NewsGuard, a for-profit company that rates news websites and works closely with government agencies and major corporate advertisers, demands news websites follow government narratives, according to investigative reporter Lee Fang.
While there is no official ban on talking about, for example, the efficacy of coronavirus vaccines, editors and journalists understand that writing about such issues can result in consequences, such as demonetization and shadow-banning, due to the Orwellian existence of a network of government agencies and groups claiming to combat so-called “misinformation” repressing online speech, according to independent journalist Lee Fang in the New York Post.
NewsGuard’s business model is based on being a so-called misinformation meter. It rates news websites on a scale of 0 to 100 on an array of factors, such as headline choice and whether the website publishes “false or egregiously misleading content.”
NewsGuard targets pro-Trump news outlets (Alex Wong/Getty, Jason Connolly/AFP/Getty, NewsGuard; Edit: BNN)
The boot of censorship (Westend61/Getty)
According to Fang, while this may appear to some as an objective public service, these ratings are a way to coerce conformity, as they give NewsGuard the power to smear an entire website as untrustworthy if it strays from the government narrative.
In one example, the libertarian-leaning