Free Republic

CNN anchor and slick-haired blowhard Jake Tapper’s tell-all book on how Democrats covered up President Joe Biden’s mental decline the past four years was just released today. Not surprisingly, website traffic cop NewsGuard is still giving the liberal media outlets that helped perpetuate this cover-up stellar marks for journalistic credibility. Outlets like CNN, Politico, Bloomberg News, Slate and others have falsely tried to cast Biden’s conservative critics on his deterioration and on the media’s complicity in burying the story as peddling “unfounded” “conspiracy” theories, which now look utterly ridiculous in retrospect of Tapper’s new book. As syndicated radio host Chris...

NewsGuard, the blacklisting arm of Microsoft, is still deliberately misleading Americans into believing debunked Russia Collusion Hoax headlines are credible. On Monday, Breitbart News reported on the top 51 debunked Russia Collusion Hoax stories spread by the establishment media over the last few years. A spot check of the first 12 stories on that list shows that the NewsGuard’s seal of approval — a big, green checkmark — still appears next to almost all of those stories! — The blacklisters at NewsGuard argue that it is not signing off on individual stories. Rather, it only signs off on the news...

Well, well, well—looks like Revolver was right again. While other conservative outlets turned a blind eye to NewsGuard or, some even played along with their “media literacy” scam, we were out in front, boldly calling them out for exactly what they were—a tool of the regime, designed to blacklist and silence conservative media under the phony guise of fact-checking. .. So, how were we right? Well, as we speak, Microsoft, one of their biggest backers, is now scrambling to distance itself, from the fake fact-checking group. Also, this probably won’t come as a shock, but the infamous USAID was also...

President Donald Trump on the first day of his administration stripped the security clearances of a number of anti-Trump former officials, including retired Gen. Michael Hayden, an adviser to Newsguard, the establishment pro-censorship group operating a news blacklist against conservatives. Trump’s removed 50 security clearances, including former CIA and National Security Agency (NSA) Director and retired Air Force General Michael Hayden. Hayden is a controversial public figure, even for those in the Never Trump camp.

The Washington Post made a pathetic attempt to paint website traffic cop NewsGuard as some kind of victim of right-wing oppression, all while downplaying the years-long dystopian vendetta it waged against right-leaning media. “This company rates news sites’ credibility. The right wants it stopped,” cried The Post in a 2,282-word salad for Christmas Eve. “NewsGuard, which prizes its nonpartisan criteria, has become a prime target of the GOP’s battle against disinformation watchdogs,” (emphasis added). Yes, despite the results of a congressional investigation and significant evidence to the contrary, The Post actually had the gall to characterize the disgraceful Orwellian operation...

Obama’s ‘Censorship’ Office Goes Bankrupt COMMENTARY By Gabe KaminskyDecember 30, 2024 Obama’s ‘Censorship’ Office Goes BankruptAP The Global Engagement Center, an office housed within the State Department and aiming to thwart disinformation and misinformation, has been forced by Congress to close up shop. It’s no mystery why; the taxpayer-backed GEC violated its mandate to work only overseas and devolved into a partisan enabler of speech suppression in the United States. Here’s how. Founded in 2016 and technically the product of an Obama-era executive order on counterterrorism, the GEC lapsed in December and lost congressional funding. Over the last two years,...

It looks like the Federal Communications Commission under Brendan Carr won’t be the only agency looking to tear down the government-backed dystopian activities of website traffic cop NewsGuard. Federal Trade Commissioner Andrew Ferguson issued a statement Dec. 2 joining his colleague Commissioner Melissa Holyoak in urging the agency “to investigate online platforms for unfair acts or practices relating to their opaque, unpredictable processes for banning users and censoring content.” Ferguson stipulated that “we must vigorously enforce the antitrust laws against any platforms found to be unlawfully limiting Americans’ ability to exchange ideas freely and openly.” Part of Ferguson’s antitrust push...

nlike the other media watchdogs, NewsGuard is a for-profit company, making money in a variety of ways that include licensing its rating.. Part of President-elect Donald’s Trump plan to rein in censorship, which he disclosed on Nov. 9, involves tweaking section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996. Section 230 gives social media companies liability immunity for user posts, though Trump wants it to apply only to those with “high standards of neutrality,” not just those who appear to routinely take down posts that lean conservative. Without calling out by name Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube or a legacy media,...

Many news outlets have published Robert F. Kennedy Jr. profiles in the past 18 months, but The Washington Post’s in June was the only one to warrant a 20-page response from the Trump HHS nominee (This story is the first in a four-part series this month by Just the News on self-described watchdogs who push for censorship.) “If we don’t have free speech, then we just don’t have a free country,” President-elect Donald Trump said in a video posted to social media just day after winning reelection on Nov. 5. “Today, I’m announcing my plan to shatter the left-wing censorship...

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...

A House committee revealed Friday that the Pentagon, other US agencies and the European Union — in addition to the State Department — have funded a for-profit “fact-checking” firm accused of suppressing The Post. House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) wrote a letter to the firm, NewsGuard, demanding more details about the public-private collaboration that led last year to the State Department being sued by conservative outlets that were labeled more “risky” than their liberal counterparts..... The Oversight panel in June opened its investigation into NewsGuard’s apparent participation in a government-funded “censorship campaign” to allegedly discredit and even demonetize...

