NewsGuard Technologies was founded in 2018 by Steven Brill and L. Gordon Crovitz, who serve as co-CEOs. Investors include the Knight Foundation, Publicis, and former Reuters executive of Tom Glocer.
Its advisors include former officials such as Tom Ridge, former homeland security secretary, Richard Stengel, former undersecretary of state for public diplomacy, Michael Hayden, former CIA director general, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, former NATO chief, as well as Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales.
NewsGuard approved sites include The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and BuzzFeed. Sites labeled as unreliable include InfoWars, the Daily Kos, Sputnik, RT, WikiLeaks, and Fox News.
They are nearly correct on the unreliable ones, but most people already knew thlose sites are garbage. Where they went wrong was listing unreliable media as “reliable” when they are, often as not, everun bit as kooky as the blacklisted media sites.