Topic: Newsmax
Newsmax continued its parroting of right-wing attacks against website-rating service NewsGuard witha Dec. 9 article by Eric Mack featuring another right-wing outlet complaining that their shoddy work was called out:
The Biden administration could not get around the First Amendment in silencing dissent, but it has effectively found a way through the State Department paying NewsGuard to defund conservative media, according to a trio of researchers from the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER).
The First Amendment is "is so clear that only a politician could manage to miss the point," AIER senior researchers Phillip Magness, James Harrigan, and Ryan Yonk wrote in the New York Post this week.
[...]
The Post and AIER have been targeted by NewsGuard — founded by Steven Brill, a Democrat activist and donor, in 2018. Newsmax has reported it has been, too.
NewsGuard's rankings have since been used by advertising agencies to target and block conservative media from obtaining advertising revenue.
The complaints from Mack and AIER are generalized as to subject but don't get too deep into specifics, suggesting that it's simply playing a partisan game rather than engaging in any sort of good-faith criticism.
A Dec. 13 article -- which was later deleted from the Newsmax website without explanation, though it lives in the Internet Archive -- featuring one of NewsGuard's most dishoenst critics, the Media Research Center (which posted its own version of the segment):
NewsGuard, the ensorship giant self-tasked with rating media outlets on reliability, has “for years been silencing conservatives, directing ad revenue to liberals instead,” said Dan Schneider, vice president of Media Research Center’s Free Speech America.
The biased company has been "choking off the life blood of conservative media outlets, all because of their zeal to defeat Donald Trump and any conservative that wants to stand for basic American principles," he told Newsmax.
“NewsGuard has one standard, that is defeat conservatives, promote liberals,” Schneider said Wednesday during an appearance on Newsmax TV’s “Chris Salcedo Show.”
Media Research Cente [sic] on Tuesday released a study that found that NewsGuard “overwhelmingly favored left-leaning outlets over right-leaning ones.”
Using AllSides, an organization that classifies media outlets by their “right” to “left” bias, “MRC researchers determined that NewsGuard provided a stellar average ‘credibility’ rating of 91/100 for ‘left’ and ‘lean left’ outlets (e.g., The New York Times, The Washington Post, TIME, Vox),” wrote MRC researchers. Meanwhile, “right” and “lean right” outlets, such as Fox News, the New York Post, and The Daily Wire, were given “an outrageously abysmal average score of 65/100.”
Schneider also criticized left-leaning news outlets for covering up the Hunter Biden probe “because he’s part of the Biden bribery scandal.”
“This is how Joe Biden and his family have been making money for a long time. And NewsGuard is covering for it. NewsGuard is not going to go back and re-rate all those media outlets that said the Hunter Biden laptop was a hoax. … Their bias is so extreme that the left is willing to give our taxpayer dollars, millions of our taxpayer dollars, to NewsGuard and other outlets just like it.”
Newsmax did not allow anyone from NewsGuard to respond to Schneider.
A Dec. 11 article by Mark Swanson hyped a Republican attack on NewsGuard:
House and Senate Armed Services committees last week concluded their negotiations on the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), and Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., and House Republicans have won a significant victory opposing woke censorship programs that impact Pentagon recruiting.
The Democrat-led Senate has agreed with Johnson’s demand the annual defense spending bill not allow Pentagon dollars to be spent with ad agencies that use "misinformation" media monitors.
Left-wing groups such as NewsGuard and the Global Disinformation Index (GDI) have been used by major advertising agencies to block military recruitment ads on many conservative media outlets.
The new NDAA provision expressly prohibits any advertising agency the Defense Department contracts with from using services that engage in "determinations of misinformation."
The new law would also require the Pentagon to inform the House and Senate Armed Services committees any time the recruitment division directly contracts with NewsGuard, GDI or a similar entity.
Swanson did let NewsGuard respond -- though it took him three days to update his story to include that response -- but he continued to attack the group anyway, engaging in nitpicking over Hunter Biden's laptop:
In an email to Newsmax, NewsGuard disputed that it “was not a ‘vocal advocate’” of claims that the Hunter Biden’s laptop “represented Russia misinformation.”
However, the New York Post reported that NewsGuard CEO [Steve] Brill was a leader in declaring the Hunter Biden laptop story a “hoax.”
Also, NewsGuard’s board adviser, General Michael Hayden, a former director of the CIA, was a principal advocate for asserting the laptop was Russian disinformation, and was one of 51 signatories to a now discredited letter made public in October 2020 making such a claim.
Despite the false claims about the laptop being a “hoax,” neither Brill nor NewsGuard has offered a retraction.
swanson offered no evidence that either Brill or Hayden were speaking on behalf of NewsGuard when they made those statement, and he failed to disclose that the New York Post offered no independent verification of the laptop at the time it introduced the story on it that would have addressed reasonable concerns about its authenticity.
Newsmax parroted the MRC again in a Dec. 14 article by Michael Katz:
NewsGuard, the left-wing media ratings group, continues to target conservative news outlets, a new study by the Media Research Center (MRC) finds.
In its annual review of NewGuard's rankings, an MRC Free Speech America study found that for the third year in a row NewsGuard continues to significantly outrank liberal and far-left news outlets over conservative ones.
"NewsGuard is just another leftist group trying to censor conservatives," MRC President Brent Bozell said in a statement. "We have the proof."
Note that Katz put a "left-wing" label on NewsGuard but no ideological label on the MRC despite its clear right-wing bias.
Katz did let NewsGuard repsond -- then let the MRC respond to the response:
"The analysis in question is highly flawed, relying on a cherry-picked sample of just 66 ratings out of more than 9,500 NewsGuard has issued, less than 0.7%.," NewsGuard's Matt Skibinski told Newsmax.
"In fact, NewsGuard's apolitical process has resulted in many conservative publications outscoring similar left-leaning publications and vice versa — for example, The Daily Caller outscores The Daily Beast, The Daily Wire outscores the Daily Kos, and FoxNews.com outscores MSNBC.com."
MRC told Newsmax that these "outscores" have not always reflected the rankings for conservative media like The Daily Caller, The Daily Wire, and Fox News.
It also noted that outspoken conservative critics of NewsGuard, like Newsmax and The Federalist, have also been targeted for extremely low scores.
Neither Katz nor the MRC offered evidence that NewsGuard downgrades a media outlet solely for criticizing it. Swanson returned to tout another right-wing attack on NewsGuard in a Dec. 21 article:
Florida CFO Jimmy Patronis announced a consumer protection bill Thursday that would prevent state agencies from using taxpayer funds to contract with media censorship companies like NewsGuard.
Florida HB 939 mirrors similar federal legislation that moved to strike the Pentagon from contracting with advertising agencies that use NewsGuard to blacklist conservative publications.
"We've got state agencies throughout Florida trying to reach the public to provide critical services, and we need to make sure advertisers who partner with the state are doing their very best to reach the specific groups," Patronis said in the announcement.
"NewsGuard's technology, however, is working its way into the advertising world, and effectively blacklisting media outlets who don't measure up to their ratings."
The legislation comes on the heels of Patronis' letter to NewsGuard in March, warning then he would "not hesitate to use the full force of my office to shed light on the organization you're running."
Swanson is lying by calling NewsGuard a "media censorship companies," and later in the article he falsely called NewsGuard "far-left."
