NewsGuard says it will remain “apolitical” in the aftermath of the deadly terror attack by Hamas militants against Israel, and the latter’s response — though it continues to give a clean bill of health to the New York Times, which engaged in stealth edits on key stories about the conflict.
“NewsGuard rates every news outlet based on the same apolitical journalistic criteria, one of which assesses whether the outlet gathers and presents information responsibly,” NewsGuard General Manager Matt Skibinski told Breitbart News.
Steven Brill and Gordon Crovitz, co-CEOs of NewsGuard (D Dipasupil and Stephen Chernin /Getty)
Commenting on how corporate media outlets like the New York Times reported on the Gaza hospital story, Skibinski said, “If a news outlet presented initial, unverified reports about the bombing as factual information, and if that were part of an ongoing pattern of reporting unsubstantiated information as fact, then that could cause a news outlet to fail this criterion.”
“We’re keeping close track of how different outlets reported on this story and which outlets may have given more certainty than they should have to initial, unverified reports. Ultimately, any changes to a publisher’s score will be based on assessing this within the context of our nine apolitical journalistic criteria.”
NewsGuard, which has recently faced scrutiny from X/Twitter owner Elon Musk, claims it is an independent tracker of misinformation, advising advertisers, tech companies, governments, and even schoolteachers on what news sources to trust and distrust.
In practice, the news sources it rates as untrustworthy are overwhelmingly conservative, while news outlets that promoted conspiracy theories like Russiagate and the Steele Dossier, like MSNBC and the New York Times, are routinely given 100-percent trustworthy ratings.
Breitbart News also reached out to the Global Disinformation Index (GDI), an organization with a similar mission to NewsGuard, which was caught red-handed advising advertising companies to financially throttle conservative media. The GDI, which has posted no new tweets since January and no new posts on its blog since September, did not offer a response.
Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News. He is the author of #DELETED: Big Tech’s Battle to Erase the Trump Movement and Steal The Election.