{"id":249399,"date":"2023-12-04T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2023-12-04T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=249399"},"modified":"2023-11-30T08:15:04","modified_gmt":"2023-11-30T08:15:04","slug":"reflections-on-the-deep-states-media-watchdog-tool","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2023\/12\/reflections-on-the-deep-states-media-watchdog-tool\/","title":{"rendered":"Reflections on the Deep State\u2019s Media Watchdog Tool"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

NewsGuard Technologies, Inc., Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons<\/p><\/div>\n

29 Nov 2023<\/em> – In early November, the leadership and board of Consortium News, the independent news site, filed a major lawsuit against the federal government and NewsGuard Technologies, Inc.\u00a0 NewsGuard at first glance looks like a media watchdog organization, a group that seeks to keep misinformation and disinformation out of the mainstream. That notion is quickly dispelled, however, as soon as one takes a look under the hood. But first a little background:<\/p>\n

Consortium News<\/em> is one of the country\u2019s most highly-respected independent news sources<\/a>. It was founded in 1995 by journalist Robert Parry, who gained fame at the Associated Press, and later at Newsweek<\/em>, for his role in uncovering the Iran-Contra affair and for breaking the story of CIA involvement in Contra cocaine trafficking. Parry was a winner of the prestigious George Polk Award for National Reporting and of the I.F. Stone Medal for Journalistic Independence, bestowed by Harvard University\u2019s Nieman Foundation.<\/p>\n

Its board of directors includes Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges; foreign policy author Diana Johnstone; Black Agenda Report editor Margaret Kimberley; political consultant Garland Nixon; Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe communications director Nat Parry; documentary filmmaker John Pilger; award-winning investigative journalist Gareth Porter; producer and Academy Award nominee Julie Bergman Sender and this author.<\/p>\n

NewsGuard is a private company<\/a> created and run by Steven Brill and L. Gordon Crovitz. Brill founded CourtTV, a digital broadcast network featuring court coverage, as well as a number of mainstream publications. He is also a former columnist at Newsweek <\/em>and Reuters. Crovitz is a former editorial writer who later became publisher of The Wall Street Journal<\/em> and the former vice president for planning at Dow Jones. These men have fine journalistic credentials. But that\u2019s not where my complaint lies.<\/p>\n

My complaint is that NewsGuard issues what it calls \u201ctrust ratings\u201d for news. The company brags on its website that these ratings are \u201cproduced by humans, not AI\u201d (artificial intelligence). It offers something called \u201cMisinformation Fingerprints\u201d to tell you when you are consuming what the company has determined to be disinformation.<\/p>\n

They market this as a \u201cjournalistic solution to online misinformation,\u201d and they claim to have \u201cpartnerships\u201d with the Departments of State and Defense, Microsoft, Apple and other tech giants, although the nature of those partnerships is not clear.<\/p>\n

We do know, however, that the Pentagon last year gave<\/a> NewsGuard $750,000 for access to its \u201cDisinformation Fingerprints\u201d project, which it described in the contract as \u201ca catalog of known hoaxes, lies, and disinformation stories spreading online.\u201d<\/p>\n

Their team of human beings rates alternative media sites all over the world and gives them a score of 0-100. These scores are based on the following set of criteria:<\/p>\n

\u201cDoes not repeatedly publish false content (22 points); Gathers and presents information responsibly (18 points); Regularly corrects or clarifies errors (12.5 points); Handles the difference between news and opinion responsibly (12.5 points); Avoids deceptive headlines (10 points); Discloses ownership and financing (7.5 points); Clearly labels advertising (7.5 points); Reveals who\u2019s in charge, including possible conflicts of interest (5 points); Provides names of content creators and their contact or biographical information (5 points).\u201d<\/p>\n

A score of 60 points or more initially gave a site a \u201cgreen\u201d label. But a score below 60 points gave the site a dreaded \u201cred\u201d label, which appeared on one\u2019s device screen to alert the reader that this might be a dangerous site.\u00a0 These color ratings were changed a few months ago, replaced by a numerical score from 0 to 100, with zero being utterly unreliable and 100 practically coming from the mouth of God Himself.<\/p>\n

So, who are these brilliant and unbiased human beings who get to decide if what we read is real news or disinformation?<\/p>\n

