NewsGuard and Uncle Sam: Vitamin Deficient Nutrition

NewsGuard and Uncle Sam: Just the Beginning of the End for the First Amendment? (full series)
The Nutrition Label | Vitamin Deficient Nutrition
History-Making Hoaxes | Disclosure

Vitamin Deficient Nutrition

The grading criteria reveals the nutrition labels to be pure nonsense.[1] The 100 points are assigned as follows:

1. “Does not repeatedly publish false or egregiously misleading content” (22 points)
2. “Gathers and presents information responsibly” (18 points)
3. “Has effective practices for correcting errors” (12.5 points)
4. “Handles the difference between news and opinion responsibly” (12.5 points)
5. “Avoids deceptive headlines” (10 points)
6. “Website discloses ownership and financing” (7.5 points)
7. “Clearly labels advertising” (7.5 points)
8. “Reveals who’s in charge, including possible conflicts of interest” (5 points)
9. “The site provides the names of content creators, along with either contact or biographical information” (5 points)

Each of these is graded on a pass/fail basis. A source must score 100 percent to receive a “High Credibility” label, and almost all the big regime media blue bloods, such as the Washington Post, ace the test.

But the system is cooked against everyone else.

Even the people who crafted the U.S. Constitution probably couldn’t get a 100 percent. One of a handful of the most critical founding documents of the American republic, The Federalist Papers (no relation to The Federalist publication noted earlier) were a series of essays published in newspapers and carefully making the case for ratification of the U.S. Constitution.

The authors were patriots James Madison, John Jay, and Alexander Hamilton. But flouting NewsGuard’s supposed “journalism” standards, they all published anonymously under the nom de plume “Publius” and didn’t reveal their funders. They kept these secrets from readers because each had attended the Constitutional Convention and writing about its deliberations violated an agreement to keep that confidential.[2]

Having failed to abide by NewsGuard criteria 6, 8 and 9, the nutrition rating for the first drafts of The Federalist Papers would have been just 82.5 percent. This is in the middling region of a “Generally Credible” judgment from NewsGuard, and well short of the “High Credibility” standard.

Such absurd results are as common as they are predictable. C-SPAN, which has spent the last three decades just pointing a neutral, judgment-free camera at the federal government and letting it roll without critical analysis of what transpires, received a ludicrous 87.5 percent nutrition rating. This honest gatherer of information was dinged 12.5 points because the network “does not meet NewsGuard’s standard for having effective practices for correcting errors.” History.com, the website of the History Channel, receives just a 70 percent label, RealClearPolitics a 62 percent, downgrading both to a nutrition rating of “Credible with Exceptions.”

But search “Hunter Biden laptop” in a Google browser with the nutrition label app and it returns 100 percent scores next to all stories from Politico, NPR, the Washington Post, the New York Times, and other pillars of the regime media.[3] By contrast, all New York Post stories are scored at 69.5 percent, with 18 of the missing points removed because NewsGuard decided the newspaper “does not gather and present information responsibly.” (See screenshot below.)

When the laptop story first broke, those supposedly 100 percent nutrition sites quite irresponsibly promoted a hoked-up letter from dozens of biased former intelligence officials that implied the story was Russian disinformation.[4] Responding to outrage over its refusal to cover the laptop story, NPR’s managing editor tweeted, “We don’t want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories, and we don’t want to waste the listeners’ and readers’ on stories that are just pure distractions.”[5]

Were all these purely nutritious outlets practicing “misinformation,” “disinformation,” or “does not gather and present information responsibly”? Or all three at once?

In the next installment, the nutrition labels have helped cover up major hoaxes perpetuated by news outlets.

Notes

[1] NewsGuard Technologies, “Website Rating Process and Criteria,” https://www.newsguardtech.com/ratings/rating-process-criteria/.

[2] History.com Editors. “Federalist Papers,” A&E Television Networks, https://www.history.com/topics/early-us/federalist-papers.

[3] Google.com, search of “hunter biden laptop.”

[4] Ken Braun, “The Twitter Files and the Ministry of Truth Media,” Capital Research Center, June 12, 2023, https://capitalresearch.org/article/the-ministry-of-truth-media-part-2/.

[5] NPR Public Editor (@NPRpubliceditor), “Why haven’t you seen any stories from NPR about the NY Post’s Hunter Biden story?,” Twitter, October 22, 2022, 10:15 AM, https://twitter.com/NPRpubliceditor/status/1319281101223940096.