STEVEN BRILL , Politico; Opinion | Trump’s Nominees Falsely Say I’m Censoring Conservatives — So They Want to Censor Me
"Last week, The Washington Post published an article detailing how NewsGuard, whose journalists rate the reliability of news sources, has become the target of incoming Trump administration regulators and far-right Republicans in Congress. They are accusing me and my NewsGuard colleagues of being part of some left-wing conspiracy — or “cartel” in the words of the incoming chairs of both the FCC and the FTC. Our cartel is supposedly aimed at censoring conservative websites and their associated social media and video platforms.
What we actually do is provide consumers and businesses with our journalists’ assessments of the professional standards of thousands of news websites, assigning them reliability scores based on apolitical, journalistic factors — like accuracy, transparent correction policies and honest headlines. Advertisers, for example, can use these reliability scores to make sure their computerized placements of online ads avoid running alongside Russian disinformation, health care hoaxes or other content that could embarrass their brands. Consumers who subscribe to our browser extension can also see those ratings when they pull up an article or scroll through a Facebook or X feed.
If you click the link to the Post article, you’ll see that the reporters compiled a chart of our 0-100 point ratings for a sample of 20 news sites. It plainly demonstrates that we give high and low ratings to liberal and conservative sites alike, because the nine criteria we use to tally the point score have nothing to do with politics. After all, is there a liberal or conservative way to have a transparent policy for admitting and correcting errors or having headlines that accurately reflect what’s delivered in the story?"
