Cultural Manipulation? NewsGuard Defends Perfect Rating of Dossier-Slinging BuzzFeed

NewsGuard has renewed its 100% rating BuzzFeed NewsThis is despite the fact that the outlet still hosts the Steele dossier.

In an email to MRC, NewsGuard General Manager Matt Skibinski justified his company’s perfect “100/100” rating for BuzzFeed News by noting the five-year timespan since the dossier’s publication and the fact that the dossier article is one “single story.”

To build support for Robert Mueller’s appointment, members of the U.S. Intelligence Community and former President Donald Trump’s political foes used the dossier, which was discredited by Christopher Steele (an ex-british spy) to create the case. According to Fox Business the investigation cost $25.2million and was a paralyzing one for two years. Also, the Mueller investigation exacerbated the US political climate and the global one. It dominated headlines, while important, more relevant news was ignored.

The dossier’s accuracy has been criticized by liberal media, including Special Counsel John Durham who charged John Durham with lying to FBI officials in November.

Remarkably, NewsGuard affirmed BuzzFeed’s rating – which was written and edited by seven employees – in a recent email response to the MRC.

At the same time, the company’s own write-up on BuzzFeed News pays lip service to the site’s catastrophic failures in reporting on the Steele dossier and alleged Trump ties to the Kremlin.BuzzFeed published an “unverified dossier of opposition research on then-President Donald Trump,” NewsGuard notes in its “nutrition label” about the news organization. “Much of the information in the dossier, which influenced public discussion about special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, was unconfirmed. Several other news outlets had obtained it, but declined to publish it.”

MRC asked NewsGuard to explain its BuzzFeed rating, pointing out that the Steele dossier was the focal point of the media’s misreporting about Trump ties to Russia.

The dossier story “was published in January of 2017, more than five years ago and more than a year and a half before NewsGuard first launched our ratings and Nutrition Labels,” Skibinski said. “Moreover, no single story, even one that has recently been published, determines a site’s rating.”

Yet, in November 2021, many years after publication, the dossier was still available. The Washington Post retracted prior reporting about the primary source of the document’s most salacious claims.

“Source D, according to the dossier, alleged that Russian intelligence had learned that Trump had hired Russian prostitutes to defile a Moscow hotel room once occupied by President Barack Obama and Michelle Obama and possessed a video recording of the incident,” The Post reported. “The allegation, which the dossier said was confirmed by a second person described only as ‘Source E,’ has never been substantiated.”

Further, the liberal Axios in November reported the discovery of the dossier’s falsity had spurred a “reckoning” among news organizations “for years-old coverage,” noting it still matters today. It’s “one of the most egregious journalistic errors in modern history, and the media’s response to its own mistakes has so far been tepid,” Axios reported.

And the taxpayer-funded Voice of America, widely regarded as the global microphone of U.S. politics, in a December 2021 story reported that the media’s corrections “underscore… the need for transparency to maintain credibility and the audience’s trust.”

The dossier has not been removed from the website. BuzzFeed News website without any correction or clarification, NewsGuard’s nutrition label says the outlet both “Regularly corrects or clarifies errors” and “Gathers and presents information responsibly.”

Apart from reporting on Steele as though it contained credible allegations, BuzzFeed News falsely claimed in a Jan. 17, 2019, story that the Mueller team had detailed evidence that Trump directed his former attorney Michael Cohen to “lie to Congress” about a presumable project to build a Trump Tower in Moscow. BuzzFeed posted a subtle “update” three months later that Mueller’s final report found that Trump didn’t direct Cohen to lie.  

The update – which was not posted as a correction – undercut the entire premise of the story. The first sentence of the article, however, still notes that Trump “directed his longtime attorney Michael Cohen to lie to Congress.” The headline also still says Trump directed Cohen to lie to Congress about the Moscow project. 

Liberal outlets The Washington Post described that “single story” as the “highest-profile misstep at a time when press is under greatest scrutiny” in a January 2019 article.

NewsGuard’s erroneous ratings extend far beyond BuzzFeed News. The December MRC study found that NewsGuard rated liberal news outlets on an average 27 points higher than those on the right. Earlier this year, NewsGuard sent a lame rebuttal to MRC’s study. NewsGuard called it “fundamentally flawed” and claimed the MRC “cherry-picked” the news outlets it examined. However, the AllSides-approved independent AllSides list was used in the study.

In his most recent email sent Feb. 17, Skibinski complained that MRC was wrong for calling out NewsGuard’s flawed scoring system. Then he abruptly pivoted to mention MRC’s NewsGuard rating, a topic that had nothing to do with the BuzzFeed News inquiry.

“We hope you will be more fair and accurate in your description of NewsGuard’s ratings of the many conservative and conservative-leaning outlets that get perfect or high scores based on our criteria in this story than in previous stories, including noting that your own outlet, NewsBusters, continues to score a 92.5 out of 100 points,” Skibinski wrote.

An extract of NewsGuard’s defense against its BuzzFeed News You can find the rating below:

SkibinskiRebuttal.pdf

Conservatives are 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 left-wing bias.