Conservatives Protest Media WatchDog NewsGuard's Left Wing Bias

The House Oversight Committee announced last week that it will be launching an inquiry into alleged left-wing bias of NewsGuard, a media watchdog company that publishes ratings of news outlets based on "reliability" and claims to "counter misinformation." Experts say the company's own objectivity is questionable based on the slanted results of its ratings, the political views of its staff, and other factors.

In a letter addressed to NewsGuard's CEOs, House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer (R-Ky.) expressed concern over the company's contracts with federal agencies. "The Committee seeks to make an independent determination about whether NewsGuard's intervention on protected speech has been in any way sponsored by a federal, state, local, or foreign government," he wrote. NewsGuard's website lists the U.S. Department of Defense, the Department of State, the U.K.'s Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, and the World Health Organization as partners.

The letter goes on to call into question NewsGuard's own pledge that its employees do not engage in politically biased activities, listing numerous examples of social media posts that appear to exhibit prejudice by a senior advisor, a contributing analyst, and a staff analyst.

Comer's letter additionally points to specific instances in which NewsGuard has attempted to "suppress information that may challenge widely held views but is not itself inaccurate." One example listed is when the company attempted to get British outlet The Daily Sceptic to retract an article covering a Johns Hopkins study indicating that COVID-19 lockdowns were ineffective and harmful. After The Daily Sceptic declined to do so, NewsGuard lowered the outlet's reliability rating.

In response to the House Oversight probe, NewsGuard co-CEO Gordon Crovitz stated that Comer has a "misunderstanding" of the nature of the company's work. "Under NewsGuard's apolitical rating system, many conservative outlets outscore similar left-leaning brands," he wrote. "The Daily Caller outscores The Daily Beast, the Daily Wire outscores the Daily Kos, Fox News outscores MSNBC and The Wall Street Journal outscores the New York Times."

But in December 2023, the Media Research Center published an in-depth study finding that on its 0/100 ratings scale measuring "credibility," NewsGuard scored "left" and "lean left" outlets with an average of 91. Meanwhile, "right" and "lean right" outlets were scored with an average of 65, a 26-point disparity.

Among the report's findings is the fact that in 2020, just before the November elections, NewsGuard co-CEO Steven Brill appeared on CNBC and conjectured that the Hunter Biden laptop story was "a hoax perpetrated by the Russians," which dovetailed with the legacy media narrative that was being put forward at the time. A year and a half after the New York Post first reported on the story, The Washington Post and The New York Times both admitted that the story was not a hoax.

The Media Research Center report further found that NewsGuard scored pro-life outlets Life News and Live Action with 17.5 scores, but rated Planned Parenthood with the "generally credible" score of 75. In addition, it found that outlets run by the communist Chinese government -- The China Daily, the Global Times, the China Global Television Network (CGTN), and The People's Daily -- received scores of 44.5, 39.5, 44.5, and 39.5 respectively. 

By comparison, NewsGuard rated a number of American outlets on the right as far less credible than these communist Chinese propaganda arms, scoring The Federalist, One America News, and Newsmax with 12.5, 25, and 15 respectively.

"I can see the temptation a news organization might have to moderate and even liberalize their content to raise their score and thereby be more accepted by NewsGuard's audience," Jared Bridges, editor-in-chief of The Washington Stand, observed. "And that's the real question: do we want to be acceptable or truthful? There are plenty of 'acceptable' news organizations in America today, but we're more interested in high truth than we are a high score."

Originally published at The Washington Stand