GOP House Oversight panel widens probe on NewsGuard, requests information on government contracts

The House Oversight Committee is widening its probe into NewsGuard Technologies, Inc., the for-profit entity dedicated hunting down “misinformation” in the news media.

The GOP-led committee is seeking all contacts the group has with any federal government entity, following a briefing from NewsGuard that showed its close work with several federal agencies. 

“The Committee on Oversight and Accountability is continuing to investigate the impact of NewsGuard on protected First Amendment speech and its potential to serve as a non- transparent agent of censorship campaigns,” committee Chairman Rep. James Comer wrote to NewsGuard’s executives. “Our investigation has particularly focused on abuse of government authority to censor American citizens under the guise of protecting them from so-called misinformation.”

According to information NewsGuard handed over to the committee, the company performed work for the Defense Department, the Joint Research Centre of the European Union and the Global Engagement Center, a subagency of the State Department. The briefing also revealed work with U.S. Cyber Command and the State Department more broadly. 

NewsGuard's government work is concerning because federal agencies are “rapidly expanding into the censorship sphere," says Comer, a Kentucky Republican. 

"For example, one search of government grants and contracts from 2016 through 2023 revealed that there were 538 separate grants and 36 different government contracts specifically to address ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation,’” Comer wrote. 

He also cited revelations from the Twitter Files, which showed how the federal government pressured the private company to censor disapproved narratives on its platform, which heightened during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

NewsGuard’s website shows that it partnered with the State Department, the Defense Department, and the World Health Organization to combat “COVID-19 misinformation.” 

The organization also had a COVID-19 Misinformation Tracking Center which flagged sites for spreading coronavirus “myths.”

NewsGuard has become the subject of public scrutiny for the alleged bias of its news ratings system, which a study from the conservative Media Research Center conclude systematically rates left-wing media outlets as more credible than right-wing ones using cherry-picked examples. 

The MRC report noted the company failed to reassess ratings for prominent mainstream outlets when key stories were later disproven. For example, NewsGuard failed to correct BuzzFeed, which still publishes a story on the since-disproven Steele Dossier with no added context.

After outlets like Politico, The Washington Post and USA Today published stories linking the release of Hunter Biden’s laptop emails to disinformation, NewsGuard did not adjust ratings after the laptop contents were verified. 

One of NewsGuard's most high-profile advisers, former CIA director and retired Air Force Gen. Michael Hayden, signed the original letter warning about Biden's laptop being a Russian information operation shortly before the 2020 election. The contents of the laptop were eventually verified by the news media and the FBI.

In a prior statement to Just the News last year, NewsGuard disputed allegations of bias. 

“NewsGuard was created as an alternative to the black-box algorithms that decide which news content is promoted and which is not on big tech platforms – and as an alternative to any government censorship of content. We rate publishers using publicly disclosed, apolitical journalistic criteria, and we publish the evidence and rationale behind our assessment of each publisher we rate, along with any comments from the publisher, so that each reader can see and decide for themselves,” said General Manager Matt Skibinski. 

“As a result of our apolitical rating system, many right-wing sources get high trust scores and many left-wing news sources get low trust scores and vice versa.”