https://www.theepochtimes.com/article/how-newsguard-became-the-establishment-guard-against-independent-media-5417756

SPECIAL REPORT

How NewsGuard Became the Establishment Guard Against Independent Media

Company makes a profit—including from US government funds—through a business model that leads to defunding and censoring of independent media

… snippets from the article…

More often than not, outlets poorly rated by NewsGuard tend to be on the right side of the political spectrum.

The Media Research Center (MRC), a conservative media watchdog, reported that NewsGuard gave left-leaning outlets scores 22 points higher on average than right-leaning outlets. The 2021 report was based on a review of NewsGuard ratings for more than 50 major news outlets sorted for left or right bias by AllSides, a company that measures media bias based on blind studies of content and editorial reviews.

Newsguard criticized the MRC report, saying it cherrypicked the outlets for the study and that the sample was too small. MRC retorted that the list included all news outlets reviewed by AllSides.

When MRC repeated the study in late 2022, the disparity had increased to 25 points.

….. snip …..

Establishment Guard

According to Mike Benz, former head of the digital desk at the State Department and now head of the Foundation for Freedom Online, NewsGuard is part of a broader censorship industry that emerged over the past six years or so. The industry players aren’t primarily partisan, he noted, but rather pro-establishment. Right-leaning outlets can receive high NewsGuard scores—as long as they follow the establishment’s narratives on specific topics.

… snip ….

Last year, NewsGuard was promoted by the World Economic Forum.

Its reach extends beyond American borders to Canada, Australia, Europe, and increasingly other parts of the world, with an apparent goal of global, ubiquitous coverage.

Its ratings are also utilized by other parts of the censorship industry, such as researchers and operatives, including those funded by the U.S. government, who are developing tools to detect and challenge disfavored views online.

Talking about the dangers of misinformation in its 2022 white paper, NewsGuard said that “researchers using NewsGuard’s source reliability data found that anti-establishment networks disseminated content from a large number of NewsGuard Red-rated sites during the German Federal Election in 2021, proliferating anti-vaccination, anti-lockdown, and anti-climate protection content specifically.”



https://www.theepochtimes.com/article/how-newsguard-became-the-establishment-guard-against-independent-media-5417756