Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center's loud and lame war against NewsGuard got an assist from its favorite social media-ruining multibillionaire, as Joseph Vazquez gushed in an Oct. 19 post:
X owner Elon Musk came out swinging against the leftist media hall monitor NewsGuard and called for the whole company to be “disbanded immediately.”
Musk responded to criticism from WikiPedia co-founder Jimmy Wales who whined in a post Oct. 17 about the X platform allegedly removing “all the core features that made it even remotely possible to tell real journalists from fakes.” Through discussion on the X thread, Foundation For Freedom Online Executive Director Mike Benz pointed out to Musk that Wales was an advisor to the leftist NewsGuard, “which is knee deep in a plot to get gov’ts to bankrupt alternative news.” Musk did not hold back in his response to Benz’s revelatory Oct. 19 post: “This is crazy!”
Podcaster Tim Pool joined the conversation, stating that his website’s rating by NewsGuard was dinged because “we ran 5 stories out of nearly 5,000 that quoted Trump.” Meanwhile, as Pool noted, legacy and liberal media outlets that “ran fake stories out of Gaza” like The New York Times get perfect 100/100 scores.
Musk was having none of it. “What a scam! ‘Newsguard’ should be disbanded immediately,” he rebuked.
Vazquez didn't mention that Benz had been exposed a couple weeks earlier as a creator of videos promoting racist and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories while posting under the name Frame Game, which undermines his credibility as any sort of cheerleader for "freedom." Instead, he took stenography from his MRC superiors reciting their NewsGuard-bashing narratives:
“There are a number of these politicized, so-called ratings outfits that exist to direct consumers away from conservative media and drive advertisers into the arms of the left,” said MRC Free Speech America Vice President Dan Schneider. “Every one of these groups, whether it’s NewsGuard, Ad Fontes or others, needs to be exposed, and the public needs to understand that they are anything but reliable.”
[...]
MRC Free Speech America Director Michael Morris piled on, adding to Musk’s retort. “Musk is absolutely right,” said Morris. “And the American people also deserve an explanation. Speech and thought police have no place in the United States of America. Such business models are antithetical to the vision our Founding Fathers had when they made clear the importance of free speech and a free press when they underscored these fundamental liberties as part of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.”
The MRC has repeatedly shown through its analyses how skewed to favor the left NewsGuard’s ratings system has been.
Yeah, not so much. Those "analyses" are mostly whining that right-wing media was rated as high as non-right-wing media without bothering to demonstrate why right-wing media actually deserved better ratings, and it was much more about lame gotchas than presenting any sort of credible evidence.
Vazquez rehashed another related attack: "But NewsGuard isn’t the only leftist entity trying to act as a Ministry of Truth on the internet. MRC Free Speech America also recently exposed an leftist, so-called media ratings firm Ad Fontes. MRC laid bare Ad Fontes’s penchant for elevating leftist media while throttling right-leaning media with its own skewed scoring system." As we've documented, the MRC's hit job on Ad Fontes was just as shoddy as its attacks on NewsGuard, demanding false balance while refusing to demonstrate why it should exist and falsely framing legitimate and credible criticism of right-wing media as "censorship."
Vazquez concluded by ranting: "One thing is clear: leftist website ratings firms like NewsGuard and Ad Fontes have no business policing the internet given their demonstrable biases. Both should be disbanded." Which, of course, is the entire point of the MRC's jihad: to silence critics they don't agree with.
The next day, Vazquez was back to playing gotcha against NewsGuard:
Radical internet traffic cop NewsGuard has shown once again why its bona fides as a supposedly unbiased journalism referee are hot garbage in light of how it treats leftist outlets that peddled Hamas agitprop to attack Israel.
The New York Times, TIME magazine, Politico and Reuters are just four of a number of leftist news outlets that haphazardly gobbled up the Hamas-controlled Gaza health ministry’s claim that an “Israeli” airstrike blew up a Gaza-based hospital, allegedly killing 500 people on Oct. 17. A U.S. intelligence assessment later concluded that Israel was not responsible for the bombing. Both the U.S. House and Senate intelligence committees absolved Israel. Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Mark Warner (D-VA) instead placed the blame squarely at the feet of a “failed rocket launch by militant terrorists.” Later reports also put the estimated death toll at a much lower count than what Hamas initially claimed.
But liberal media outlets across the internet just took the Hamas talking points and ran with them, which helped fuel mass anti-Israel protests and regional governments’ fury across the Middle East. MRC Free Speech America dug out the archived versions for each of the four outlets that originally smeared Israel in their reporting before later stealth-editing their stories and headlines. Then MRC researchers checked NewsGuard’s scores for the four respective outlets. In the three days that have passed since the incident, NewsGuard maintained the perfect 100/100 scores for all four outlets.
Vazquez offered no evidence that NewsGuard renders immediate judgments on news stories, and the headlines Vazquez himself is quoting about the incident make sure to attribute the death toll to the Gaza health ministry and not presenting it as indisputable fact,, and he largely ignored how these outlets treated questions about the health ministry's veracity and efforts to correct the record. He also failed to provide an example of a right-wing media outlet that he believed presented that information in a way he approves of. A real, credible researcher would have done those things, but Vazquez is a partisan activist, not a researcher.
