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
3 - Keeping the conversation safe for the corporatocracy
Newsguard
describes itself as an organization dedicated to “restoring
trust and accountability” and using “journalism to fight
false news, misinformation and disinformation.” While it
repeatedly claims on its website that its employees “have no
political axes to grind” and “care deeply about reliable
journalism’s pivotal role in democracy,” a quick look at
its co-founders, top funders and advisory board make it clear that
Newsguard is aimed at curbing voices that hold
the powerful — in both government and the private sector — to
account.
Newsguard
is the latest venture to result from the partnership between Steven
Brill and Louis Gordon Crovitz, who currently serve as co-CEOs of the
group.
Brill is
a long-time journalist — published in TIME and The New
Yorker, among others — who most recently founded the Yale
Journalism Initiative, which aims to encourage Yale students who
“aspire to contribute to democracy in the United States and
around the world” to become journalists at top U.S. and
international media organizations. He first teamed up with Crovitz in
2009 to create Journalism Online, which sought to make the
online presence of top American newspapers and other publishers
profitable, and was also the CEO of the company that partnered up
with the TSA to offer “registered” travelers the ability to move
more quickly through airport security — for a price, of course.
While
Brill’s past does not in itself raise red flags, Crovitz — his
partner in founding Journalism Online, then Press+, and
now Newsguard — is the last person one would expect to find
promoting any legitimate effort to “restore trust and
accountability” in journalism. In the early 1980s, Crovitz held
a number of positions at Dow Jones and at the Wall Street
Journal, eventually becoming executive vice president of the
former and the publisher of the latter before both were sold to
Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp in 2007. He is also a board member of
Business Insider, which has received over $30 million from
Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos in recent years.
In
addition to being a member of the Council on Foreign Relations,
Crovitz proudly notes in his bio, available on Newsguard’s
website, that he has been an “editor or contributor to books
published by the American Enterprise Institute and Heritage
Foundation.” Though many MintPress readers are likely
familiar with these two institutions, for those who are not, it is
worth pointing out that the American Enterprise
Institute (AEI) is one of the most influential
neoconservative think tanks in the country and its “scholars,”
directors and fellows have included neoconservative figures like Paul
Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, John Bolton and Frederick Kagan.
During
the George W. Bush administration, AEI was instrumental in promoting
the invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq and has since
advocated for militaristic solutions to U.S. foreign policy
objectives and the expansion of the U.S.’ military empire as well
as the “War on Terror.” During the Bush years, AEI was also
closely associated with the now defunct and controversial
neoconservative organization known as the Project for a New
American Century (PNAC), which presciently called, four
years before 9/11, for a “new Pearl Harbor”
as needed to rally support behind American military adventurism.
The
Heritage Foundation, like AEI, was also
supportive of the war in Iraq and has pushed for the expansion of the
War on Terror and U.S. missile defense and military empire. Its
corporate donors over the years have included Procter &
Gamble, Chase Manhattan Bank, Dow Chemical, and Exxon
Mobil, among others.
Crovitz’s
associations with AEI and the Heritage Foundation, as well as
his ties to Wall Street and the upper echelons of corporate media,
are enough to make any thinking person question his commitment to
being a fair watchdog of “legitimate journalism.” Yet, beyond his
innumerable connections to neoconservatives and powerful monied
interest, Crovitz has repeatedly been accused of inserting
misinformation into his Wall Street Journal columns, with
groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation accusing him of
“repeatedly getting his facts wrong” on NSA surveillance
and other issues. Some of the blatant falsehoods that have
appeared in Crovitz’s work have never been corrected, even when his
own sources called him out for misinformation.
For
example, in a WSJ opinion piece that was written by Crovitz in 2012,
Crovitz was accused of making “fantastically false claims”
about the history of the internet by the very people he had cited to
support those claims.
As
TechDirt wrote at the time: “Almost everyone he [Crovitz]
sourced or credited to support his argument that the internet was
invented entirely privately at Xerox PARC and when Vint Cerf helped
create TCP/IP, has spoken out to say he’s wrong. And that list
includes both Vint Cerf, himself, and Xerox. Other sources, including
Robert Taylor (who was there when the internet was invented) and
Michael Hiltzik, have rejected Crovitz’s spinning of their own
stories.”
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