The Federalist was asked by NewsGuard to respond to its concerns we are ‘inaccurate and misleading’ — so we did. Proudly and publicly.
In America, we have the First Amendment and have long prided ourselves on having a free press, but the reality is that it’s becoming harder and harder to exist as an independent publication on the internet. One major reason for this is that lots of bad actors are trying to weaponize concerns over “misinformation.” While misinformation is a problem, in practice the attempts to police it are often wholly incompetent and even more damaging than the alleged misinformation being addressed. Above all else the goal is to keep people from saying things that undermine the authority of America’s obviously foundering left-leaning institutions.
Anyway, The Federalist recently got an email from “NewsGuard Technologies” — a relatively new service that’s popped up in the last few years that purports to rate websites on their credibility based on some established criteria. It then sells its ratings services to schools, various corporate entities, and advertisers looking for someone to tell them what news outlets they can supposedly trust or what websites they don’t want to advertise on for fear of damaging their brand.
So how does NewsGuard go about making those ratings for websites? Well, it starts with firing off a series of hostile questions to the editors of a website about weirdly specific aspects of its coverage and demands you answer them in a vain attempt to improve whatever rating NewsGuard’s going to give you. Now it’s bad enough that this is an extortion racket, but it’s downright insulting to see NewsGuard’s team wheel around a website that publishes over a million words a year, cherry-pick some example of what they think is problematic coverage, and still demonstrate an inability to think critically or fairly about what they’re reading. If it questions a dominant narrative, it does not compute with these people. Anyway, let’s take a look at what we’re dealing with.
My name is Chiara Vercellone and I’m an analyst at NewsGuard Technologies, a service that reviews news and information websites based on a set of credibility criteria, and monitors misinformation trends online.
I am reaching out because we are in the process of updating our analysis of TheFederalist.com and I have a few questions about the content published on the site. I am also attaching our currently-published analysis of The Federalist for your reference.
Just for reference, Vercellone apparently has a graduate degree in journalism from Northwestern, which generally vies with Columbia for the best journalism program in the country. Previously, she worked as a “fact checker” for USA Today. I used to work at a publication that, like USA Today, was also a participant in Facebook’s fact-checking program. Facebook funds the fact-checking programs at these publications, even though these same publications are often required to cover Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg objectively in their news pages despite being financially compromised by this.
Facebook/Meta then brags that when a “fact checker” it helps pay for rates a story as false, it uses that rating to downrank and kill 80 percent of the internet traffic to that story. That’s what it says in its own corporate communications. Given how often we’ve seen Facebook-funded fact-checkers produce politically distorted nonsense, the power given to these people ought to be alarming.
Vercellone and everyone else involved in these rackets have convinced themselves they’re performing a valuable public service fighting “misinformation” that nearly always conveniently aligns with ideological priors, but I’m not sure they’ve had anyone be blunt: Between her time as a “fact checker” and her new gig at NewsGuard, Vercellone is a censor pure and simple. The business model she’s participating in is to make a profit by narrowing the range of acceptable opinions.
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