The Federalist
In America, we have the First Amendment and have long prided ourselves on having a free press, but the reality is that it’s becoming harder and harder to exist as an independent publication on the internet. One major reason for this is that lots of bad actors are trying to weaponize concerns over “misinformation.” While misinformation is a problem, in practice the attempts to police it are often wholly incompetent and even more damaging than the alleged misinformation being addressed. Above all else the goal is to keep people from saying things that undermine the authority of America’s obviously foundering left-leaning institutions.
Anyway, The Federalist recently got an email from “NewsGuard Technologies” — a relatively new service that’s popped up in the last few years that purports to rate websites on their credibility based on some established criteria. It then sells its ratings services to schools, various corporate entities, and advertisers looking for someone to tell them what news outlets they can supposedly trust or what websites they don’t want to advertise on for fear of damaging their brand.
So how does NewsGuard go about making those ratings for websites? Well, it starts with firing off a series of hostile questions to the editors of a website about weirdly specific aspects of its coverage and demands you answer them in a vain attempt to improve whatever rating NewsGuard’s going to give you. Now it’s bad enough that this is an extortion racket, but it’s downright insulting to see NewsGuard’s team wheel around a website that publishes over a million words a year, cherry-pick some example of what they think is problematic coverage, and still demonstrate an inability to think critically or fairly about what they’re reading. If it questions a dominant narrative, it does not compute with these people. Anyway, let’s take a look at what we’re dealing with.
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