The House Oversight Committee is investigating NewsGuard, a private company, for supposed “censorship” for the crime of… offering its own opinions on the quality of news sites. The old marketplace of ideas seems to keep getting rejected whenever Republicans find that their ideas aren’t selling quite as well as they’d hoped.
Up is down, left is right, black is white, day is night. The modern GOP, which has left any semblance of its historical roots in the trash, continues to make sure that “every accusation, a confession” is the basic party line. And now, it’s claiming that free speech is censorship.
Apparently Rep. James Comer was getting kinda jealous that his good buddy Rep. Jim Jordan was out there weaponizing the government to suppress speech, all while pretending it was in an attempt to stop the weaponization of the government to suppress speech.
Comer heads the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability. He has apparently decided that it’s his job to investigate companies for the kind of speech he dislikes. In this case, it’s NewsGuard he’s investigating.
Today, House Committee on Oversight and Accountability Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) launched an investigation into the impact of NewsGuard on protected First Amendment speech and its potential to serve as a non-transparent agent of censorship campaigns. In a letter to NewsGuard Chief Executive Officers Steven Brill and Gordon Crovitz, Chairman Comer raises concerns over reports highlighting NewsGuard’s contracts with federal agencies and possible actions being taken to suppress accurate information. Chairman Comer’s letter includes requests seeking documents and information on NewsGuard’s business relationships with federal agencies and its adherence to its own policies in light of highly political social media activity by NewsGuard employees.
First off, it helps to understand what NewsGuard is. The organization was set up in 2018 by two journalism moguls, Steven Brill and Gordon Crovitz, in an effort to combat the rise of disinformation and nonsense peddling online. The basic product is rating journalism websites to give a scoring of how credible and reliable they are.
And, let me be upfront: I’m not a fan of NewsGuard’s methodology, which I think isn’t particularly useful for doing what they’re trying to do. It’s formulaic in a somewhat arcane way, which enables terrible news sites to get rated well, while dinging (especially smaller, newer) publications that don’t check off all the boxes NewsGuard demands.
But, they’re allowed to do whatever they want. They are expressing their own First Amendment-protected opinion. And that’s a good thing. People don’t have to believe NewsGuard’s rankings (and my personal opinion is that everyone should take them with a large grain of salt). But it’s still their opinion. It’s their speech.
However, NewsGuard has been singled out as one of the enemies of free speech, like so much of the fantasy industrial complex that is making the rounds these days. This is because some of the nuttier nonsense-peddling grifters out there have been rated poorly by NewsGuard, and that’s resulted in some advertisers deciding to pull advertising.
Somehow that is a form of censorship. Of course, it’s not: it’s speech by a private party, in which other private parties listen to and potentially take some action on, exercising their own rights of association.
But, as the Comer “investigation” calls out, some US government agencies have worked with NewsGuard, most notably the Defense Department. A few years back, the DoD signed a contract with NewsGuard, in which NewsGuard would flag content it found online that it believed were foreign influence campaigns. Basically, it’s the Defense Department contracting with some internet watchers to see if they spot anything the DoD should be aware of.
I have no idea if NewsGuard is any good at this, and frankly, I’d be surprised if the DoD actually got any value out of the deal. But, it’s got nothing to do with “censorship” of any kind. It’s still just more speech.
To date, Crovitz (who was formerly the publisher of the Wall Street Journal, so you’d think the GOP grifter class would realize he’s much closer to them politically speaking) has tried defending NewsGuard by (1) inserting some facts into a discussion that will reject such facts and (2) stupidly insisting that his is the only “non-partisan” rating service, and the rest are all leftists.
“We look forward to clarifying the misunderstanding by the committee about our work for the Defense Department,” Crovitz said in a statement to The Hill. “Our work for the Pentagon has been solely related to hostile disinformation efforts by Russian, Chinese and Iranian government-linked operations targeting Americans and our allies.”
Crovitz, a former publisher of The Wall Street Journal, also touted NewsGuard as “the only apolitical service” that rates news outlets, saying, “the others are either digital platforms with their secret ratings or left-wing partisan advocacy groups.”
In some ways, this strategy of responding to the investigation kinda serves to explain why NewsGuard has always been kinda useless. They bring fact-checking to a vibes fight. That doesn’t work.
If we’ve learned anything from the failures of media over the past decade, it is not that we had a lack of fact-checking or other “objective” ways of measuring news. It’s that people don’t want that. What we’ve discovered is that tons of people are in the market for the Confirmation Bias Times, and they’re going to lap up anything that confirms their priors and outright reject anything that challenges what they believe.
We’ve seen things like Stanford’s Internet Observatory try to respond to similar attacks by coming back with facts, only to have those facts distorted, twisted, and turned right back around to accuse them of even worse things. Crovitz and NewsGuard seem likely to go through the same nonsense ringer.
Because the whole point of this is that facts no longer matter to the modern GOP. If you bring facts that conflict with their feelings, they’re going to blame you for it and attack you.
Here, all that NewsGuard has done is add their opinions about news sources. Some people trust them. Others don’t. That’s the marketplace of ideas in action.
And that’s what Comer is trying to suppress.