One of them is Michael Hayden<\/a>. (NewsGuard says its advisory board members don\u2019t take an active role in rating news organizations.) The name should ring a bell. Hayden is a retired four-star general who was the director of the National Security Agency (NSA) on Sept. 11, 2001. He was the guy who immediately implemented a massive program of warrantless wiretapping of American citizens, all in the name of \u201cnational security.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hayden later became director of the CIA, where he oversaw the agency\u2019s illegal, immoral and unethical torture, kidnapping and secret prison programs. He\u2019s also a former principal deputy director of National Intelligence, as if he hadn\u2019t already done enough damage to the country.<\/p>\n

More recently, Hayden was a signatory on an open letter full of disinformation and outright lies that indicated that the Hunter Biden laptop was a \u201cRussian intelligence operation.\u201d That was laughable even before Hunter Biden stated publicly that the laptop was his.<\/p>\n

Another one of NewsGuard\u2019s \u201cadvisers\u201d is former Secretary of Homeland Security (DHS) Tom Ridge<\/a>. It was Ridge who implemented the notorious Patriot Act in 2001 and the Homeland Security Act of 2002, which severely restricted Americans\u2019 civil liberties. Those restrictions last to this day.<\/p>\n

It was also Ridge who was the subject of a lawsuit in 2004 by Canadian national Maher Arar. Arar was a university professor in Toronto who had gone on vacation to Tunisia in 2002. On his way back to Toronto, while changing planes in New York, he was snatched by FBI agents at the request of the CIA, and with the cooperation of DHS agents, and sent to Syria, where he was tortured mercilessly for 10 months.<\/p>\n

The U.S. maintained that he had \u201cconnections\u201d to\u00a0 al-Qaida, allegations that were never proven. The Syrians finally informed the U.S. that, despite the fact that Arar had been forced to sign a confession, he had no information about al-Qaida. He was simply the wrong guy. Arar was released and finally returned to Toronto. Nothing ever came of his suit against Tom Ridge.<\/p>\n

Another of NewsGuard\u2019s eminent advisers is Anders Rasmussen<\/a>, the former prime minister of Denmark and former secretary general of NATO. It was Rasmussen who sent Danish troops into Iraq to look for weapons of mass destruction that never existed. And as the leader of NATO, it was Rasmussen who oversaw NATO\u2019s wars in Afghanistan and Libya. In 2014, this champion of transparency and opponent of disinformation told<\/a> the Chatham House think tank, \u201cI have met allies who can report that Russia, as part of their sophisticated information and disinformation operations, engaged actively with so-called non-governmental organizations \u2014 environmental organizations working against shale gas \u2014 to maintain European dependence on imported Russian gas.\u201d Yes, he actually said this, with no evidence or proof whatsoever, that environmentalists oppose fracking only because the Russians have tricked them into it.<\/p>\n

Of course, as NewsGuard maintains, it\u2019s (apparently) not these board members who oversee the ratings of alternative news sites. It\u2019s what NewsGuard calls \u201cjournalism analysts<\/a>.\u201d The journalism analyst who oversaw the Consortium News review was Zach Fishman. Fishman\u2019s only previous employment in journalism was as a \u201cphysical and life sciences reporter at The Academic Times,\u201d a now-defunct website, and later as a finance reporter at something called Fastinform. Fishman did not respond to a request for comment on this article.<\/p>\n

Fishman, of course, is not the only journalism analyst at NewsGuard. ScheerPost, founded by the eminent former Los Angeles Times journalist Robert Scheer, an 11-time Pulitzer Prize nominee, winner of numerous national journalism awards, author of 13 books and now a professor of communication at the University of Southern California, whose website is also currently being scrutinized by NewsGuard. ScheerPost is edited by Narda Zacchino, a 31-year veteran and former associate editor and vice president of the Los Angeles Times, deputy editor of the San Francisco Chronicle, senior editor at the Center for InvestigativeReporting, and four-time Pulitzer Prize judge. Scheer received a series of emails from NewsGuard \u201csenior analyst\u201d Valerie Pavilonis, 22, in which she asked the same kinds of loaded questions, mostly about Ukraine and Syria, that NewsGuard analysts had asked of Consortium News, The Grayzone, antiwar.com, Mint Press and other now red-listed outlets.<\/p>\n

