Topic: Media Research Center
For the third year in a row, the Media Research Center has issued a so-called study purporting to attack NewsGuard as having a political bias against right-wing websites. And unsurprisingly, it's as loud and lame as the first two. Jiseph Vazquez huffed in a Dec. 12 post:
Internet traffic cop NewsGuard has gotten worse. A new MRC Free Speech America analysis shows the notorious leftist media ratings organization is more biased against the right than ever before.
MRC Free Speech America investigated NewsGuard for a third year in a row, finding that its 0/100 ratings scale has once again overwhelmingly favored left-leaning outlets over right-leaning ones. “NewsGuard is just another leftist group trying to censor conservatives,” said MRC President Brent Bozell. “We have the proof.”
Using the media list provided by AllSides that classifies publications based on 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). At the same time, it dinged “right” and “lean right” outlets like Fox News, the New York Post and The Daily Wire with an outrageously abysmal average score of 65/100.The latest analysis denotes a 26 point disparity.
NewsGuard’s rating for right-leaning outlets in particular was worse than the still-low 66/100 average rating it slapped on right-leaning media across the prior two MRC studies released Jan. 6, 2023 and Dec. 13, 2021.
First of all, AllSides is a right-leaning organization that promotes the MRC's work, so its list is a bit suspect, given how it places most mainstream media outlets on the "left" side of the ledger and still lists Newsweek as in the "center" despite its undeniable move to the right. And of course, the disparity in group scores is not, in and of itself, evidence of bias, and Vazauez makes little attempt to prove that it is. Indeed, he follows that by rehashing old grievances about how the media handled Hunter Biden's laptop (ignoring that the New York Post did not offer any independent corroborating evidence to prove the laptop's authenticity, making it easy for non-right-wing media to dismiss the story as an October surprise by a pro-Trump rag) and complaining yet again that "NewsGuard still gives leftist outlet BuzzFeed a perfect 100/100 score despite the expired site continuing to host the widely discredited Steele dossier (ignoring the fact that BuzzFeed never claimed the dossier was accurate).
Vazquez's unprofessional bias is splayed throughout his so-called study, such as when he ranted about "NewsGuard’s perfect scores for blatantly liberal outlets like the explicitly left-wing New York Times"; by contrast, he refused to identify the New York Post as "blatantly conservative" and "explicitly right-wing." He also portrayed coverage of the Israel-Hamas war and related protests over it as being between "anti-Iksrael media" and "right-leaning media" -- a ridiculous comparison -- going on to whine that non-right-wing media coverage didn't adhere to right-wing narratives. That's another sign this is a political hit job, not a serious piece of "media research."
Vazquez also gave right-wing outlets space to complain about their relatively low ratings -- but he offered few specific examples to explain why they were so low. He did cite one instance, though, which comes off as whiny nitpicking (prefeaced by more whining):
The Heritage Foundation, one of the most prominent think tanks in the U.S. also received NewsGuard’s ire, getting hit with a 69.5/100 score. “The political hacks from NewsGuard claim they’ll help you decide what news outlets you can trust. In reality, you shouldn’t trust anything from this overtly biased organization,” said The Heritage Foundation Communications Director Rob Bluey. “Thanks to MRC, we now have proof that left-leaning outlets fare better than their conservative counterparts.”
One of NewsGuard’s nonsensical quibbles was The Heritage Foundation’s repudiation of the $80 billion earmarked in Biden’s extremist $749 billion Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) towards hiring 87,000 new Internal Revenue Service “agents.” NewsGuard split hairs by arguing that the onerous Biden bill simply allows the IRS to hire “86,852 full-time employees — not all audit agents, as the article suggested.” The headline of The Heritage Foundation’s article was “Fact-Checking Team Biden on Who Those 87,000 New IRS Agents Would Audit,” but NewsGuard didn’t disclose that The Heritage Foundation did note in its piece how “Calculations conservatively assume that only 57.3% of the Treasury Department’s estimated 86,852 new IRS agents (49,754 in total) would be assigned to enforcement.” In other words, The Heritage Foundation did specifically note that not all of the new “agents” would serve in auditing functions.
