The Patriot Post® · In Brief: NewsGuard's School Indoctrination
We’ve certainly had our beef with NewsGuard over the years. The self-appointed arbiter of truth rates news and analysis sites like The Patriot Post and grades them on supposedly objective criteria. But that skews heavily left, meaning we and other conservative news sites suffer from yet another “fact-checking” Big Tech entity with the power to squelch free speech.
John Tillman, CEO of the American Culture Project, says the problem is expanding in schools.
Under the guise of fighting “misinformation,” millions of K-12 students are being funneled toward hard-left media content. They’re being primed for a life of leftist activism.
While public education has long leaned left, the widespread and deliberate steering of students toward liberal media sites has been happening for only the last two years. In 2022, the American Federation of Teachers — a powerful teachers union with 1.7 million members — announced a partnership with a third-party company called NewsGuard. The company wants teachers to ensure that tens of millions of students aren’t “misled by dubious outlets and spam sites posing as ‘news.’” The partnership even makes NewsGuard’s services available to students outside of school on their personal devices.
NewsGuard bills itself as providing “reliability ratings for news outlets,” but in practice, it discriminates against right-of-center media. The typical left-leaning outlet gets an A, but on the right, the average is a D. When students are looking for sources for papers or trying to keep up with the news, they’re pushed toward decidedly slanted outlets. Should Israel call a cease-fire with Hamas? Check. Is America systemically racist? Check. Is another government program the solution to this, that, and the other social or economic problem? Check, check, always check.
That the American Federation of Teachers has embraced this tool is telling. This teachers union is among the most leftist organizations in the United States, and in NewsGuard, it has found a partner to help indoctrinate students in a far-left worldview. But the problem doesn’t end with the discouragement of students clicking on stories from right-leaning media outlets. NewsGuard works in a way that makes it harder for such outlets to survive.
Tillman explains that NewGuard works with ad agencies, which end up strangling low-rated websites of much-needed revenue. Fortunately, your humble team here at The Patriot Post does not live or die by advertising but by the generous support of our readers. Nevertheless, Tillman is right to sound the alarm in large part because the AFT “isn’t the only entity using NewsGuard,” and NewsGuard isn’t “the only company advancing the liberal agenda under the guise of fact-checking and media reporting.”
He warns:
Today’s college students are radical enough, setting up shanty encampments, becoming apologists for antisemites, and engaging in vandalism and violence. Imagine how much worse things will be when today’s high school students, trained to believe that The New York Times and NPR are oracles of truth, find themselves on the college campus.