Special to WorldTribune.com, June 19, 2023

Corporate WATCH

Commentary by Joe Schaeffer

Along with other news sites that have exposed the false narratives of a corrupt progressive ruling establishment, WorldTribune.com is currently being targeted by a certain self-appointed media gate-keeper organization. But while it’s easy to laugh off being labeled as “extremist” and “low trust” by wildly partisan groups such as The Southern Poverty Law Center or The Poynter Institute, it’s a bit disconcerting to be harassed by an outfit with tightly enmeshed Deep State ties.

We’ll spare you the rather boring details of the accusation-filled letters of inquiry from NewsGuard. For an example of how it operates, see this 2021 article from Darren Beattie’s Revolver News site. [In particular, NewsGuard was triggered by WorldTribune.com's coverage of the released videos of January 6, right to bear arms without a government permit, a UN report on decriminalizing pedophilia and reports on the massive health and economic impact of the Covid vaccines.]

“NewsGuard data helps individuals, governments, companies, and organizations fight misinformation and teach media literacy through data integrations and other partnerships,” the company states on its website.

The for-profit company was founded in 2018 by Steven Brill and L. Gordon Crovitz. Brill is the “founder of Court TV, The American Lawyer Magazine, American Lawyer Media, Brill’s Content Magazine, Journalism Online, and The Yale Journalism Initiative,” his NewsGuard bio reads. Crovitz is a “former publisher, editorial board member and opinion columnist for The Wall Street Journal, board member of Business Insider [and] editor or contributor to books published by the American Enterprise Institute and Heritage Foundation,” his bio states.

Having associations with old-guard DC think tanks AEI and Heritage is meant to provide a patina of conservative sensibility to NewsGuard. Other prominent organizations and individuals that the company partners with provide a more complete picture. One mustn’t look at NewsGuard from a left-right lens. Its true nature is far more akin to a quasi-official apparatus operating under the auspices of Big Brother.

French communications powerhouse Publicis Groupe is a core funder of NewsGuard. Publicis Groupe is also an officially listed partner of notorious one-world-government enthusiast Klaus Schwab’s World Economic Forum. So it should be no surprise to see the WEF touting NewsGuard’s crusade to fight “misinformation”:
 

NewsGuard gives sources a Red or Green rating using 9 credibility criteria.

Learn more about fighting misinformation: https://t.co/gVugpFrZtF @WEFBookClub pic.twitter.com/ywXGmpWGR0

— World Economic Forum (@wef) February 5, 2022

In 2020, NewsGuard partnered with the World Health Organization to push vaccine propaganda during the height of the COVID hysteria:
 

NewsGuard [on August 24, 2020] announced an agreement with the World Health Organization to provide the WHO and the technology platforms that WHO advises on healthcare-related online safety with a variety of reports and data aimed at fighting online COVID-19 misinformation online. The NewsGuard information is being provided to the WHO on a pro bono basis. Key NewsGuard data will be made available to digital platforms, including Facebook, Google/YouTube, Twitter and TikTok, at the direction of the WHO.

Now that Facebook parent company Meta’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg has admitted that the social media goliath suppressed anti-establishment views on coercive COVID medical protocols that “ended up being, you know, more debatable or true,” a confession of wrongdoing in its self-appointed professional information expert role by NewsGuard should be rolling out any day now. Don’t hold your breath. The more one digs into NewsGuard, the more glaring the power connections become.

Wendi Strauch Mahoney at UncoverDC.com notes:
 

NewsGuard has partnered with Microsoft, Pfizer, the Department of Defense with a 2021 $749,387 one-year contract, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), and the WHO using NewsGuard’s trademark “new Misinformation Fingerprints” analyst and AI cataloging tool. NewsGuard’s other products include NewsGuard, HealthGuard, and BrandGuard – which help marketers concerned about their brand safety.