SPRINGFIELD, Ohio — The woman behind an early Facebook post spreading a harmful and baseless claim about Haitian immigrants eating local pets that helped thrust a small Ohio city into the national spotlight says she had no firsthand knowledge of any such incident and is now filled with regret and fear as a result of the ensuing fallout. “It just exploded into something I didn’t mean to happen,” Erika Lee, a Springfield resident, told NBC News on Friday. Lee recently posted on Facebook about a neighbor’s cat that went missing, adding that the neighbor told Lee she thought the cat...

Below is my column in The Hill on the recent notice that this blog is now being formally “reviewed” by NewsGuard, a company that I just criticized in a prior Hill column as a threat to free speech. The questions from NewsGuard were revealing and concerning. Today, I have posted the response of NewsGuard’s co-founder Gordon Crovitz as well as my response to his arguments. Here are is the column: Recently, I wrote a Hill column criticizing NewsGuard, a rating operation being used to warn users, advertisers, educators and funders away from media outlets based on how it views the...

NewsGuard, the self-appointed arbiter of media reliability, appears poised to peddle some more of its own misinformation—this time about George Washington University Law School Professor Jonathan Turley. Turley exposed NewsGuard’s apparent plans in a Saturday column for The Hill. In “The Most Chilling Words Today: I’m from NewsGuard and I Am Here to Rate You,” the chaired professor of law detailed a recent communication he received from the ratings giant. Roughly a week after he had penned an earlier column for The Hill in which he criticized NewsGuard as infected with a “pro-Democrat and left-wing bias,” the for-profit organization “came...

NewsGuard discovered that The New York Times was never worth its flawless 100/100 score, but apparently only after MRC Free Speech America repeatedly called it out. NewsGuard finally downgraded The Times’ perfect score Feb.1 to a lukewarm 87.5/100. NewsGuard’s beef with the legacy leftist publication was that it “no longer meets NewsGuard standards for handling the difference between news and opinion responsibly.” Wow, what a revelation! Has the dystopian website traffic cop been living under a rock? The head-turning move by the media ratings firm came after MRC released three studies of NewsGuard’s ridiculously skewed ratings system across three consecutive...

Blaze Media host Glenn Beck emphasized the utter ridiculousness of leftist website traffic cops like NewsGuard masquerading as unbiased truth gatekeepers, and relied on original MRC Free Speech America research to do it. Beck ripped into the discredited NewsGuard that has been outed as a leftist operation targeting the advertising dollars of right-leaning media sources during the March 27 edition of Glenn TV. In his X post promoting the segment, Beck referred to NewsGuard as “propaganda” for continuing to behave like an Orwellian arbiter of truth, despite the glaring evidence of its so-called ratings system consistently being shown to favor...

The rise of the administrative state and inverse totalitarianismThe State Department is censoring and limiting the circulation of disfavored press outlets.According to a new lawsuit filed in December on behalf of two media organizations, those being The Daily Wire and The Federalist, as well as the State of Texas and AG Ken Paxton versus the U.S. Department of State (the State Department) through its Global Engagement Center (GEC) and various US government officials, it is alleged that the defendants are actively intervening in the news-media market to both censor and limit the circulation of disfavored press outlets. These illegal activities...

‘That which government is constitutionally prohibited from doing, it cannot contract with others to do.’In a study published Tuesday, Media Research Center (MRC) Free Speech America found that NewsGuard, the taxpayer censorship giant self-tasked with rating media outlets on reliability, “overwhelmingly favored left-leaning outlets over right-leaning ones.” This is the third year MRC Free Speech America has exposed NewsGuard for its partisanship, and, according to MRC, NewsGuard has become “even worse” than years prior. Using AllSides, an organization that classifies media outlets by their “right” to “left” bias, “MRC researchers determined that NewsGuard provided a stellar average ‘credibility’ rating of...

A new organization has 'come to light' called the 'National Immigration Forum Action Fund' and it's pretending to be an organization by conservatives. The reality is, as Breitbart has discovered, that the organization is nothing but another left wing organization backed by billionaire America-hater George Soros. The same man who has spent billions pushing far left wing ideology and programs onto Americans for years. A group masquerading as conservative but backed by left-wing foundations including George Soros' Foundation to Promote Open Society (FPOS) has launched an online advertising campaign in defense of bringing Syrian refugees to the United States. The...

It looks like the harbingers Dr. Robert Epstein had warned the country about regarding liberal Big Tech’s influence in elections is coming true. Big Tech giant Facebook informed the Media Research Center that it would be partnering with the nonpartisan digital encyclopedia Ballotpedia and the radical left-wing organization Democracy Works to help formulate the online platform’s 2020 election strategy. What makes this partnership so damning is that Democracy Works in particular has been heavily funded with millions collectively by at least six liberal organizations between 2012 and 2019. Also concerning is that Big Tech giant Google is also working with...