What is "NewsGuard?"

And why is Matt Taibbi obsessed with it?

Yesterday I examined Matt Taibbi’s efforts to deliver the Senate to the Republicans next year by defeating innocuous but publicly female Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar. One of the pieces of what he asserts is evidence that she should be face of the Big Tech Censorship Complex is the relationship between the Pentagon and an entity called “NewsGuard.” This is how Taibbi describes the relationship between NewsGuard and the Department of Defense:

“On September 7, 2021, the U.S. Department of Defense gave an award of $749,387 to Newsguard Technologies, a private service that scores media outlets on “reliability” and “trust.” According to the suit, roughly 40,000 subscribers buy Newsguard subscriptions, getting in return a system of “Nutrition Labels” supposedly emphasizing “safe” content.”

The Pentagon, total budget of $1.8 TRILLION spent a little less than $750,000 on a contract with this company that rates the reliability of various websites. I don’t have the math chops to calculate a percentage that small. If anyone knows how much the Pentagon spends on paperclips, please tell me because if the paperclip expense is less than the Newsguard contract, I will send that person a $50 gift card to the restaurant of their choice. (Yes, I will do that.) It should also be noted that Taibbi himself repeats Newguard’s statement that “Our Pentagon contract is a single-digit percent of our revenues.” He later in the same piece calls the Pentagon the “major” client of Newsguard, contradicting the quote he uses a few sentences earlier, without providing any evidence to support his claim. So, a company gets a small amount of its revenues from something less than a rounding error in the Pentagon budget, and this amounts to a way the Pentagon censors dissidents. Yeah, Matt, Stalin would be envious.

What does Newsguard do for the Pentagon’s pocket change? Newsguard describes itself as providing "transparent tools to counter misinformation for readers, brands, and democracies. " Its ratings process is described here. I actually paid to subscribe to the service to see what it says about Substack and Matt Taibbi. It says nothing. Substack isn’t even listed as a platform, which Newsguard itself describes as “A site receives a platform rating if it primarily hosts content directly published by users with limited vetting. Information from platform sites may or may not be reliable. We do not rate these sites according to the nine journalistic criteria, but we do provide a description of each site and its practices.” At least for ordinary users, Newsguard doesn’t provide any information that would deter us from the sites.

In the linked piece, Taibbi makes a great deal out of the fact that Newsguard gives a low reliability rating to Consortium News. My results from the Newsguard phone app show that Consortium gets a 47.5 out of a possible 100 points. When asked by Green Greenwald in this interview to explain the harm caused to websites when Newsguard gives them a low rating, Taibbi responds:

“NewsGuard has roughly 40,000 subscribers. A lot of them are big institutional customers like libraries and universities. Basically, imagine students at a big state university will plug into the library or maybe even just through their dormitory system and they’ll go looking for research about say, the Maidan Revolution in Ukraine. And they’ll call up one from CBS News, which has a big healthy nutrition label from NewsGuard on it. And that’s what they actually call them, “Nutrition labels.” And if they call up Consortium, which says the United States was involved in the Maidan Coup, it will say it’s anti-US, unreliable, unsafe, disinformation, and so on and so on.”

The key word in that sentence is “imagine.” Taibbi does not provide any specific examples of any person actually rejecting any particular source based on a Newsguard search, so any harm is speculative. A bit of further analysis of his example demonstrates just how bad this example is. If a student is searching for sources for a paper or project, that student needs to know that the sources are accurate. Substacks, including mine, are at the absolute best good secondary sources. No one vets the work on this platform to determine whether the product is based on good original sources or absolute nonsense. Using bad sources will get the student a failing grade. Thus, Newsguard actually provides a service to the student. Taibbi never explains why knowing that a website is reliable is a bad idea.

One legitimate question is whether Newsguard’s vetting process actually produces good results. Taibbi NEVER discusses their process at all; he merely asserts that the Pentagon contract, that $750K out of $1.8 trillion, makes everything they do useless. I don’t have the skills to make that determination, but apparently neither does Taibbi. The difference between him and me is that nobody pays me to know this stuff.