The Journalism Competition and Preservation Act (JCPA), which would create a media cartel in the U.S. empowered to collectively bargain with Big Tech for special treatment, has the support of NewsGuard, an organization that has repeatedly attempted to discredit and delegitimize conservative and independent media. NewsGuard says it would be “understandable” if the media cartel and Big Tech companies used its anti-conservative criteria to exclude publishers.
Over the past few years, NewsGuard has built a blacklist of news sources it considers untrustworthy, ranking publishers through “nutrition labels,” which can be viewed around the web via its browser addon.
With the addon installed, red warning labels appear next to websites NewsGuard disapproves of, which include the two top conservative news sources on the web: Breitbart News and Fox News.
In comments to Breitbart News, NewsGuard co-CEO Gordon Crovitiz said he believes it would be “understandable” to use his organization’s blacklist to determine membership in the JCPA media cartel, giving it the ability to cut off disapproved publishers from the rewards of its backroom deals with Big Tech companies.
“In the case of whether the Silicon Valley platforms should pay market rates for the value they receive from the work of journalists, it’s understandable that both the platforms and publishers would look for ways to exclude from required payments sites that are only masquerading as news sites, such as Russian, Chinese and Iranian government disinformation sites and the thousands of healthcare hoax sites that we have identified,” said Crovitz.
Defenders of the JCPA say the bill is designed to protect small, independent news companies, but NewsGuard, which purports to rank the trustworthiness of news sources, has done nothing but elevate the largest, wealthiest, and most establishment-leaning news companies over their independent competitors.
Recently, NewsGuard downgraded Fox News from a green rating, indicating trustworthiness, to a red rating, indicating the opposite. Breitbart News and a number of other independent media outlets have also been given a red rating by NewsGuard.
In their public statement supporting the bill, NewsGuard also declared their hopes that the JCPA will contribute to the suppression of “misinformation” and “hoaxes.”
“The digital platforms have allowed misinformation and hoaxes to be hugely popular on social media and in search results,” wrote the co-CEOs in a statement earlier this year.
“The platforms fail to provide their users with tools to tell the difference between high-quality journalism and purveyors of misinformation. It’s time the trustworthy news publishers of all stripes are allowed to join forces to push back against these irresponsible platforms and re-establish sustainable revenue models to support newsrooms across the country.”
NewsGuard has built its brand on opposing “misinformation, the buzzword typically used by establishment institutions to smear and censor conservatives.
Yet its own people have engaged in the same kind of misinformation and hyperbole that they accuse others of. Weeks before the 2020 election, NewsGuard co-founder Steve Brill went on national television and claimed there was a “high likelihood” that the Hunter Biden laptop story was a “hoax perpetrated by the Russians.”
More recently, NewsGuard advisory board member, retired Gen. Michael Hayden, publicly agreed with the incendiary claim that Republicans are “extremist and violent” and that this generation has “never” seen a force more “dangerous.”
That claim would make Republicans more dangerous than Al Qaeda and ISIS.
In a comment to Breitbart News, Gordon Crovitiz, NewsGuard co-CEO and former publisher and opinion writer of the Wall Street Journal defended Hayden’s continued presence on the board.
“As our website explains, members of our Advisory Board “provide advice and subject-matter expertise” to NewsGuard,” said Crovitz. “They play no role in the determinations of ratings or the Nutrition Label write ups of websites.”
The organization’s bias, combined with its determination to embed itself everywhere from American classrooms to Microsoft web browsers to the Pentagon has alarmed prominent Republicans.
Rep. Jim Banks (R-IN), who leads the influential Republican Study Committee and sits on the House Armed Services Committee, wrote a letter to the Department of Defense earlier this year requesting they preserve their documents, after news emerged that the DoD paid $750,000 to NewsGuard to study “misinformation.”
The fact that NewsGuard, which exists to maintain a blacklist of news sources it considers second-class, supports the JCPA, counters arguments from the bill’s defenders that it somehow protects against viewpoint discrimination.
As Breitbart News previously explained, protections against viewpoint discrimination in the bill will not, in practice, prevent a media cartel from excluding their competitors from the benefits of collective negotiations with the tech giants.
Via Breitbart News:
That provision is significant especially for its specificity. These mainstream and left-wing media cartels may not exclude based on size or “views expressed by its content.” But that is not how the exclusion happens or will happen.
These self-appointed mainstream and left-wing media cartels ARE allowed to exclude based on the usual, totally subjective, factors they always do, such as: “trustworthiness,” “fake news, “extremism,” “misinformation,” “hate speech,” “conspiracy,” “correction policy,” “expertise,” “authoritativeness,” etc.
All of these terms are viewpoint neutral, yet when interpreted by leftist NGOs, “media watchdogs” like NewsGuard, and the fact checkers and content moderators of Big Tech, inevitably end up targeting just one side of the political spectrum, with only the occasional token reprimand of the corporate mainstream media.
NewsGuard, like the third-party “fact checkers” relied on by Big Tech to provide a pretext for censorship, has never admitted to targeting conservatives or any political viewpoint. On its website, NewsGuard insists that its ratings of news sources are based on “apolitical criteria” designed to assess a website’s “credibility and transparency.”
Crovitz reiterated those empty assurances in his comments to Breitbart.
“NewsGuard provides fully transparent and apolitical ratings and Nutrition Labels for news and information websites, which news consumers and others use to determine the trustworthiness of sources. Many conservative sites get high scores and many liberal sites get low scores and vice versa, based on their adherence to credibility and transparency criteria, not based on their politics.”
Nevertheless, like the fact checkers, NewsGuard’s track record of delegitimizing conservative news, while ignoring or only lightly penalizing massive media deceptions like Russiagate (a narrative that the organization’s own co-founder drew on to discredit the Hunter Biden laptop story in 2020), is clear.
If the JCPA passes, the media cartel it creates will likely behave in the same way. The criteria it uses to allow or disallow news companies into the club will likely be presented to the public as viewpoint-neutral. In practice, it will be used in the same way that NewsGuard’s seemingly neutral criteria is — to discredit, marginalize, and censor conservative and independent voices.
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.