Federal Communications Commissioner Brendan Carr utilized Media Research Center analysis to put Big Tech and so-called media ratings firm NewsGuard on notice.

Carr sent a letter Wednesday to the respective CEOs of Google, Microsoft, Meta and Apple accusing them of “improper conduct” in silencing Americans’ exercising free speech on political, religious and scientific issues. Carr specifically ordered these tech giants to acquiesce to surrendering any documents related to their work with “the Orwellian named NewsGuard” given its history of targeting right-leaning websites by bullying their advertisers.

Moreover, Carr excoriated the CEOs for participating in “a censorship cartel that included not only technology and social media companies but advertising, marketing, and so-called ‘fact checking’ organizations as well as the Biden-Harris Administration itself” to suppress viewpoints, harm websites’ profitability and delist them by smearing them as “high risk” to advertisers.

Carr relied on MRC studies to make his case that Big Tech platforms working with NewsGuard raise questions about whether this relationship constitutes “good faith” actions within the meaning of the Section 230 liability protections in the Communications Decency Act of 1996 that they enjoy.

For one, reports indicate that NewsGuard has consistently rated official propaganda from the Communist Party of China as more credible than American publications,” Carr wrote citing MRC Free Speech America research. “For another, NewsGuard aggressively fact checked and penalized websites that reported on the COVID-19 lab leak theory. For still another, the Small Business Committee and multiple Media Research Center studies detail numerous instances where NewsGuard apparently does not apply its own rating system in an even-handed manner.

Carr called for the ties of leftist ratings firms like NewsGuard, the government and Silicon Valley to be dismantled: “This censorship cartel is an affront to Americans’ constitutional freedoms and must be completely dismantled. Americans must be able to reclaim their right to free speech. Indeed, our democracy depends on freedom of expression.”

MRC Free Speech America released three studies of NewsGuard’s ridiculously skewed ratings system across three consecutive years consistently showing NewsGuard heavily favoring left-leaning publications like The New York Times, The Washington Post, the now-defunct BuzzFeed News (which infamously published the notorious Steele Dossier) over right-leaning media. 

MRC’s most recent study, which Carr cited, revealed that NewsGuard gave “left” and “lean left” outlets an average “credibility” rating of 91/100, whereas “right” and “lean right” outlets got slammed with an abysmal 65/100 score—a 26-point disparity. 

NewsGuard also applies nutrition labels to media outlets and targets the flow of ad revenue to a media outlet. The ratings firm relies on its subjective opinion of these outlets’ reliability, objectivity and other factors to come up with their scores.

The MRC study also resurfaced a previous 2022 analysis that NewsGuard had given higher credibility ratings to Chinese Communist Party-tied publications over American-based right-leaning media. 

 China Daily (44.5/100), the Global Times (39.5/100), and China Global Television Network (CGTN) (44.5/100) and People’s Daily (39.5/100) all had significantly higher scores at the time over right-leaning media like The Federalist (12.5/100), One America News (25/100), Newsmax (15/100), Life News (17.5/100) and LifeSite News (17.5/100).

Carr ripped NewsGuard for trying to pass itself off as some kind of neutral arbiter of truth:

NewsGuard is the subject of an ongoing investigation by the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Accountability for its impact on protected First Amendment Speech. And while NewsGuard claims that its mission is to provide apolitical guidance on ‘misinformation,’ NewsGuard undercuts this claim by retaining on its Advisory Board at least one person that signed the now infamous October 2020 letter from former intelligence community officials that flamed the false claim that the Hunter Biden laptop story was Russian disinformation—a letter that itself fueled a wave of censorship.

Read Carr's letter to Big Tech CEOs below:

Carr_Letter_on_NewsGuard_-_11.13.24.pdf

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