Media Research Center: NewsGuard Gives Perfect Ratings to Outlets that Spread False Claims About Biden Laptop
NewsGuard gives perfect 100/100 “credibility” ratings to news organizations that helped bury the Hunter Biden “laptop from hell” stories, one of the most consequential stories of the 2020 presidential cycle and beyond, according to a report by the Media Research Center.
The news-rating project, which aims to police the internet by telling users which news sources can be trusted and which ones cannot, continues to give its stamp of approval to news organizations that prioritize politics over newsworthiness.
Via the Media Research Center:
Left-wing news organizations Politico, The Washington Post, Axios and USA Today all maligned the Biden bombshell by the New York Post as possibly part of a 2020 “disinformation” campaign.
The story documented purported emails from Hunter Biden reportedly exposing the alleged corrupt dealings of him and his father in Ukraine. The New York Times finally authenticated the emails the liberal media tried to dismiss for months, but also tied the documents to an ongoing federal investigation.
Despite this, NewsGuard has the outlets rated with perfect 100/100 scores for “credibility.”
As Breitbart News previously reported, NewsGuard co-founder Steve Brill told CNBC in 2020 that he believed that the Biden laptop story was likely a “hoax perpetrated by the Russians.”
Brill has yet to publicly recant that opinion, which was spread throughout the media at the time, and contributed to the discrediting of a factually accurate story about one of the most powerful political families in the United States.
In comments to Breitbart News, NewsGuard general manager Matt Skibinski stressed that his organization does take the severity of factual errors into account when assessing news sites.
“Our criteria for all of our ratings are transparent, and our specific rationale for each site’s rating is explained in detail in our Nutrition Label for each site,” said Skibinski. “Ultimately, readers can view our detailed explanations and judge for themselves whether or not they agree.”
“We do weigh the severity of the false claim published in assessing whether a site repeatedly published false content — for example, we focus on clearly and significantly false claims, not minor factual errors like misspelling a name.”
“Our ratings are based on an overall review of the site’s practices, but we often cite specific examples of high profile controversies or reporting errors in our Nutrition Labels, even if such mistakes are relatively infrequent.”
“For example, you mentioned the UVA case; we explain that error, and the resulting defamation lawsuit, in detail in Rolling Stone’s Nutrition Label so that readers have that context when deciding how much to trust the site.”
NewsGuard’s “Nutrition Labels” have yet to been updated to note the news organizations that spread false information about the Hunter Biden laptop, including NPR and Politico.
Newsguard advisory board member Michael Hayden, the former Bush Administration CIA director who reinvented himself as an anti-Trump pundit during the 45th President’s first term, went even further. He lent his name to a letter penned by a cabal of former intelligence officials who claimed, similarly without basis, that the laptop from hell was “Russian disinformation.”
Like Brill, Hayden has yet to publicly admit he was wrong, or apologize for misleading the American public weeks before a presidential election. Hayden remains on the advisory board of NewsGuard, an organization that claims to care about Americans being misled by inaccurate and irresponsible media.
Despite the apparent unwillingness of NewsGuard’s own founders and advisors to correct themselves on the record, it may soon end up in classrooms across America.
The American Federation of Teachers (AFT), a far-left teachers union recently partnered with the organization, with NewsGuard licenses to be distributed to 1.7 million teachers who are members of the union.
This comes as far-left teachers across the country are fighting tooth and nail against an energized Republican grassroots, intent on protecting their ability to indoctrinate children in LGBTQ+ ideology, critical race theory, and now, apparently, which news sources to trust.
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.
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