‘It’s nuts!’ Influential media ‘watchdog’ awards WaPo a perfect score

A discredited media watchdog group has claimed that the Washington Post’s otherwise sometimes shoddy reporting is 100 percent reliable.

NewsGuard, a so-called media watchdog group that’s in the business of propping up the corporate press and attacking independent media, uses “Nutrition Labels” to rate the reliability of news websites.

Why are NewsGuard’s labels relevant? For two reasons.

#1. Its software is being used in schools, libraries, hospitals, and other public facilities.

#2. It has a sub-product, BrandGuard, that’s “used by advertisers and the agencies that represent them, to ensure their ads don’t appear alongside news stories and at media outlets to which NewsGuard assigns a low rating,” according to journalist Paul Bond.

“Insiders at multiple media outlets [said] that many companies arbitrarily choose a 70% NewsGuard rating as a minimum threshold before they’ll consider buying an ad, notably just above the 69.5% rating it gives to Fox News,” Bond reported for Just The News.

The bottom line is that NewsGuard has a lot of influence, in that its ratings can lead to a news site either suffering a loss in traffic and advertising or getting a boost in traffic and advertising.

The problem is that NewsGuard is innately a left-wing for-profit operation that exists to serve the interests of the Democrat Party.

And so not surprisingly, right-wing sources like Breitbart News, The Daily Wire, and BizPac Review always boast fairly poor ratings, while left-wing sources like the Post, HuffPost, and even The Atlantic boast absolutely terrific scores.

The Post in particular boasts a 100 percent “Nutrition Label” score despite the paper, one, having propagated the Russian collusion delusion hoax and conspiracy theory, and two, having claimed that Hunter Biden’s otherwise real laptop was somehow fake.

“It’s nuts,” one media executive who’s familiar with NewsGuard’s chicanery told Bond. “They hold different outlets to different standards. It’s not an unbiased tool.”

“It’s arbitrary categories with arbitrary weighting from people who think they know best because they were once journalists. It’s terrible, to begin with, and a shame it ever got traction,” the exec added.

If and when an outlet receives a negative score from NewsGuard, the watchdog will usually provide tips on what can be done to improve the rating. The aforementioned media executive was told by NewsGuard that his site’s opinion pieces made them feel “uncomfortable.”

“Who are they to say to say what our audience and advertisers should be comfortable with?” the executive asked Bond. “It’s like they saw a space to launch a company to bully conservative news sites and promote the ones they like. They don’t look at every story, they pull out the ones they disagree with to downgrade your newsroom.”

NewsGuard for its part claims its ratings criteria are based on “apolitical criteria of journalistic practice” and that it was founded as “an alternative to government censorship or the continued dominance of the secret ratings of news publishers by the social media companies and left-wing advocacy groups.”

Of course, conservatives don’t buy this. It doesn’t help that one of the U.S. intelligence figures who signed the infamous letter claiming the Hunter Biden laptop was fake, retired Gen. Michael Hayden, serves as an adviser to NewsGuard’s board.

And it also doesn’t help that there are oodles of conservative publishers who can attest to NewsGuard’s unfair practices.

Case in point:

Vivek Saxena

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