STUDY: NewsGuard Ratings System STILL Heavily Biased in Favor of Left-Wing Media Outlets

Discredited leftist website ratings firm NewsGuard has had a year to prove that its ratings system isn’t prejudiced against conservative media, but it’s failing miserably. A new analysis shows that liberal media outlets were rated 25 points higher on average than right-leaning media outlets illustrates how NewsGuard’s self-projection as a credibility gatekeeper is a complete joke.

MRC Free Speech America analyzed the NewsGuard ratings of media outlets based on a list compiled by AllSides that classified their “bias” on a left-to-right scale. The average NewsGuard score for the “left” and “lean left” outlets — which included leftist outlets like USA Today — was a “green shield” rating of 91/100. USA Today was embroiled in a scandal after former reporter Gabriela Miranda was found to have fabricated sources. While the average rating for “right” and “lean right” outlets — which included Fox News, The Daily Wire and New York Post — was a low 66/100. 

That’s a 25-point disparity.  

This study was published just over one year after MRC Free Speech America released its first comprehensive study analyzing NewsGuard’s bias on Dec. 13, 2021, which showed a 93/100 to 66/100 disparity in favor of “left” and “lean left” media outlets over “right” and “lean right” media outlets.

NewsGuard’s bias has barely budged in over 365 days of ever-changing nutrition labels either praising or demonizing the “credibility” of news outlets. But NewsGuard as an organization is in no place to virtue-signal about “credibility” given that its CEO Steven Brill tried to cast the now-verified Hunter Biden laptop scandal as a Russian “hoax” just prior to the 2020 presidential election. Even after the emails from the laptop were verified, NewsGuard maintained perfect scores for outlets like Politico, The Washington Post and USA Today, which all interfered in the 2020 election by trying to bury the Biden family scandal as some kind of disinformation operation. 

Outlets like The New York Times and The Washington Post have proceeded to cite NewsGuard as a neutral journalism referee, perhaps because of the glowing treatment they get from the firm. Both The Washington Post and The New York Times received 100/100 scores from NewsGuard. The Washington Post was recently caught stealth-editing a report that falsely labeled journalists Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss as “conservative.” The erroneous characterization came after both reporters’ separate  coverage exposing the internal communications behind Twitter’s massive campaign to censor speech and ban former President Donald Trump. The Times recently acted as a public relations firm for communist China during the COVID-19 pandemic. One grotesque example of glorifying China’s draconian zero-COVID-19 controls appeared in the paper in February 2021: “Power, Patriotism and 1.4 Billion People: How China Beat the Virus and Roared Back.” (NOTE: New York Times and The Washington Post were posted in the AllSides list and were included in MRC Free Speech America’s analysis.)

AllSides listed 31 total outlets as “left” or “lean left” and 25 outlets listed as “right” or “lean right.” AllSides included the opinion sections of news websites as separate entities. MRC Free Speech America excluded any outlet that was characterized as “opinion” to keep the focus on news organizations for the analysis. The much higher scores for outlets classified as “left” and “lean left” look ridiculous in light of the content that they’ve published and promoted.

BuzzFeed News continues to host the bogus January 2017 Steele dossier it published that made erroneous claims about alleged collusion between Trump and Russia. However, NewsGuard still gives the outlet a perfect 100/100 score. In an email to the Media Research Center sent earlier this year, NewsGuard General Manager Matt Skibinski justified his company’s perfect “100/100” rating for BuzzFeed News by noting the five-year timespan since the dossier’s publication and the fact that the dossier article is one “single story.” That’s despite the fact that top government officials and Democrat lawmakers wielded the Steele dossier as part of a protracted political investigation that cost $25.2 million total in taxpayer dollars, according to Fox Business, and paralyzed the country for two years.   

BuzzFeed News even tried protecting disgraced CNN Chief Legal Analyst Jeffrey Toobin after he was caught with his pants down masturbating during a Zoom call for The New Yorker, where he was a staff writer. In a piece disguised as news and not labeled opinion, BuzzFeed’s asinine headline made it appear like people generally do what Toobin did: “Jeffrey Toobin Can’t Be The Only Person Masturbating On Work Zoom Calls.”

BuzzFeed “senior culture writer” Scaachi Koul wielded Scripture to wokescold Toobin’s critics: “Haven’t we all done something on a work call that, in normal circumstances, we’d never do during a meeting? Let he without sin cast the first stone.” An outlet like that deserves a perfect score, according to NewsGuard.

Despite a glaring journalistic scandal involving USA Today publishing multiple stories with fabricated sources, MRC Free Speech America exposed on June 24 how NewsGuard still maintained the publication’s perfect 100/100 rating. That score remains unchanged as of Dec. 13. USA Today’s fact-checking operation has also been shown to peddle fake news to protect left-wing politicians. In a so-called June 30, 2020, “fact-check”, the outlet tried deflecting from the historical fact that Democrats started the white supremacist Ku Klux Klan and were responsible for the Civil War by drawing a flimsy distinction between the Democratic Party and Democrats:

Historians agree that although factions of the Democratic Party did majorly contribute to the Civil War’s start and KKK’s founding, it is inaccurate to say the party is responsible for either.

The headline for the propagandistic fact-check was deceptive: “Fact check: Democratic Party did not found the KKK, did not start the Civil War.” The Democratic Party may not have officially started the Civil War, but the Confederacy was indisputably made up of strident Democrats, which USA Today arbitrarily glossed over to protect the left. In fact, one of the KKK’s founding members was Confederate veteran Nathaniel Bedford Forrest, a Democrat. But according to NewsGuard’s nutrition label, USA Today “[A]voids deceptive headlines” and “[g]athers and presents information responsibly.” 

The bias gets even more extreme. Of all the “lean right” news outlets listed by AllSides, The Federalist scored the worst with a failing 12.5/100 score, the same score it held at the time of MRC Free Speech America’s first study. After a year, NewsGuard is still criticizing The Federalist’s questioning of the efficacy of masks for COVID-19, even though liberal CNBC (not on the AllSides list, but has a “95” NewsGuard rating) cited a study showing that cloth masks were only 37 percent effective at filtering out virus particles. Another August 2021 preprint study did not find an “association between mask mandates or use and reduced COVID-19 spread in US states.” 

NewsGuard’s skewed ratings become even more outrageous in light of the outlets it considers more credible than The Federalist.

Communist China state propaganda outlet Global Times got a 39.5/100 NewsGuard rating, 27 points higher than The Federalist. Global Times scored a green checkmark for meeting the following NewsGuard criteria: “Does not repeatedly publish false content,” despite the fact that it is literally a state propaganda outlet. The Federalist supposedly failed that standard. It’s worth noting that Global Times is the outlet that threatened Australia with becoming “cannon fodder” if it were to support Taiwan. (NOTE: Global Times was not included in the AllSides list and was not tallied in MRC Free Speech America’s calculation.) [Emphasis added.]

NewsGuard apparently doesn’t appreciate it when its bias is exposed for the world to see.

NewsGuard — at the time of MRC Free Speech America’s first study exposing its blatant bias —  tried to accuse MRC of “cherry-pick[ing]” outlets even though the study used another organization’s list and despite MRC having no hand in compiling that list. The liberal Poynter Institute cited two media experts who shared “praise for the stated methods for rating bias” by AllSides. Poynter is the same institution that attempted to blacklist 29 conservative outlets in 2019 and is funded by prominent liberal billionaires, including George Soros and Pierre Omidyar. 

After complaining that MRC “cherry-picked” sites to include in its 2021 study, Skibinski proceeded to cherry-pick sites in an attempt to prove NewsGuard…