Can NewsGuard Make Journalism Safe Again?
Just as runners hope top notch shoes will enhance their marathon performance, NewsGuard gives credible news organizations a leg up in the footrace between fact and fiction.
A four-year-old effort by journalism entrepreneur Steve Brill and Gordon Crovitz, a former publisher of the Wall Street Journal, NewsGuard grades news organizations on their editorial integrity much in the same way Standard and Poor grades corporate finance or J.D. Powers differentiates a car that sizzles from a lemon.
With a staff of about 40 journalists, NewsGuard’s database now includes some 8,000 media organizations around the globe, ranging from heavyweights like the New York Times to the DailyMemphian.com, an online only non-profit that covers metropolitan Memphis, Tennessee. NewsGuard rates news organizations in America and beyond it shores, including the UK, Canada, Germany, France, Italy, and Austria.
Media heavyweights flush with resources, such as the Times or the Washington Post, fare well in NewsGuard ratings. Both got scores of 100, the best the organization awards to journalistic organizations that embrace time-tested standards of news integrity. NewsGuard flunked some well-known competitors, though, such as the lefties at MSNBC (52 out of 100) and right wingers at Fox News (57 out of 100). Only about 15 percent of the media organizations it rates got perfect scores of 100. In contrast about 40 percent scored less than 60, which is the dividing line between trustworthy and untrustworthy.
Imperfections plague any rating system and NewsGuard is no exception. The organization and its credibility scores generate controversy. One May 2022 academic study suggested that NewsGuard’s ratings had limited effects on news quality and failed to reduce misperceptions in the media. NewsGuard has its own White Paper that suggests otherwise. Nonetheless, I think the value the company brings to today’s troubled world of journalism outweighs any shortcomings.
photo by Matthew Guay
Transparency is one of the nine values NewsGuard champions in its ratings. And, so, in the spirit of the full disclosure, Jim Warren, a long-time colleague, is executive editor of NewsGuard. I usually don’t write about organizations that employ good friends, but I decided to write about NewsGuard because of my long interest in journalistic innovation, an elusive target for journalists but also one I intend to touch upon from time to time. I think NewsGuard deserves more credit for embracing a brand of fresh thinking that traditional news organizations must emulate to survive in a world where politics and media mix like bourbon and branch water.
NewsGuard’s rating system also has an intangible educational benefit; it distills and demonstrates the best practices and values that distinguish professional news organizations from the opportunists and purveyors of misinformation that pollute the nation’s news landscape.
Warren says NewsGuard’s journalists dig deep into the pros and cons of news websites, which is what they rate. They then score them on nine yardsticks of credibility. “Does not repeatedly publish false content” is the value Newsguard weighs most heavily, but the company also ranks organizations on other standards, such as avoiding deceptive headlines and disclosure of ownership and finance. I find one element of the rating system wanting — the lack of any yardstick to measure the commitment of resources to news gathering. The New York Times gets a NewsGuard score of 100 and the Chicago Tribune gets a score of 92.5, suggesting the two organizations are in the same league. One just outranks the other. NewsGuard lowered the Tribune score by 7.5 points because it failed to disclose it was owned by Alden Capital, a New York hedge fund that has a terrible reputation.
However, there is a world of difference between the two that is not captured in the scores. The Times devotes far more resources to news gathering whereas a string of owners and publishers at the Tribune have slashed news budgets and staff.
“We are not judging the depth of content or resources allocated to the business,” says Warren. “We are assessing the trustworthiness of the product itself, in this case websites and credibility of the information they present, not the depth and breadth of their reporting. Can you trust the website? Can you trust the information? Does it tell you who owns it? Who edits it? Does it run corrections? Does it differentiate between news and opinion? Does it clearly delineate between news and advertising? That’s what we are asking. We are not suggesting that by giving a small radio station and the New York Times each a high score that they are in any way, shape or form equal when it comes to the substance of their offerings. Just can you trust them?”
When NewsGuard subscribers ($4.95 per month) want to check out a news organization that NewsGuard covers, they and simply launch a computer search on newsguardtech.com for the desired website. Assuming NewsGuard rates the site, the website will have one of four labels adjacent to its name. A green label (a score of 60 or above) connotes a trusted organization, a red label (score below 60) is not to be trusted. NewsGuard employs a gold label to identify satire, like The Onion, which uses news as a basis for humor. And a site receives a gray platform rating if it primarily hosts content directly published by users with limited vetting. When one hovers the cursor over the NewsGuard label, a short summary of the score pops up. For a deeper dive, there’s a detailed “Nutrition Label” that delves into an organization’s ownership, history, practices and why it received the rating with specific examples of any trust issues the staff found. The news organization is invited to respond to NewsGuard’s findings.
The company also blends human and artificial intelligence to expose and track disinformation campaigns that spread online with a tool it calls “Misinformation Fingerprints.” The company produces independent journalism on organizations or websites that practice — or slip into — shoddy journalism, such as Trump Social, the former president’s version of Twitter, and TikTok, a site popular with young people. The site contains some terrific journalism. I will give some examples in another piece on another date.
Overall, NewsGuard’s not perfect but it’s much better than anything else out there. We live in a world where lies compete on equal footing with facts and context. The traditional news industry, of which I was a part, did a terrible job educating the public about the values that shaped our news reports. We are now paying a price for that lapse.
NewsGuard is a good first step in the long road to correcting journalism’s errors.
—James O’Shea
NewsGuard’s Nine Yardsticks of Media Integrity
Perfect Score Adds UP to 100.
If a website fails on, say, No. 2, which is worth 18 points, it will receive a score of 82.
Does not repeatedly publish false content – 22 points
Gathers and presents information responsibly – 18 points
Regularly corrects or clarifies errors – 12.5 points
Handles the difference between news and opinion responsibly - 12.5 points
Avoids deceptive headlines – 10 points
Website discloses ownership and financing – 7.5 points
Clearly labels advertising – 7.5 points
Reveals who’s in charge, including possible conflicts of interest – 5 points
The site provides the names of content creators, along with either contact or biographical information — 5 points