As
Newsguard’s project advances, it will soon become almost impossible
to avoid this neocon-approved news site’s ranking systems on any
technological device sold in the United States.
by
Whitney Webb
Part
2 - Red light, green light . . .
Newsguard
has received considerable attention in the mainstream media of late,
having been the subject of a slew of articles in the Washington
Post, the Hill, the Boston Globe, Politico, Bloomberg, Wired, and
many others just over the past few months. Those articles portray
Newsguard as using “old-school journalism” to fight
“fake news” through its reliance on nine criteria
allegedly intended to separate the wheat from the chaff when it comes
to online news.
Newsguard
separates sites it deems worthy and sites it considers unreliable by
using a color-coded rating — green, yellow, or red — and more
detailed “nutrition labels” regarding a site’s credibility or
lack thereof. Rankings are created by Newsguard’s team of
“trained analysts.” The color-coding system may remind some
readers of the color-coded terror threat-level warning system that
was created after 9/11, making it worth noting that Tom Ridge, the
former secretary of Homeland Security who oversaw the implementation
of that system under George W. Bush, is on Newsguard’s
advisory board.
As
Newsguard releases a new rating of a site, that rating
automatically spreads to all computers that have installed its news
ranking browser plug-in. That plug-in is currently available for free
for the most commonly used internet browsers. NewsGuard
directly markets the browser plug-in to libraries, schools and
internet users in general.
According
to its website, Newsguard has rated more than 2,000 news and
information sites. However, it plans to take its ranking efforts much
farther by eventually reviewing “the 7,500 most-read news and
information websites in the U.S.—about 98 percent of news and
information people read and share online” in the United States
in English.
A recent
Gallup study, which was supported and funded by Newsguard as
well as the Knight Foundation (itself a major investor in
Newsguard), stated that a green rating increased users
likelihood to share and read content while a red rating decreased
that likelihood. Specifically, it found 63 percent would be less
likely to share news stories from red-rated websites, and 56 percent
would be more likely to share news from green-rated websites, though
the fact that Newsguard and one of its top investors funded
the poll makes it necessary to take these findings with a grain of
salt.
However,
some of the rankings Newsguard itself has publicized show that
it is manifestly uninterested in fighting “misinformation.” How
else to explain the fact that the Washington Post and CNN both
received high scores even though both have written stories or made
statements that later proved to be entirely false? For example, CNN
falsely claimed in 2016 that it was illegal for Americans to read
WikiLeaks releases and unethically colluded with
the DNC to craft presidential debate questions to favor Hillary
Clinton’s campaign that same year.
In
addition, in 2017, CNN published a fake story that a Russian bank
linked to a close ally of President Donald Trump was under Senate
investigation. That same year, CNN was forced to retract a report
that the Trump campaign had been tipped off early about WikiLeaks
documents damaging to Hillary Clinton when it later learned the alert
was about material already publicly available.
The
Washington Post, whose $600 million conflict of
interest with the CIA goes unnoted by Newsguard,
has also published false stories since the 2016 election, including
one article that falsely claimed that “Russian hackers” had
tapped into Vermont’s electrical grid. It was later found that the
grid itself was never breached and the “hack” was only an
isolated laptop with a minor malware problem. Yet, such acts of
journalistic malpractice are apparently of little concern to
Newsguard when those committing such acts are
big-name corporate media outlets.
Furthermore,
Newsguard gives a high rating to Voice
of America, the U.S. state-funded media outlet, even
though its former acting associate director said that the outlet
produces “fluff journalism” and despite the
fact that it was recently reformed to “provide news that
supports our [U.S.] national security objectives.”
However, RT receives a low “red” rating for being funded by the
Russian government and for “raising doubts about other
countries and their institutions” (i.e., including
reporting critical of the institutions and governments of the U.S.
and its allies).
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