The extent of Pavilonis\u2019s journalistic experience, as noted in her NewsGuard bio<\/a>, was as a reporter and editor for her school newspaper, the Yale Daily News; contributor for America Magazine<\/a>, a Jesuit publication (two stories); the New Haven Independent<\/a>\u00a0 (three stories), and \u201cmost recently as\u00a0 an intern for USA Today\u2019s fact-check desk.\u201d\u00a0 Like Fishman, Pavilonis, a 2022 Yale graduate, did not respond to a request for comment for this article.<\/p>\n

Poor analysis aside, NewsGuard may have gotten itself in over its head legally in 2021 in an arrogant move that has formed the basis of the Consortium News lawsuit.<\/p>\n

In May 2021, Crovitz pitched the idea of an information watchdog to executives at Twitter. Reporting by Matt Taibbi and others on the so-called \u201cTwitter Files\u201d tells us that Crovitz\u2019s written proposal included something heretofore unknown\u2014besides the extension on the Microsoft Edge browser that allows for the \u201cred\u201d or \u201cgreen\u201d rating, Crovitz offered a \u201cseparate product for internal use by content moderation teams.\u201d He promised a new tool that would use artificial intelligence powered by NewsGuard algorithms to quickly screen language the company associated with \u201cdangerous content.\u201d<\/p>\n

The real question was how the company (or its algorithm) would determine what news was true and what was false. For starters, NewsGuard would send readers to official U.S. government sources. More cynically, Crovitz\u2019s pitch noted that \u201cOther content-moderation allies include intelligence and national security officials, reputation management providers, and government agencies\u201d that contract with the firm to identify misinformation trends. Crovitz said that instead of only fact-checking individual pieces of information, NewsGuard could rate the \u201coverall reliability\u201d of a website and \u201cprebunk\u201d information there.<\/p>\n

In the end, Twitter wasn\u2019t interested in the service. But Crovitz and his partners forged ahead.\u00a0 Most important, it was NewsGuard\u2019s admission in that pitch that led to the Consortium News lawsuit.<\/p>\n

Consortium News argues in its court filing<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\u201cIn direct violation of the First Amendment, the United States of America and NewsGuard Technologies, Inc. are engaged in a pattern and practice of labeling, stigmatizing, and defaming American media organizations that oppose or dissent from American foreign and defense policy, particularly as to Russia and Ukraine.<\/em><\/p>\n

This is accomplished by a contract between NewsGuard\u2019s \u201cMisinformation Fingerprints\u201d program and the Department of Defense Cyber Command, an element of the Intelligence Community.\u00a0 Under this agreement, media organizations that challenge or dispute U.S. foreign and defense policy as to Russia and Ukraine are reported to the government by NewsGuard and labeled as \u201canti-US,\u201d purveyors of Russian \u201cmisinformation\u201d and propaganda, publishing \u201cfalse content\u201d and failing to meet journalistic standards.\u00a0 NewsGuard\u2019s contract with the government requires it \u201cto find trustworthy sources,\u201d a provision in violation of the First Amendment that does not permit the government to vet or clear news sources for their reliability, \u201ctrustworthiness\u201d or orthodoxy.<\/em><\/p>\n

Consortium News and other news organizations have been stigmatized and defamed under the Cyber Command contract.\u00a0 NewsGuard\u2019s warning labels issued under the \u201cMisinformation Fingerprints\u201d program amount to a government-funded advisory as to official disfavored information, telling readers to \u201cproceed with caution\u201d when reading or viewing targeted news organization websites, including Consortium News.\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As if that\u2019s not controversial\u2014and wrong\u2014enough, NewsGuard takes it upon itself to warn readers away from every<\/em> article on a news website if they have a problem with a single<\/em> article on the website. Consortium News notes in its lawsuit that NewsGuard has red listed the site after disagreeing with the conclusions of six articles out of tens of thousands published by Consortium News. And more cynically, although NewsGuard has existed since 2018, it did not contact, target, or label Consortium News until March 2022, after its contract with the US Cyber Command came into effect. And NewsGuard has targeted only articles dealing with the 2014 coup in Ukraine, the influence of neo-Nazis in Ukraine and \u201covertly genocidal\u201d policies of the Ukrainian government, the same three topics that are the subject of NewsGuard\u2019s \u201cMisinformation Fingerprints\u201d project under contract with the Cyber Command.<\/p>\n

