Brent Scher, lead investigative reporter and editor at The Daily Wire, said NewsGuard’s censorship of “disfavored” news through its rating tool for media sites “should not be something that is acceptable in the U.S.”
NewsGuard is a for-profit entity dedicated to countering what it calls “misinformation” founded by journalist Steven Brill and former Wall Street Journal publisher Gordon Crovitz.
The organization provides “reliability ratings and scores for news and information websites based on nine journalistic criteria.”
“There are a lot of questions about NewsGuard and how it is levying its ratings and whether there’s an ideology behind their ratings,” Scher said on Thursday’s episode of The Michael Patrick Leahy Show.
Scher said that while the entity is “supposed to be former journalists who are now trying to keep the standards up for the entire industry,” he noted how “that’s rarely the case.”
“I think the best way to see it is actually by looking at the names behind the ratings and then looking at their backgrounds. These are supposed to be former journalists who are now trying to keep the standards up for the entire industry, but if you look at the people who are carrying this out for NewsGuard, that’s rarely the case,” Scher said.
Noting how congressional lawmakers are “looking into” NewsGuard’s impact on “disfavored” news sites, Scher said he believes the practice of rating media sites is a “a very important issue for Americans.”
“There are a lot of people on Capitol Hill who are looking into this. I hope they figure it out and expose this for what it is, but it’s difficult because they hide the ball a lot in what they’re doing and they also hide the ball about their intentions and what the end goal is of applying ratings to every outlet. Once the truth comes out, I think it’s a very important issue for Americans, no matter what political stripe you are. The censoring of disfavored news should not be something that is acceptable in the United States,” Scher said.
In regards to conservative journalism, Scher said conservative sites are often “discounted by the mainstream,” explaining how it is perceived that conservative sites “don’t have the same trust from the mainstream that any other outlet would have.”
“I think a lot of times, facts that come out of conservative outlets are discounted by the mainstream because it came from a conservative outlet and they just don’t have the same trust from the mainstream that any other outlet would have. But when you put out facts in a very clear and indisputable fashion and you tell a story so good that it can’t be ignored, it has a massive impact and The Daily Wire is proving that and I’m excited and happy that I’m part of the effort,” Scher said.
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Kaitlin Housler is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network. Follow Kaitlin on X / Twitter.