Of course, the fact that Vazquez referred to the Inflation Reduction Act as "extremist" further shows his disqualifying bias. He does seem to hint that Heritage showed its own inaccuracy in referring to "87,000 New IRS Agents" in the headline, but the article continued to refer to all 87,000 as "agents" throughout, and no evidence is provided to back up its alleged "calculations" about which new hires would be doing what.Further, that statement didn't appear until theh 13th paragraph and wasn't mentioned at all in the bullet-point "key takeaways" at the top of the piece, further showing the shoddiness of Vazquez's defense.
Vazquez, however, failed to discuss how Fox News was exposed as knowingly lying to its viewers about election fraud thorugh evidence released in the Dominion lawsuit -- resulting in a $787 million settlement with Dominion -- and how that blatant dishonesty may have affected its NewsGuard score. He was also silent about how Fox News quietly deleted a false story about a Gold Star family purportedly having to pay for a soldier's remains to be returned to the U.S. after being killed in Afghanistan without issuing a public retraction or apology. Instead, he defended Fox News by portraying its reporting on an incident involving the bombing of a hospital in Gaza to be "much more accurate" than the purportedly "anti-Israel" media. If Vazquez can't even bring up the biggest news-fraud story of the year, it shows how worthless this "study" is.
Vazquez refused to give NewsGuard an opportunity to respond to any of his bad-faith partisan attacks. He closed by rehashing his earlier screed demanding that NewsGuard not receive any federal contracts -- again showing the manufactured hit-job nature of his so-called study.
Meanwhile, what better place to promote such a wildly biased and flawed study than on the very accuracy-challenged right-wing outlets it's defending? That's what MRC chief Brent Bozell did in running to Fox Business, as Luis Cornelio dutifully transcribed in a Dec. 13 post:
MRC President and Founder Brent Bozell delivered a scorching rebuke of self-anointed internet traffic cop NewsGuard following the release of another report exposing the media ratings firm’s extreme leftist bias.
Speaking to Fox Business host Stuart Varney on Wednesday, Bozell highlighted an MRC Free Speech America report that exposed NewsGuard’s ratings as being disproportionately harsher to right-leaning media. “You've got this group … that calls itself, ‘objective,’” Bozell said of Newsguard, which gave left-leaning media an average credibility rating of 91 percent, while rating right-leaning media only an average of 65 percent.
Bozell ripped the legacy media for decades of tilted coverage under the guise of objectivity. “For years and years and years, the media has been telling the American people that they were objective,” Bozell told Varney on Varney & Co. The reality, Bozell warned, “They were left wing.”
Bozell blasted NewsGuard as a “new way to attack conservatives.” Indeed, MRC released a scathing report — for the third year in a row — that found NewsGuard provides consistently better ratings to leftist media on average while generally slapping down the scores of right-leaning media.
One can assume Varney and Bozell did not discuss how Fox News trashed its reputation for objectivity and accuracy by lying to its viewers. Meanwhile, MRC executives Tim Graham and Dan Schneider ran to Newsmax to spout the same talking points, transcribed in a Dec. 14 post by Catherine Salgado:
MRC’s Dan Schneider joined Newsmax to highlight explosive MRC research on how ratings firm NewsGuard has become more biased than ever.
For the third year in a row, MRC Free Speech America exposed NewsGuard’s worsening bias against right-leaning media. MRC researchers used the AllSides Media Bias Chart to analyze that NewsGuard provided a stellar average “credibility” rating of 91/100 for “left” and “lean left” outlets while slapping a low average of 65/100 on “right” and “lean right” outlets. MRC Free Speech America Vice President Schneider and NewsBusters Executive Editor Tim Graham went on Newsmax’s The Chris Salcedo Show to discuss NewsGuard’s real goals: choking off right-leaning media’s ad revenue and promoting leftist narratives.
Schneider began, “NewsGuard, for years, has been silencing conservatives, directing ad revenue to liberals instead, choking off the life blood of conservative media outlets.” Schneider analyzed how NewsGuard’s gambit to silence the right was based on its overarching “zeal to defeat Donald Trump and any other conservative who wants to stand for basic American principles.”
Similarly, Graham and Schneider did not bring up how Newsmax is currently being sued by both Dominion and Smartmatic for the false claims it made about those companies in promoting falsehoods about election fraud in 2020.
Salgado concluded by whining that "NewsGuard targets free speech — it is not an objective arbiter of truth," despite the fact that none of the MRC's partisan attacks actually prove this beyond its empty right-wing ranting.
