites get.” But MRC research has repeatedly undercut this talking point.
MRC Free Speech America released three studies of NewsGuard’s ridiculously skewed ratings system across three years showing how the dystopian outfit habitually elevates left-leaning media while denigrating right-leaning media. The most recent MRC study revealed that NewsGuard gave left-leaning outlets a stellar average “credibility” rating of 91/100, with right-leaning outlets getting scores 26 points lower at 65/100 on average.
Another study exclusive to MRC in 2022, cited by Carr and indignantly denied by Brill and Crovitz, exposed how NewsGuard rated several US outlets like Newsmax and The Federalist lower than several Communist Chinese state-run media. NewsGuard does “not rate any Chinese state media outlets as credible,” Brill and Crovitz wrote, ignoring the reality that it did rate the Chinese state media as more credible than some U.S. outlets. Indeed, the co-CEOs aggressively defended Newsmax’s abysmal 20/100 score, bragging that it is “in the bottom 15% of the more than 10,000 news websites we have rated,” apparently not realizing that this supports Carr’s point about its biased ratings.
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) also recently called out Microsoft for supporting NewsGuard’s “Media Literacy” project for schools with the leftist American Federation of Teachers (AFT) led by extremist Randi Weingarten. In 2023 and again in 2024, Congress forced the Department of Defense to cut funding to online blacklisters, including NewsGuard.
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.
