A media publication is striking back at NewsGuard, an American company that gives clients “reliability ratings and scores” for hundreds of news and information websites and often tags conservative sites with low grades.
Consortium News has filed a lawsuit against NewsGuard and the U.S. government, accusing them of defamation and working in tandem to censor the outlet’s foreign policy reporting in violation of the First Amendment.
The publisher, Consortium for Independent Journalism, is seeking $13 million in damages and a permanent injunction declaring NewsGuard’s partnership with the U.S. government is unconstitutional.
The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Manhattan, cites a $750,000 contract awarded to NewsGuard by the Defense Department in September 2021.
NewsGuard earlier this year told The Washington Times that the government money paid for a licensing agreement for the department to use its artificial intelligence disinformation tracking product and is not funding their rating service.
Consortium News produced evidence in the lawsuit that backs up their claim that NewsGuard worked on behalf of the government to censor some views, particularly those related to Russia and Ukraine.
NewsGuard, under contract from the Pentagon, the lawsuit states, “is acting jointly or in concert with the United States to coerce news organizations to alter viewpoints as to Ukraine and Russia, imposing a form of censorship and repression of views that differ or dissent from policies of the United States and its allies.”
In a March 2023 email to independent journalist Matthew Taibbi, NewsGuard CEO Gordon Crovitz said the company is working with the Pentagon’s Cyber Command on monitoring information operations from “hostile governments” including China and Russia, which are targeting the U.S. and its allies with misinformation.
“Our analysts alert officials in the U.S. and in other democracies, including Ukraine, about new false narratives targeting America and its allies, and we provide an understanding of how this disinformation spreads online. We are proud of our work countering Russian and Chinese disinformation on behalf of Western democracies,” Mr. Crovitz said.
The lawsuit calls NewsGuard “functionally an intelligence proxy for the United States” that claims to be an independent news company. The company targets media organizations to retract articles, the lawsuit said, without disclosing it is under contract with a U.S. intelligence agency.
According to Consortium News, NewsGuard tagged all 20,000-plus Consortium News articles and videos published since 1995 with warnings to “proceed with caution.” NewsGuard warned its subscribers that Consortium News produces “disinformation,” “false content” and is an “anti-U.S.” media organization. According to Consortium News executives, NewsGuard based the stark warning on just six articles and none of the outlet’s videos and appeared to disregard the company’s thorough defense of their content.
In a statement provided to The Times in response to the lawsuit, a NewsGuard representative said the company does not tag sites for misinformation, “but instead simply provides readers with a dNewsGuardescription of why the site passed or failed each of our criteria and a resulting score out of 100 points, with evidence to back up our assessments on each of the criteria. … We do not use the words ‘misinformation’ or ‘disinformation’ at all.”
The lawyer representing Consortium News, constitutional law expert Bruce Afran, told The Times that NewsGuard’s monitoring is a form of “internet nannying.” He said it is a significant threat to free speech “because it really attempts to compel organizations to silence dissenting speech, or speech that challenges government policy.”
Low ratings from NewsGuard help steer away critical advertising from news outlets, although Consortium News is funded by subscribers.
NewsGuard scores range from zero to 100 based on what the company describes as nine “apolitical journalistic criteria” that analyze credibility and transparency.
The analysis and rankings are provided by a team of journalists led by Mr. Crovitz, a former Wall Street Journal publisher, and Steven Brill.
“We help you decide which news sources to trust — with scores from humans, not algorithms,” the company website states.
The conservative-leaning Media Research Center conducted a study of NewsGuard’s rating system in December 2021 and found that out of 55 news sites, right-leaning outlets received an average score of 66% and liberal outlets received an average score of 93%.
NewsGuard, a for-profit company, gave the now-defunct BuzzFeed News a perfect reliability score despite the outlet’s publication of the Steele dossier, which included tawdry and unproven claims by a Russian operative about President Trump. Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign funded the initial research for the dossier.
The conservative-leaning Federalist received a score of 12.5 from NewsGuard, partly because it wrote about the well-documented questions concerning the efficacy of mask mandates.
The Washington Post, The New York Times, The New Yorker and The Guardian, all of which pushed the now-debunked claims that Mr. Trump colluded with the Russians to win the 2016 election, received a perfect 100% rating.
NewsGuard said the Media Research Center’s study is too narrow to represent its overall rating system, which ranks thousands of news and information outlets.
Mr. Crovitz said the company flags false content, including those by sites that declared Hunter Biden’s discarded laptop computer was Russian disinformation.
The New York Post, which broke the news about the discarded laptop computer and its politically damaging contents in October 2020, is among the right-leaning news outlets receiving an average score of 66% from NewsGuard.
News outlets with scores of 60 to 74 are ranked “generally” credible “with significant exceptions.”
Politico, which reported that the laptop was Russian disinformation based on a letter signed by 50 former intelligence officials and also reported extensively on the debunked Trump-Russia collusion narrative, received a 100% score from NewsGuard for adhering to “all nine standards of credibility and transparency.”
• Susan Ferrechio can be reached at sferrechio@washingtontimes.com.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.