11/22/2024

Free Speech Advocates Praise NewsGuard’s Apolitical Work, Raise Concerns About FCC’s Carr Infringing First Amendment

MEDIA ADVISORY

Free Speech Advocates Praise NewsGuard’s Apolitical Work, Raise Concerns About FCC’s Carr Infringing First Amendment

NOVEMBER 22, 2024

Following a letter from FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr threatening to censor NewsGuard, prominent publications and free-speech advocates have pushed back, praising NewsGuard’s apolitical ratings and raising concerns about Carr’s attempts to infringe on First Amendment rights after the nominated Federal Communications Commission chairman was apparently misled by Newsmax and other unreliable publishers about NewsGuard’s work.

Writing in Reason, a prominent libertarian magazine, Senior Editor Jacob Sullum wrote that “Carr’s implicit charge that NewsGuard is biased against conservatives … does not seem to have a firm empirical basis.”

He noted numerous examples of conservative news outlets rated as credible by NewsGuard, including Fox News, the New York Post, Townhall, The Western Journal, The New York Sun, Reason, The Daily Caller, The Washington Times, the Washington Examiner, The Dispatch, National Review, The Free Beacon, The Post Millennial, the Cato Institute, Hot Air, Commentary, the HeritageFoundation, and The Daily Signal. Sullum also listed numerous instances in which conservative outlets outscore similar left-leaning brands, such as FoxNews outscoring MSNBC and The National Review outscoring Mother Jones.

Sullum also noted that Carr’s concerns about censorship are misplaced. “Carr’s complaint is puzzling for several reasons,” he explained. “First, his claim that NewsGuard is violating ‘Americans’ constitutional freedoms’ is legally nonsensical, since the First Amendment constrains government action, not the decisions of private businesses. Second, the First Amendment protects NewsGuard’s commercial activities, which include researching news outlets, evaluating them, offering guidance to advertisers, and selling filters based on its credibility assessments.”

“All of this would be true even if … the company were systematically biased against conservative voices,” Sullum wrote. “But there is little evidence to support that claim.”

Ari Cohen of the free-speech advocacy group Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, raised broad concerns about Carr’s letter in a piece on the foundation’s website, writing, “The Constitution protects the expression of groups like NewsGuard, which simply provide opinions on the credibility of content and information sources that other services may choose to adopt or ignore at their discretion.”

Sullum’s article explains how news websites with low reliability scores from NewsGuard, such as Newsmax — a prime purveyor of election and health misinformation — use their false reporting about NewsGuard’s rating process to paint themselves as victims of “censorship”—and then mislead government officials such as Carr into demanding that NewsGuard be censored, in violation of the First Amendment. Sullum quotes NewsGuard co-CEO Gordon Crovitz saying, “We find it ironic that sites like Newsmax report falsely about us, misleading government officials into threatening us, then call us censors, even though we’re First Amendment absolutists.”

NewsGuard was founded in 2018 as an alternative either to government censorship of the internet or to the secret ratings of news websites by the digital platforms. Instead, NewsGuard provides information to consumers and enterprises about the reliability of websites based on apolitical criteria of basic journalistic practices. As the Reason article details, the result is that many conservative sites do well, often better than their liberal peers. Some, like Newsmax, instead choose to seek government censorship of their rating rather than join the thousands of sites across the political spectrum that have taken steps to improve their credibility and transparency practices to increase their NewsGuard scores.

For further detail, read NewsGuard’s statement responding to the threats by Carr based on false claims Newsmax made about NewsGuard that he was misled to cite as authoritative.