Here's Microsoft, the company co-founded by Bill Gates, boasting in 2018 of its close partnership with NewsGuard in a spookily Orwellian manner:
 

Disinformation can distort democracy. Those who propagate it seek to achieve this objective by undermining trust in core democratic institutions and by exacerbating societal fault lines, manipulating public perception of polarized viewpoints and sowing discord and conflict. While these tactics are not new to political discourse, the power and anonymity of information and communication technology and social media has created an asymmetric threat which foreign adversaries are using to corrupt our democratic processes. Defending against disinformation efforts, therefore, is a critical challenge we are addressing in our Defending Democracy Program. At Microsoft, we believe that enhancing digital media literacy and transparency will be a powerful tool to reduce the impact of disinformation campaigns....

We are proud to sponsor NewsGuard’s new browser extension, which can be downloaded free of charge starting today from the Microsoft Store. Moreover, our Defending Democracy Program will continue to build partnerships and explore technology solutions that can help defend against foreign influence operations.

That is how NewsGuard kicked off in 2018. It also had another highly credentialed backer singing its praises right out of the gate. Former Obama administration Director of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson gushed over the new venture in an April 2018 conversation hosted by the Council on Foreign Relations. Johnson went out of his way to insist he does not want to ban free speech he doesn’t like. He has a much better idea. Label and de-platform it:
 

There’s a pioneering journalist I think a lot of named Steve Brill. Some of you may know Steve Brill. He’s founder of American Lawyer magazine, founder of Court TV, and he is promoting something called NewsGuard – I’m not promoting it; I’m just telling you about it – (laughter) – called NewsGuard, and social media providers have to embrace it, and you go on – you go on a platform, and NewsGuard will tell you red, yellow, green – you know, green meaning this is – this is verifiable, it’s authentic, it’s good.

Yellow means, well, be careful; and red means this is unverified, it’s false, it’s fake, and it’s like – you know, it’s like a Good Housekeeping seal of approval. And that’s – I think, you know – you know, we need to – we need to consider something like that because there’s just so much information in the information marketplace, and so many people are falling into the trap of embracing something as their own opinion that is not reliable, it’s not authenticated, and it’s just not good journalism.

Obama's people have very good reason to love Brill. In 2020 he declared that Hunter Biden's laptop was likely a hoax perpetrated by Russia:
 

Steve Brill, NewsGuard’s founder, asserted in 2020 that the New York Post’s story about Hunter Biden’s laptop was likely false and based on Russian disinformation. "My personal opinion is there’s a high likelihood this story is a hoax, maybe even a hoax perpetrated by the Russians again," Brill said in an interview with CNBC.

Whoops, the information experts were wrong again. How about that?

By the way, Crovitz proudly states that he is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations in his NewsGuard bio. What a remarkable coincidence.

Always-incisive investigative reporter Whitney Webb had a lot more on NewsGuard’s Deep State connections in an exhaustive January 2019 article:
 

[A] cursory examination of Newsguard’s advisory board makes it clear that Newsguard was created to serve the interests of American oligarchy. Chief among Newsguard’s advisors are Tom Ridge, the first Secretary of Homeland Security under George W. Bush and Ret. General Michael Hayden, a former CIA director, a former NSA director and principal at the Chertoff Group, a security consultancy seeking to “advise corporate clients and governments, including foreign governments” on security matters that was co-founded by former Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, who also currently serves as the board chairman of major weapons manufacturer BAE systems.

Another Newsguard advisor of note is Richard Stengel, former editor of Time magazine, a “distinguished fellow” at the Atlantic Council and Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy under President Barack Obama. At a panel discussion hosted last May by the Council on Foreign Relations, Stengel described his past position at the State Department as “chief propagandist” and also stated that he is “not against propaganda. Every country does it and they have to do it to their own population and I don’t necessarily think it’s that awful.”

These are the forces openly seeking to suppress journalism deemed unacceptable to the progressive globalist ruling elite. It may be just as lacking in credibility as your run-of-the-mill George Soros-sponsored “Fact Checker” organization, but the elaborate cabal muscle behind it makes NewsGuard an especially unpleasant example of how an oppressive Western establishment regime is working to crush all dissenting voices to its nation-destroying tyrannical power grab.

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