This company rates news sites’ credibility. The right wants it stopped.
NewsGuard, which prizes its nonpartisan criteria, has become a prime target of the GOP’s battle against disinformation watchdogs.
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Veteran journalists and news entrepreneurs L. Gordon Crovitz, left, and Steven Brill share responsibilities as chief executives and editors-in-chief of NewsGuard. (Shuran Huang for The Washington Post)
By Will Oremus and Naomi Nix
When veteran newsmen L. Gordon Crovitz and Steven Brill started their news site rating company, they were prepared for the inevitable cries of bias from both sides.
What they didn’t anticipate was that NewsGuard, their company of about 50 employees, would become the target of congressional investigations and accusations from federal regulators that it was at the vanguard of a vast conspiracy to censor conservative views.
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.
Crovitz, a former publisher of the Wall Street Journal and a Republican, and Brill, a left-tending independent who founded Court TV and the American Lawyer magazine, engaged with publishers wanting to understand subpar ratings, sometimes wrangling for hours by phone over the details of a site’s correction policy.
But conservatives now question the company’s premise. Brendan Carr, President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to lead the Federal Communications Commission, accused the company of facilitating a “censorship cartel,” in a November letter to leading tech platforms. Noting that key legal protections depend on tech executives operating “in good faith,” Carr continued: “It is in this context that I am writing to obtain information about your work with one specific organization — the Orwellian named NewsGuard.”
NewsGuard, backed by legal experts, argues that Carr’s letter may violate the First Amendment by threatening the speech rights of private companies.
“The only attempt to censor going on here is by Brendan Carr,” Crovitz said in an interview.
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. Revelations the year before that Kremlin-backed operatives had manipulated American social networks to mislead and divide Americans had shaken Silicon Valley and troubled Republicans and Democrats alike. Tech executives such as Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg were lambasted by lawmakers in testy televised hearings for their failure to fight fake news.
A Russian disinformation network boosted the number of “pink slime” outlets — sites that present themselves as independent local news outlets but are instead funded by partisan groups — to 1,265, outnumbering the websites of 1,213 daily newspapers left in the U.S., according to… — NewsGuard (@NewsGuardRating) June 11, 2024
Despite the battering, tech giants didn’t particularly want to play truth police on their platforms. Crovitz and Brill offered them a solution: Pay NewsGuard to sift the real news sites from the propaganda peddlers. “We’re going to apply common sense to a problem the algorithms haven’t been able to solve,” Brill told “CBS Mornings” that year. “It’s going to be very simple … telling the difference between the Denver Post and the Denver Guardian, which is a hoax site.”
Users of NewsGuard products — which include a free browser extension for Microsoft Edge and extensions you can buy for other major browsers — see each publisher’s credibility score beside any link to its articles in search results or on social media.
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. (World Socialist Web Site, it warns, is a far-left, for-profit enterprise that has “published false claims about the Russia-Ukraine War.” Reached for comment, World Socialist Web Site spokesman Joseph Kishore said NewsGuard’s rating “is not based on objective assessment but political prejudice against our socialist perspective.”)
But if rating news sites seemed like a straightforward endeavor, navigating an increasingly fractured and partisan information landscape has turned out to be anything but.
Brand safety
NewsGuard landed a high-profile early client in Microsoft, which incorporated the company’s credibility ratings into its Edge browser. Google, Facebook and other internet giants opted to use their own opaque algorithms to decide which sites and posts would rise to the top of users’ search results and feeds.
Brill and Crovitz found more demand among online advertisers and brand safety groups looking for tools to ensure their ads don’t run on scammy news sites or alongside bogus claims. While other such tools existed, including Integral Ad Science and DoubleVerify, NewsGuard stood out in the way that it publishes its assessments of media outlets.
In addition to its publisher credibility ratings, NewsGuard began tracking specific false narratives that it saw spreading across disreputable sites. Brill said NewsGuard keeps a “catalogue of provably false claims” — not matters of opinion, such as “abortion is bad,” but definitively debunked factual claims such as “the moon landing didn’t happen.” “There are advertisers that don’t want to advertise on a website that has articles saying that Dominion voting machines were rigged or the coronavirus vaccine will kill you,” Brill said in an interview.
Jason Kint, CEO of the publisher trade group Digital Content Next, said marketers need to assure brand safety. “Given the Wild West nature of the web, it’s important to have tools that can provide accurate data,” he said, to “avoid harm to the brand and weed out fraudulent and illegal sites.”
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.
Instead, they find themselves a central target of Republicans’ wide-ranging war on content moderation — a practice many on the right deem censorship — with their reputation and their business at stake.
The ‘censorship-industrial complex’
During his first term, Trump routinely clashed with the mainstream media and social networks over their attempts to fact-check his statements, especially when he began contesting the 2020 election as fraudulent. After the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, the major social networks banned or indefinitely suspended Trump, earning his ire and stoking suspicion on the right that online content moderation was fundamentally a liberal plot to muzzle disfavored views.