Is biased NewsGuard going to favor state-affiliated media automatically? The liberal online “credibility” arbiter gave seven traditionally non-autocratic state-affiliated media outlets around the world an average score of 98.6/100.
MRC Free Speech America reviewed seven media outlets that are not affiliated with the U.S. government, France or the United Kingdom. Biased NewsGuard didn’t allow government affiliation to harm journalistic credibility. America’s National Public Radio (NPR) and Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), France’s Radio France Internationale (RFI) and France 24 and Germany’s Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen (ZDF) all received perfect scores of 100/100. The UK’s British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and Canada’s Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) both received excellent NewsGuard scores of 95/100. NewsGuard also gave a rating to the state media in openly authoritarian countries such as Russia, Qatar, or China.
NewsGuard treated the two openly state-affiliated media sites in a different way. These sites have poor NewsGuard ratings. An average rating of 24/100 has been given to six state media outlets in Russia and China. NewsGuard still rates several Communist Chinese state media outlets as higher than many American outlets or U.S. prolife websites.
Qatar’s Al Jazeera, which is partly funded by the Qatari government, had a NewsGuard score of 82.5/100 and a green checkmark of credibility. CNN reported that Al Jazeera had been owned by Qatari officials in 2013. CNN also reported that Al Jazeera has been called a “terror network.” Al Jazeera has posted articles sympathetic to terrorist organizations, particularly in “Palestine.” Yet NewsGuard rates Al Jazeera credible, while U.S. pro-life sites rated by NewsGuard have an average score of 26.5/100.
An MRC Free Speech America study found that NewsGuard’s average ratings for sites that AllSides deemed “left” or “lean left” were significantly higher than ratings for “right” or “lean right” outlets.
AllSides, which rates the institutional bias of news organizations, previously said, “[W]It is doubtful that any media outlet should be given a credibility rating of 100%. NewsGuard seems to favor large-scale, traditional media outlets we classify as Lean Left. These outlets are often seen as making up the ‘establishment press,’ and are the outlets that journalists themselves consider to be the most trusted, most established, most transparent, etc., due in large part to their own biases.”
The above ratings show that NewsGuard favors state media outlets even more than it already favors legacy media outlets rated “left” or “lean left” by AllSides. The MRC study found that the average score of the seven traditionally non-autocratic state media outlets was 98.6/100, which exceeds the average NewsGuard rating of 93/100 for “left” and “lean left” sites as described by AllSides.
Conservatives being attacked. Contact ABC News (818) 460-7477, CBS News (212) 975-3247 and NBC News (212) 664-6192 and demand they report on NewsGuard’s clear left-wing bias.
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