The Patriot Post® · NewsGuard Targets Jonathan Turley

NewsGuard, the self-appointed leftist arbiter of “trustworthy” news and media outlets, has set its sights on a well-regarded critic: George Washington University professor and constitutional scholar Jonathan Turley.

As regular readers of The Patriot Post know, we in our humble little shop have had our own run-ins with this for-profit “fact-checking” censorship outfit. But we are unabashedly conservative, so it comes as no surprise.

But why is NewsGuard now targeting Turley, who has repeatedly noted that he is a registered Democrat who describes his political views as traditionally liberal/libertarian? Apparently, this real-life Ministry of Truth doesn’t like his criticism of the media “fact-checking” industry and his commitment to defending Americans’ basic constitutional rights, especially freedom of speech.

Indeed, Turley names NewsGuard specifically, noting that following his column in The Hill, in which he criticized the organization as “a rating being used to warn users, advertisers, educators and funders away from media outlets based on how it views the outlets’ ‘credibility and transparency,’” he was contacted by the outfit. Turley suspects it was that column which brought down the wrath of NewsGuard. “I have previously criticized NewsGuard as one of the most sophisticated operations being used to ‘white list’ and ‘black list’ sites,” he writes.

Furthermore, Turley points out that in his new book, The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage, he exposes these media “fact-check” organizations as part of “a massive censorship system that one federal court called ‘Orwellian.’” He adds, “For any site criticizing the media or the Biden administration, the most chilling words today are ‘I’m from NewsGuard and I am here to rate you.’”

NewsGuard is part of a cabal of establishment media outlets seeking to elevate their own biased perspective above all others. Its rating system is designed to call into question the reporting and news analysis of inconvenient media while at the same time painting Leftmedia outfits as the heralds of truth.

Turley insightfully observes that NewsGuard’s cofounders, Steven Brill and Gordon Crovitz, “want their company to be the media version of the Standard & Poor’s rating for financial institutions. However, unlike the S&P, which looks at financial reports, NewsGuard rates highly subjective judgments like ‘credibility’ based on whether they publish ‘clearly and significantly false or egregiously misleading’ information.”

As noted above, the true aim of NewsGuard is the censorship of views and opinions with which the media establishment disagrees.

Interestingly, in Turley’s case, when NewsGuard contacted him, it asked the following question: “I cannot find any information on the site that would signal to readers that the site’s content reflects a conservative or libertarian perspective, as is evident in your articles. Why is this perspective not disclosed to give readers a sense of the site’s point of view?”

Turley says the objective of his blog is to express a variety of views on various topics. He’s a thinker, and he says that this attempt to label him is an attempt to censor him, to put him in a box as out of bounds. He writes, “Apparently from where NewsGuard reviewers sit, I am a de facto conservative or libertarian who needs to wear a digital bell to warn others. It is a system that includes what Elon Musk correctly called ‘the advertising boycott racket.’”

Turley adds, “They have commoditized free speech in blacklisting and potentially silencing others. If you are the Standard & Poor’s of political discourse, you can rate sites out of existence by making them a type of junk bond blog.”

Thus, NewsGuard is targeting Turley because he’s exposing its speech-suppressing racket. So much for the “trust” industry.