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FCC Commissioner Gets Hoodwinked About NewsGuard
By Steven Brill and Gordon Crovitz, NewsGuard Co-CEOs
FCC Commissioner and soon-to-be chairman Brendan Carr has criticized NewsGuard for “censorship” after being misled by low-rated (and sour grapes-motivated) Newsmax. In a letter to major tech companies, Carr cited false reporting by Newsmax (which gets a 20/100 NewsGuard Trust Score) to claim we deliberately rate conservative sites lower than liberal sites. In fact, our apolitical criteria result in no such bias. Read the facts here in our response.
We’re grateful that commentators have pointed out that the would-be censor here is the government official — not us.
Ari Cohn of the free-speech advocacy group Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) wrote, "The Constitution protects the expression of groups like NewsGuard, which simply provide opinions on the credibility of content and information sources that other services may choose to adopt or ignore at their discretion."
Jacob Sullum wrote in the libertarian magazine Reason that "Carr's complaint is puzzling for several reasons,” explaining, “First, his claim that NewsGuard is violating ‘Americans' constitutional freedoms’ is legally nonsensical, since the First Amendment constrains government action, not the decisions of private businesses. Second, the First Amendment protects NewsGuard's commercial activities, which include researching news outlets, evaluating them, offering guidance to advertisers, and selling filters based on its credibility assessments."
Sullum also wrote that "Carr's implicit charge that NewsGuard is biased against conservatives ... does not seem to have a firm empirical basis."
Read more from FIRE and Reason here.
As we told Reason, "We find it ironic that sites like Newsmax report falsely about us, misleading government officials into threatening us, then call us censors, even though we're First Amendment absolutists." But in the spirit of Thanksgiving, let us end on a note of gratitude: We at NewsGuard are grateful to operate in a country where the First Amendment protects free speech from censors — and gives our Reality Check readers the right to know what’s really going on.
Steven Brill and Gordon Crovitz are Co-CEOs of NewsGuard.
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