NewsGuard, the establishment “news-rating” project that presents itself to the public as an impartial authority on the trustworthiness of news publishers, is telling reporters that it is not “government funded” — despite receiving a $750,000 contract from the Department of Defense to track “misinformation.”
Steven Brill and Gordon Crovitz, co-CEOs of NewsGuard (Credit: D Dipasupil and Stephen Chernin /Getty)
The claim was made in an email to Matt Taibbi, a Twitter Files reporter who testified at a landmark House Judiciary Committee hearing on the topic of government-backed censorship last week.
In the email, NewsGuard co-founder and CEO Gordon Crovitz said the organization was a “business with many licensees” that pay for access to it and that the Pentagon is just one of those licensees.
Via Twitter:
Matt:
I noticed with interest and surprise how you referred to NewsGuard in your congressional testimony on Thursday. There seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding about NewsGuard and our work.
During the hearing, NewsGuard was inaccurately described as “U.S. government funded.” Unlike other entities mentioned during the hearing, we are not a non-profit funded by government grants. We are a business with many licensees paying to access our proprietary data, including government entities that pay to license our data. These licenses are only for access to our data and are entirely unrelated to our rating of news publishers.
For example, as is public, our work for the Pentagon’s Cyber Command is focused on the identification and analysis of information operations targeting the U.S. and its allies conducted by hostiles governments, including Russia and China. Our analysts alert officials in the U.S. and in other democracies, including Ukraine, about new false narratives targeting America and its allies, and we provide an understanding of how this disinformation spreads online. We are proud of our work countering Russian and Chinese disinformation on behalf of Western democracies.
NEW: In a lengthy email to @mtaibbi on Friday morning, Newsguard’s CEO Gordon Crovitz refuted that the purported disinformation tracker is “U.S. government funded.”
In 2021, the Department of Defense awarded $749,387 to Newsguard. pic.twitter.com/WlDr7UcbbO
— Gabe Kaminsky (@gekaminsky) March 10, 2023
As Breitbart News previously reported, the $750,000 Pentagon contract was for NewsGuard’s “misinformation fingerprints” project, described by the organization as “a catalogue of known hoaxes, falsehoods and misinformation narratives that are spreading online.”
In 2022, Rep. Jim Banks (R-IN), a member of the House Armed Services Committee, told the Pentagon to preserve its documents related to NewsGuard, expressing concern at the organization’s “extreme partisan bias.” (Read more: Breitbart, 3/15/2023) (Archive)