NewsGuard Won’t Downgrade New York Times over Massive Error About Children with Coronavirus

The establishment “news-rating” project NewsGuard says it is unlikely to downgrade its positive assessment of the New York Times following the newspaper’s recent whopper regarding the hospitalization of children with coronavirus.

The Times had to issue a stunning correction last Thursday, admitting that its reporter overstated the number of children who have been hospitalized with coronavirus since the beginning of the pandemic by over 800,000 cases.

Despite this, NewsGuard general manager Matt Skibinski told Breitbart News that  its positive opinion of the New York Times is unlikely to change:

NewsGuard uses the same criteria to assess each publication we rate. When a publication makes a major factual error like the one you cited, we look at whether the publication quickly and publicly corrects the article and owns up to its mistake in a transparent editor’s note or clarification—and whether the publication has a regular practice of proactively issuing such corrections, as opposed to doing so only after we ask about the factual errors during our review process.

In an example like the one you described, in which a publication makes a significant error but quickly and publicly corrects it, the site’s NewsGuard rating is unlikely to change as a result. If the publication’s practices were to change such that it no longer proactively, publicly, and promptly corrects factual errors regularly, that absolutely would impact its NewsGuard rating.

NewsGuard is an optional browser extension that can be installed on Chrome, Edge, and other browsers. If installed, it will display a green symbol of approval next to websites it considers trustworthy, and a red warning label next to websites it considers untrustworthy.

As Breitbart News has previously documented, NewsGuard consistently targets conservative media outlets with “untrustworthy” warnings while giving a pass to corporate left-wing media (including repeat hoax-pushers like Rolling Stone and MSNBC, which hosts Russiagate conspiracy theorist Rachel Maddow).

This results in the now-frequent phenomenon of green approval labels appearing next to debunked stories from the corporate media, while readers are warned to stay away from the conservative news organizations that did the debunking.

Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News. He is the author of #DELETED: Big Tech’s Battle to Erase the Trump Movement and Steal The Election.