The Trump administration and Republicans are pushing Big Tech to divorce itself from NewsGuard, a company that critics say steers advertising and readership away from conservative news sites.
Newly installed Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr said restoring freedom of speech and ending “censorship cartels” are among his top priorities.
He is seeking answers from Microsoft, Apple, Google and Meta about their relationships with “the Orwellian named NewsGuard,” which critics say has worked to censor the media, particularly conservative viewpoints. Mr. Carr said Big Tech’s legal liability shield, which the FCC administers, could be jeopardized if the companies use NewsGuard on their platforms.
Facebook and Google say they don’t work with NewsGuard. Microsoft provides NewsGuard’s monitoring service free on its browser, and Apple offers the app through a paid subscription on its Safari browser.
NewsGuard, which strenuously denies the FCC complaints, could soon come under Federal Trade Commission investigation.
In a December statement, FTC Commissioner Andrew Ferguson said the FCC should investigate and “bust up” collusion that suppresses online competition and free speech.
Mr. Ferguson pointed to NewsGuard’s rating system, which dictates a news site’s trustworthiness and gives advertisers “inclusion” and “exclusion” lists.
“If a website gets a poor rating on NewsGuard’s ‘nutrition label,’ it can choke off the advertising dollars that are the lifeblood for many websites, including platforms on which millions of Americans every day speak their minds,” Mr. Ferguson wrote.
NewsGuard faces additional threats from Capitol Hill. The company is the subject of a House Oversight and Government Reform Committee investigation for its impact on First Amendment rights. In the Senate, Commerce Committee Chairman Ted Cruz, a Texas Republican who says NewsGuard’s rating system is biased and stifles intellectual diversity, recently pressured Microsoft to end its partnership.
Mr. Cruz announced Friday that Microsoft informed his panel that its financial support of NewsGuard was limited to “a one-time donation in 2018.” Mr. Cruz said Microsoft asked NewsGuard to remove a claim on its site that the company’s Media Literacy Program, which provides NewsGuard free to libraries and schools, is funded by “generous support” from Microsoft.
“Big Tech is finally beginning to recognize the censorship of conservative viewpoints will no longer be tolerated by the American people,” Mr. Cruz said.
NewsGuard advertises that its rating system remains free, “courtesy of Microsoft,” on the Microsoft Edge browser.
NewsGuard rates thousands of media sites using a 100-point system. It critiques news and opinion pieces and steers advertisers away from sites with low marks.
Conservative site Newsmax, which operates a cable channel, received a rating of 20%. NewsGuard claims “it severely violates basic journalistic standards.” Newsmax contested the score and said NewsGuard holds a liberal bias that does not provide neutral or fair ratings.
Fox News, the conservative cable channel and news site, is rated at 69.5% and CNN at 80%. NewsGuard said Fox News “mostly adheres to basic standards of credibility and transparency.” The far-left website Jacobin has a score of 92.5%.
NewsGuard scored The Washington Post and Politico at 100% even though the publications reported for months that Hunter Biden’s discarded laptop computer was likely Russian disinformation and that President Trump colluded with Russians to win the 2016 election. The Post labeled as “fringe theory” assertions by scientists and lawmakers that the COVID-19 virus leaked from a lab in Wuhan, China.
Gordon Crovitz, NewsGuard CEO, said company staff analyze content using a set of clear, nonpartisan standards.
Mr. Crovitz said NewsGuard is helping steer advertising toward trustworthy news sites, not away from them, thus benefiting the news industry with advertising dollars.
In a Jan. 17 interview with the Technology Policy Institute, he acknowledged that advertisers are not directed to news sites that NewsGuard dings with low ratings.
Mr. Crovitz criticized the Trump administration for threatening Big Tech and NewsGuard.
“The advertisers that work with us, the ad tech companies that work with us … they know that there’s a dire problem that we’re helping them solve,” Mr. Crovitz said. “It’s a private-market, private-sector problem with a private-sector solution. And government officials making false claims about us is not going to solve their problem for them.”
The NewsGuard rating system is free to libraries and, in partnership with the American Federation of Teachers, is available in public school classrooms.
In a Dec. 10 letter responding to Mr. Carr, Mr. Crovitz and co-CEO Steven Brill said Mr. Carr’s letter to the Big Tech companies “relies on false reporting about us, citing unreliable sources who have misled you about us for their own reasons that we look forward to explaining to you.”
They argued that NewsGuard was founded “as an alternative to government censorship” and secret social media algorithms and uses nine “transparent and apolitical criteria” to rate news sites.
Ad agencies, they wrote to Mr. Carr, use NewsGuard to buy more ads on news sites. Conservative sites outnumber liberal sites on NewsGuard’s “inclusion list” for advertisers, they wrote.
The two CEOs said conservative sites such as Fox News and The Washington Times benefit from NewsGuard’s “trustworthy” ratings. The Times received a 62% score from NewsGuard.
• Susan Ferrechio can be reached at sferrechio@washingtontimes.com.