Well first of all, when fact checked your source comes up as “misleading”

Censorship 101: Just don’t cover a story that hurts the Left’s Narrative of the day

I’ve already looked at several examples of this:

But there’s actually yet another set of Lefty groups involved: privately funded, news monitoring outfits, like those funded by Craigslist billionaire, Craig Newmark:

In the run-up to the 2020 presidential election, billionaire philanthropist Craig Newmark spent close to $200 million on news media projects to help fight “disinformation,” secure “voting integrity,” and defeat Donald Trump. More importantly, after a raft of multimillion-dollar gifts to New York’s leading journalism schools, he is poised to shape the future of journalism.

Even in the context of a multi-billion dollar campaign that it is serious money. He’d been donating to the Democrat Party at all levels for years but the 2016 election win by Trump seems to have sent him off the deep end, convinced that it was down to Russian disinformation and sending him on a crusade to stop it happening again.

He donated millions of dollars to outfits like First Draft, PolitiFact, the Poynter Institute, Columbia University with the Craig Newmark Center for Journalism Ethics and Security ($10 million), City University of New York with the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism ($20 million), . and perhaps most important of all in the Interwebby age, partnered with Google News.

It hasn’t gone all his way: 2020 was a triumph of manipulative news coverage but in 2023 Harvard University shut down one of his big investments, the Harvard Shorenstein Centre (which studied “misinformation”), and despite all this money Trump won in 2024.

But there’s another big private player in the news censorship business, NewsGuard Technologies, which is a Left-wing anti-“misinformation” operation that goes after alt-media websites like blogs, supposedly rating them according to objective criteria. It then sells its ratings services to schools, corporations, 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.

You can see the angle already, and the guys at the long-standing Powerline blog ran into them in 2018:

My name is Jon Allsop and I work for NewsGuard, a new service that reviews news and information websites for credibility and transparency. I’m reaching out because I have some queries about Powerlineblog.com that it would be great if you could answer. I can’t see any explicit disclosure as to who owns and funds the site.

Powerline simply stiff-armed the bastards with a minimal response, but they were back in the big year of 2020:

I’m working on a review of Power Line and am hoping to find a time to chat with one of you (or the appropriate contact) over the phone about the site, as I have a few questions about its editorial process, including its publication of false and misleading content, and its choices regarding transparency.

But this time there were follow-up phone calls and emails, plus – unfortunately for Newsguard – their re-hashing of an old story for 2011. Powerline stiff-armed them again and as John Hinderacker writes:

Back in 2011, I devoted considerable effort–highly successful effort, in fact–to debunking ridiculous charges that were made by leftists against Charles and David Koch and Koch Industries. I had a lot of fun crushing stupid attacks on the Kochs, many of which came from Think Progress, a now-defunct left-wing site. The funny thing about Melissa Goldin’s inquiry is that the exact same question was raised by Think Progress’s desperate crew back in 2011. I responded to it here…. Melissa could have found the answer to her question–which I gave nine years before!–if she had conducted a simple search of our site.

But who needs to do research when it’s all about smearing. As Powerline discovered there is no way for a non-subscriber to find out what Newsguard has told their customers – corporations, advertisers, schools (government agencies) about them or anyone else.

Powerline could stiff them because they don’t care about revenue, being pretty much a private affair. But in 2023 The Federalist, which does rely on such (to a certain extent) ran into it face first, starting with the same civility bullshit that Powerline hit:

My name is Chiara Vercellone and I’m an analyst at NewsGuard Technologies, a service that reviews news and information websites based on a set of credibility criteria, and monitors misinformation trends online. I am reaching out because we are in the process of updating our analysis of TheFederalist.com and I have a few questions about the content published on the site. I am also attaching our currently-published analysis of The Federalist for your reference.

The approach is always the same: fire off a series of hostile questions to the editors of a website about weirdly specific aspects of its coverage and demand fast answers from them in a vain attempt to improve whatever rating NewsGuard’s going to give.

The folks at The Federalist had also gone through the journalist and “fact checking” mill so they knew the game. Ms Vercellone was a journalism graduate from NorthWestern (a fairly prestigious Chicago university) and had previously worked as a “fact checker” for USA Today, a participant in Facebook’s fact-checking program, which brags that when a “fact checker” – that it helps pay for – rates a story as false, it uses that rating to down-rank and kill 80 percent of the internet traffic to that story. That’s what it says in its own corporate communications. Google does the same.

Newsguard flagged five Federalist stories for “false or misleading information“:

  1. The IRS funding for 80,000 new agents.
  2. The actions on January 6, 2021, of Jacob Chansley, the “QAnon Shaman.
  3. NYC Mayor Eric Adams putting caps on meat and dairy consumption (he’s a vegan)
  4. Links between abortion and cancer.
  5. A California bill would legalise, or decriminalise, infanticide.

But when you read the details it’s the obvious scam; Newsguard are not “fact-checking”, they’re arguing about word choice and context and anything else that could see the story bent in the direction they would prefer – the direction taken on the same stories by the MSM they approve. In addition was this problem:

We’ve also seen that articles generally embrace a conservative agenda, which is not disclosed on the site. And articles not categorized as “Opinion” often feature opinionated language.

Except that, as the Federalist pointed out:

The Federalist is a conservative, right-leaning news and opinion website. This is not being hidden from anyone. …Does The New York Times openly declare it is a leftist paper somewhere? Or are we still laboring under the delusion it is objective?
…
the vaunted “paper of record” has defended itself in two separate libel lawsuits by asserting that its reporters can insert their opinions into news stories, without labeling or distinguishing the opinion from fact — even though this is against the Times’ own internal policies. Last I checked, The New York Times had a perfect 100 percent rating from NewsGuard. The Federalist was given a score of 12.5 out of 100, even though we’re far more transparent about our ideological perspective.

They capped things off with a nice piece of snark as they pointed out the following piece of news history about the founder of Newsguard, one Stephen Brill asking whether he had:

…admitted he was wrong to go on TV and dismiss the reporting on Hunter Biden’s laptop as “misinformation” right before the 2020 election? Let us know so we can update The Federalist’s rating of NewsGuard. It’s currently hovering around zero.

As it should be for all such Lefty sites that pompously and deceitfully sell themselves as “fact checkers” and people who can be trusted to judge that news coverage is balanced and accurate. Like the MSM itself I suspect these bullshit artists will soon be on their last legs, and for the same reason; once the scam is uncovered trust will vanish – except for Lefties who need the prop of some Voice of Authority to simply assert “misleading”.