Disinfo cop NewsGuard goes after free-speech lawyer, Olympics narratives as peers fall to scrutiny

Two months after the for-profit business NewsGuard came under congressional investigation for whether its business relationships with domestic and foreign governments are tantamount to state-sponsored censorship, the self-described "only apolitical service rating news sources" is taking on new targets like the Olympics and a high-profile free-speech lawyer.

Known for giving much higher scores to left- than right-leaning media, with potentially existential implications for their advertising revenue, NewsGuard in recent weeks has targeted George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley's influential blog and dismissed evidence-backed narratives from the Paris Olympics as "far-right" and "Kremlin" propaganda.

The entity co-led by former Wall Street Journal publisher Gordon Crovitz is facing comparable scrutiny as the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, which recently shut down under congressional scrutiny and lawsuits by Elon Musk's X and video-sharing platform Rumble, and the Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO), which functionally dissolved in late spring.

Four of GARM's members among the "big six" global advertising agency holding companies have received billions of federal dollars from departments including Defense and Health and Human Services, according to a new analysis by the Foundation for Freedom Online, founded by former Trump administration State Department official Mike Benz.

The U.S. Embassy in Berlin sponsored anti-misinformation seminars that promoted NewsGuard products, and the disinformation cop's board includes Michael Hayden, former CIA and National Security Agency director. A federal court approved expedited legal discovery in May in a lawsuit against State for its work with disinformation cops including NewsGuard.

Newly revealed public records also show NewsGuard briefed the Microsoft "Democracy Forward Team," run by a former member of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission and senior advisor to the Department of Homeland Security's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, at some point before the 2022 midterm elections. 

The two have since spoken openly of their six-year-old relationship, as when NewsGuard said last year they were continuing "cooperation to empower voters with authoritative election information on Bing," Microsoft's little-used search engine.

The public records obtained by Protect the Public's Trust through the University of Washington, whose Center for an Informed Public co-led the Election Integrity Partnership with SIO, show the two entities discussing how to respond to Just the News questions nearly two years ago about the involvement of Hillary Clinton's former campaign manager in EIP.

SIO founder Alex Stamos proposed a response that called JTN reporting "libelous," meaning legally actionable. While CIP Assistant Director for Communications Michael Grass said he liked the "short and direct" proposal, CIP Director Kate Starbird weighed in: "We probably wouldn't use libelous … [sic] but you are free to say that and it's true." 

The eventual email from Stamos called JTN reporting "false" but omitted "libelous." 

GWU's Turley, who has a new book on the "indispensable right" of free speech that opposes federal funding of so-called blacklisting sites, disclosed in late July that he has questions from NewsGuard that he portrayed as an inquisition.

He wrote in a Hill column that NewsGuard reached out about a week after Turley publicly criticized the entity as a state-paid tool to "monitor and effectively blacklist media" that accuse mainstream media of bias.

NewsGuard asked him for the "financial or revenue sources used to support my blog," which does not carry advertising and whose only supposed "financial support would be my wife," Turley said. It falsely claimed he did not post corrections and even "bizarrely" asked why the blog name is written in Latin.

Not long after I ran a column criticizing NewsGuard, the company came knocking to ask about my revenue sources and why I do not notify people that I write from what it views as a conservative or libertarian perspective... https://t.co/hhY0qWFJ4O

— Jonathan Turley (@JonathanTurley) July 28, 2024

It tacitly accused him of false advertising by not disclosing "the site’s content reflects a conservative or libertarian perspective," as judged by NewsGuard, even though NewsGuard doesn't label its co-founder Steven Brill a "diehard liberal," Turley said.

"The blog has thousands of postings that cut across the ideological spectrum," Turley wrote. "What I have not done is suspend my legal judgment when cases touch on the interests of conservatives or Donald Trump." 

NewsGuard's Crovitz responded to Turley, distinguishing his entity from the "left-wing advocacy group" Global Disinformation Index, calling NewsGuard a "journalistic enterprise" that "always reach[es] out for comment before concluding a site fails any of our criteria," and noting it rates Fox News higher than MSNBC for distinguishing news from opinion.

Turley responded that NewsGuard's highlighted distinctions are actually why it's so dangerous, enabling the practice of "censorship by surrogate." Rather than a "market alternative to censorship," as Crovitz called NewsGuard, Turley said "it can be an avenue for censorship."

Writing in The Hill, @JonathanTurley suggests that by rating his website, NewsGuard is censoring him based on anti-conservative bias. Turley's piece relies on several inaccurate assumptions about NewsGuard to make his point. Let's set the record straight. (Thread incoming.) 1/6 pic.twitter.com/iclVk839d4

— NewsGuard (@NewsGuardRating) July 29, 2024

NewsGuard's July 30 newsletter, titled "False Olympics Claims: Terrorism, Crime, and Wardrobe Malfunction," faulted "viral false narratives that frame Paris as a crime-ridden cesspool," including a "fake infographic" that apparently started with a "pro-Kremlin Telegram channel" and an Olympic athlete who was actually robbed outside of Paris before the Games.

In a Monday analysis, FFO said NewsGuard was nitpicking and falsely portraying widespread concerns as obsessions of the "far-right" and Russia, when even French President Emmanuel Macron told France 2 nearly two years ago that "at least half of the crime [in Paris] comes from people who are foreigners, either illegal immigrants or waiting for a residence permit."

Australian cyclist Logan Martin was robbed two days before the Olympics "in a city that is two hours from Paris by train, [and] it seems reasonable to connect this incident to the Paris Olympics" despite an X account's false claim that it happened on "Day 1," FFO said.

The factual claims in the post by Europe Invasion are "far more accurate than not," FFO said, including the theft of "rings, watches, wallets" at the Olympics — based on reports by members of the Japanese rugby and Argentine football teams — and delay in the Argentina-Morocco football game because "Morocco fans stormed the field."

NewsGuard General Manager Matt Skibinski told Just the News it stuck to the false information in the Europe Invasion post, that "BMX racing athlete Logan Martin was robbed in Paris for the Olympics."

"FFO criticized us because the tweet had some other claims in it that were not false. But we never debunked those other claims," he wrote in an email.