Have you ever heard of Newsguard? Nah? Neither had we until we received an email from Amina McCauley, an intern at Newsguard, demanding we comply with their demands. They wanted answers and they wanted them now!
Who is Newsguard? Well, it seems they are the new censors on the block, and boy are they wielding big sticks.
Kiwi journalists were advised in late March about the arrival of US news-ratings agency/fact-checker NewsGuard to Australia and New Zealand, via media and PR database company, Telum.
The disinformation industry, also described as the Censorship Industrial Complex, or Big Disinformation has been slowly gearing up over the last three years, but it’s really getting it’s boots on now.
NewsGuard makes money from licensing its website ratings to advertisers, in principle so they can select ‘safe’ sites on which to advertise – until NewGuard came along, no-one had any idea how to judge these things, apparently. The NewsGuard browser extension is also built into Microsoft’s Edge browser.
The rankings agency’s third largest investor is Publicis Group, one of the world’s largest and most influential public relations firms. Yes, a global PR firm funding news rankings … hmmm.
Writing in Mint Press News in 2019, investigative journalist Whitney Webb reported that NewsGuard was lobbying for its news site rankings to be installed by default on computers in US public libraries, schools, and universities as well as on all smartphones and computers sold in the United States.
Four years later this agenda is well advanced. After Telum announced the arrival of NewsGuard to our shores, it did a Q&A with a couple of NewsGuard executives. Like The Disinformation Project, they are targeting all kinds of sectors in the business of information, not just journalists.
The Looking Glass
They want to grade our website to make sure it is “safe” for advertisers. Sounds awfully like Big Tech moving to censor pesky sites that challenge the narrative, whatever that narrative may be at any given time.
Here’s what’s on offer:
- Reliability Ratings help advertisers redirect ad spend away from purveyors of misinformation that do not align with their brand safety standards and towards sources of quality journalism.
- Data, including its ‘Misinformation Fingerprints’ dataset of machine-readable false claims circulating the internet, equips technology platforms and content moderation teams with intelligence to protect users from online harm and control the spread of misinformation.
- Reliability Ratings assist reputation management professionals and media monitoring platforms in protecting their clients from misinformation.
- Reliability Ratings guide aggregation services as they work to curate news and information from publishers of the highest calibre that adhere to their standards of credibility and transparency.
- Data equips defense and military personnel with tools to identify and avoid disinformation.
- Data power research studies misinformation, electoral integrity, media literacy, and other aspects of online news consumption habits.
- NewsGuard’s browser extension and associated media literacy materials provide schools and libraries with resources that help guide learners of all ages through the overwhelming landscape of online news and information.
- Public libraries can access NewsGuard’s ‘pro-bono media literacy programme’ – thanks to support from Microsoft, by downloading its the NewsGuard browser extension to library computers
Definitely the new news censors. Their censoriousness is appalling too. In the email we were sent (below) they make judgments on our content, and cite only one example to contradict what we were saying.
We have noticed that you have published articles with false or misleading claims about the COVID-19 pandemic. For example, in this article it is stated that “there was little to no difference in lethality between Covid and the flu.” However, many peer-reviewed studies have found that COVID-19 is significantly deadlier than the seasonal flu, including a French study published in The Lancet Respiratory Medicine in December 2020 which found that the mortality rate for COVID-19 patients was nearly three times higher than the mortality rate for flu patients.
This article said “a new paper offers fresh evidence ventilators killed Covid patients, suggesting ventilator-acquired pneumonia – not Covid itself – caused many deaths, while Sars-Cov-2 was relatively mild.” However, a co-author of the study told us that the claims that the study showed that most of the early COVID-19 deaths can be attributed to ventilators are false. The actual conclusion of the study was that COVID patients with severe pneumonia had a higher risk of death when they developed a separate case of bacterial pneumonia after being put on a ventilator. This secondary pneumonia, called ventilator-associated pneumonia, is a known risk of ventilator use that predates the COVID-19 pandemic.
This article said that facemasks make no difference at all to viral transmission, however, a growing body of evidence suggest otherwise. A study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in July 2020 for example, concluded that masks were associated with a significantly lower rate of COVID-19 positive case among health workers.
And lastly, this article stated that “solar radiation really is the primary driver of temperatures” and “climate models, which treat solar radiation as a constant, really are useless for making real-world predictions.” However, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) states on its website, “Changes in the Sun’s overall brightness since the pre-industrial period have been minimal, likely contributing no more than 0.01 degrees Celsius to the roughly 1 degree of warming that’s occurred over the Industrial period.”
Please comment on all of the above cases.
I would also like to ask you about your practice regarding publishing content that has first been published elsewhere. In many of the articles, you note that the story has been republished with permission. However, I’ve also found a few cases where you haven’t included the permission note. See this article, this one, this one, and this one. Please let me know whether I have overlooked something here or what your overall permission policy is.
We also like to see that a site publishes corrections regularly, as we believe that it’s common for any news or information site to make mistakes. I cannot find any corrections published on the site, are you able to send me links to any corrections published, otherwise a comment as to what your corrections policy is?
…
Let me know if you would prefer to have a phone interview about this, but please respond in the next couple of days for your comments to be included in our write up. Please note that all comments in response to this email will be seen as on the record.
Newsguard email
Amina McCauley studied globalisation, journalism, and totalitarianism at Aarhus University, Denmark and Charles University, Czech Republic. She has the perfect credentials for implementing a draconian censorship regime that seeks to defund news sites like ours by getting their advertising cancelled due to poor scores.
I have no doubt that this jumped-up intern has a very good understanding of how totalitarian regimes control the narrative by controlling the news and she is about to start stomping her jack boots all over us. I just bet she has a fetching collection of Hugo Boss designed brown shirts.
Make no mistake readers, they are seeking to defund us because we won’t play their little game and answer their stupid questions.
This is all about censorship and defunding.
They are going to make The BFD their first and most prominent example, mark my words.
They will be working hand in glove with other censorious organisations like The Disinformation Project, and the Department of Internal Affairs which is looking to establish a regulatory regime over all online media in New Zealand
That’s why we need your help. The censors are coming for us. They aim to defund us, firstly by making advertisers shy away, then I have no doubt they will do what these totalitarians have done all over the world, try and silence us for good.
They tried to silence me with Nicky Hager’s Dirty Politics. The media tried to silence me by blacklisting me from their papers and their television and radio shows. But we were resilient because of our members. You stood strong with me in the past, never bowing to the threats and the intimidation, and now I need you to stand strong again.
For those of you who are already members, we thank you. You literally are the lifeblood of this site. But we still need your help. If you can spare a donation, then please assist any way you can. If you have friends and family that aren’t members then please ask them to become members.
If you aren’t a member, then we really need your help too. You obviously value this site, comment on it, and read the articles. What is stopping you from becoming a member?
Because if you don’t support us through membership or donations, and the censors win, then this site will cease to exist. It is that serious. Do you want us to disappear, a lone voice in the wilderness challenging woke dogma, and standing up to the deep state and the woke agenda?
Now is the time to be brave. Put your money where our mouth is. For less than the cost of a cup of coffee a month you can really make a difference. Become a member today, and help us fight the censors:
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We can take the fight to these control freaks, but we can only do it with your help. The more you help us, the braver we can be.
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