After Federal Communications Commissioner Brendan Carr challenged NewsGuard’s blatant bias against right-leaning media, the ratings firm actually complained about supposedly unfair targeting. No, we’re not kidding.
In November, Carr, recently picked by President-elect Donald Trump to chair the FCC, wrote a letter obtained by Newsmax to the CEOs of Microsoft, Apple, Meta and Alphabet (Google) to challenge the tech companies on censorship and potential ties to Orwellian “media monitors” like NewsGuard. NewsGuard fired back a letter in December, manipulating and denying facts to cry foul. MRC has repeatedly exposed the egregious leftism infused in NewsGuard’s ratings system across multiple studies.
NewsGuard co-CEOs Gordon Crovitz and Steven Brill denied that NewsGuard “favors censorship,” asserting, “The opposite is true and is imbued in everything NewsGuard does. NewsGuard was founded in 2018 explicitly as an alternative to government censorship of the internet.” Undermining the claim, however, is the fact that NewsGuard received funding from the U.S. federal government.
“The fact that NewsGuard can claim to be an alternative to government censorship while receiving funding from the government defies logic,” MRC Free Speech America Vice President Dan Schneider blasted. “It’s doublespeak! NewsGuard is in fact a prototype of the very kind of dystopian Ministry of Truth that Americans should be unnerved about. For Crovitz and Brill to brazenly attempt to pull the wool over everyone’s eyes now and play the victim is more proof why nobody should take anything they say seriously without a bucket of salt.”
Previous statements from NewsGuard leadership also undermine the co-CEO’s claim. Brill, who falsely accused the Hunter Biden laptop scandal of being a Russian “hoax” in 2020 (even though the new letter denied NewsGuard ever labeled it Russian disinformation), slammed the concept of free speech and urged “gatekeepers” to censor it by saying earlier this year, “The idea that everybody can have an opinion, [for instance] about who won the election … I think that is a dangerous idea.” […]
— Read More: www.newsbusters.org
