House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) announced Thursday that he is launching an investigation into a news ratings system that seeks to protect against misinformation by ranking news and information sites based on in its trustworthiness, trustworthiness and financial conflict of interests.
Comer said the investigation will focus “on NewsGuard’s impact on First Amendment protected speech and its potential to serve as a non-transparent agent of censorship campaigns.”
In a letter to NewsGuard’s executive directors, veteran news executives Steven Brill and Gordon Crovitz, Comer requested documents about the company’s contracts with federal agencies and “its adherence to its own policies designed to protect against the appearance of bias,” including how the company avoids conflicts of interest.
“The Committee seeks to make an independent determination as to whether NewsGuard’s intervention into protected speech was in any way sponsored by a federal, state, local or foreign government,” Comer wrote in his letter.
“The Committee does not take issue with a business entity providing other companies and customers with data-driven analytics to protect their brands. Instead, we are concerned about the potential involvement of government entities in interfering with free speech. Veracity and transparency about the purpose and origin of consultations and the management of conflicts of interest that may impact the public good are also relevant”, added Comer in the letter.
NewsGuard is a web extension that evaluates the trustworthiness of news sources, in what appears as a nutrition label. The scores come from a team of “expert journalists” who rate editors on a scale of 0 to 100, based on “a set of apolitical criteria of journalistic practice,” according to the website.
Factors include whether the site repeatedly publishes “false or blatantly misleading content,” whether it presents information “responsibly,” whether it has “effective practices for correcting errors,” and whether it treats opinion and news differently. Other criteria include avoiding misleading headlines, disclosing ownership and financing, and disclosing potential conflicts of interest.
“We hope to clear up the committee’s misunderstanding of our work for the Department of Defense,” Crovitz said in a statement to The Hill. “Our work for the Pentagon has been exclusively related to hostile disinformation efforts carried out by operations linked to the Russian, Chinese and Iranian governments that target Americans and our allies.”
Crovitz, a former editor at The Wall Street Journal, also praised NewsGuard as “the only apolitical service” that rates media outlets, saying, “the others are digital platforms with their secret ratings or left-wing partisan advocacy groups.” .
He noted that the rating system resulted in positive and negative scores for right-wing and left-wing outlets.
“Under NewsGuard’s apolitical ratings system, many conservative outlets outperform similar left-leaning brands: The Daily Caller outperforms The Daily Beast, the Daily Wire outperforms the Daily Kos, Fox News outperforms MSNBC, and The Wall Street Journal outperforms New York Times,” he wrote.
This story originally appeared on thehill.com read the full story
