First CBS, Then NPR, Now NewsGuard? Trump’s FCC Boss Zeroes In on ‘Fact Checking’ Group Accused of Censoring Conservatives

President Trump’s new chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr, is now eyeing changes to liability protections for Big Tech companies that “rely on” services of the controversial fact-checking organization NewsGuard as he seeks to dismantle what he calls the “censorship cartel.”Mr. Carr has quickly been taking on multiple, liberal establishment media institutions since taking over as chairman of the FCC. He forced CBS News to hand over the full and unedited interview Vice President Harris gave to “60 Minutes” and has launched investigations of NPR and PBS for potentially violating federal laws by running thinly veiled commercials known as “sponsor messages.” The FCC chairman has also made it clear he plans to dismantle what he calls the “censorship cartel” to protect Americans’ free speech rights. In a little noticed move in November, Mr. Carr sent a letter to the leaders of Apple, Alphabet, Microsoft, and Meta asking about their partnerships with the “Orwellian-named” fact-checking organization NewsGuard.Founded in 2018 by founders with deep ties to New York City’s left-leaning media elite, NewsGuard casts itself as a helpful tool to guide social media and internet users away from misleading or false information and to reliable sources of information. People can subscribe to the service and have an extension added to their browsers that provides a rating of a news organization’s trustworthiness. But more significantly, some of the largest technology companies who funnel news content to Americans are believed to be using NewsGuard’s tools to screen information based on whether NewsGuard considers the source to be reliable.NewsGuard has been accused for years of targeting conservative and libertarian publications, rating them lower than liberal and far left publishers. Mr. Carr now says the organization is “part of the broader censorship cartel.” He noted a House Committee on Small Business 2024 Staff Report said that NewsGuard’s ratings “combined with NewsGuard’s vast partnerships in the advertising industry select winners and losers in the news media space.” “NewsGuard does so by leveraging its partnerships with advertising agencies to effectively censor targeted outlets,” Mr. Carr wrote. He noted that NewsGuard offers an extension for Google’s Chrome, Apple’s Safari, and Microsoft’s Bing and askedApple, Alphabet, Meta, and Microsoft to share lists of their products that use the fact-checking service or that allows any of their users to “use or rely on any NewsGuard product.”Mr. Carr warned that technology companies’ liability shield, known as Section 230 and which the FCC administers, could be at risk if they work with NewsGuard. On November 24, he posted on X, “Any tech company that continues to rely on NewsGuard is putting its Section 230 protections in serious jeopardy.”Conservatives have claimed that NewsGuard is biased against conservative outlets and is steering advertising dollars and potential readers away from them by giving them lower trustworthiness rankings. The chairman of the FTC, Andrew Ferguson, echoed those complaints in a letter of his own in December. Mr. Ferguson suggested that the FTC should also investigate NewsGuard as he said the service’s ratings are used to “choke off the advertising dollars that are the lifeblood for many websites.”Conservative outlets often receive lower ratings from NewsGuard than liberal sites. Fox News Digital gets a 69.5 percent rating. The Daily Wire receives a 57 percent rating, and NewsGuard warns readers to “proceed with caution” because the site “generally fails to maintain basic standards of accuracy.”The New York Sun has received a 100 percent rating.Left-wing outlets consistently tend to score higher than conservative ones. CNN receives an 80 percent rating, and the Washington Post receives a 100 percent rating. The ratings can be used to deter advertising dollars from websites with low scores. NewsGuard’s CEO, Gordon Crovitz, has denied Mr. Carr’s allegations that his service is being used by advertisers to blacklist conservative sites and hurt their revenues. In response to the FCC chairman’s letter, Mr. Crovitz said the allegations stemmed from reporting by the conservative news outlet Newsmax, which receives a 20 percent credibility rating from NewsGuard. He pointed out that there are some left-wing outlets, such as MSNBC and the New York Times, that have lower ratings than conservative outlets. Additionally, he insisted that many conservative outlets have actually benefited from NewsGuard “driving advertising revenue to their sites.”“We note that our journalism is itself speech protected by the First Amendment, and we’re concerned to see a government official using the powers of his office, however unwittingly after having been misled by Newsmax, to attempt to prevent a private company (NewsGuard) from producing journalistic content,” Mr. Crovitz said in a statement.Besides Mr. Carr, NewsGuard is also being investigated by the House Oversight Committee to determine its “impact on protected First Amendment speech and how its contracts with government agencies may contribute to censorship under the guise of combatting misinformation.”

First CBS, Then NPR, Now NewsGuard? Trump’s FCC Boss Zeroes In on ‘Fact Checking’ Group Accused of Censoring Conservatives

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