I will admit that when this story initially broke over a year ago, with NewsGuard challenging the reporting and independence of Consortium News, The Grayzone, and others, it felt like a David and Goliath scenario. Was it even possible to stand up against an organization with the backing of the federal government and mainstream news outlets<\/a>? The answer is: It doesn\u2019t matter.\u00a0 Sometimes the truth finds itself under attack. And when that happens, the truth fights back with what it has\u2014the facts.<\/p>\n

Consortium News made a decision early on to play NewsGuard\u2019s game. Editor-in-chief Joe Lauria dutifully and honestly answered NewsGuard\u2019s questions, only to be red listed anyway.\u00a0 The Grayzone editor Max Blumenthal took a different tack. He told podcast host Jimmy Dore that he and Grayzone would wear their NewsGuard red listing as a \u201cbadge of honor.\u201d Blumenthal also wrote to NewsGuard:<\/p>\n

Your board of advisors includes Anders Fogg Rasmussen, the former NATO Secretary General who presided over the regime change war that transformed Libya from a prosperous, stable nation into the hellish site of literal slave auctions and ISIS havens, describing the murderous mission as a \u201cgreat success;\u201d<\/a> former CIA and NSA director Michael Hayden, who oversaw the growth of secret torture and mass surveillance programs in partnership with Dick Cheney; Richard Stengel, the self-proclaimed \u201cchief propagandist\u201d<\/a> of the State Department; Arne Duncan, the privatization-hungry former Secretary of Education who proclaimed that Hurricane Katrina was \u201cthe best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans<\/a>\u201d because it literally wiped out public schools; Tom Ridge, who as DHS secretary deployed cartoonish color-coded terror alerts (like NewsGuard\u2019s media \u201cnutritional labels\u201d) to frighten the U.S. public into line with Bush\u2019s catastrophic \u201cwar on terror;\u201d and John Battelle, co-founder of the Wired magazine, which exists as a clearinghouse for the military-intelligence apparatus and was launched with seed money from Jeffrey Epstein beneficiary Nicholas Negroponte, the younger brother of former Director of National Intelligence and documented Central American death squad overseer John Negroponte<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

NewsGuard\u2019s listed partners represent some of the most notorious purveyors of state violence and imperialist propaganda on the planet. They include the U.S. Department of Defense, which has racked up a body county of tens of millions of civilians in the past century, carrying out or assisting genocidal wars of extermination from Korea to Yemen to Vietnam to Iraq, while systematically lying to the American public about its criminal fiasco in Afghanistan. You are also partnered with the Department of State, the main artery for launching regime change wars that have destabilized large swathes of the Middle East while imposing sadistic sanctions that have starved millions across the Global South. Newsguard\u2019s partnerships are supplemented by imperialist cutouts like the German Marshall Fund, the U.S. government-sponsored lobby spreading disinformation to push censorship of anti-war media outlets like ours<\/a> through its Alliance for Securing Democracy. Then there is the World Health Organization, a NewsGuard partner whose second largest funder is Bill Gates, the oligarchic Microsoft founder who is one of the four richest men in the world. Gates\u2019 former tech company, Microsoft, is also a NewsGuard partner, marketing your ranking app to public schools across the country, even as Gates plows millions into destroying public education<\/a>.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Antiwar.com\u2019s editors have elected to simply ignore NewsGuard. Robert Scheer has done the same. After a lengthy and well-documented defense of the news that has appeared on ScheerPost, much of which was written by Pulitzer Prize-winning former New York Times Middle East Bureau Chief Chris Hedges, Scheer elected to ignore the company.<\/p>\n

I know many of these people. Washington is a small town. Having spent 15 years at the CIA and another two-and-a-half on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee staff, I\u2019ve gotten to know a lot of the players in government.<\/p>\n

I can tell you that they are as cynical and as dangerous as they seem. They are also the hypocrites they appear to be. Their thirst for power, and, once they have that, money, is exactly what you would expect of sociopaths who have climbed to the top of their fields on the backs of those around them.<\/p>\n

Keep in mind that these \u201carbiters of truth\u201d are the same men who have led us into false wars, who have gleefully violated even the most basic human rights and civil liberties, and who have made untold riches doing it. We must not trust them.<\/p>\n

After all, they think so little of us that they won\u2019t respect the constitutional rights and freedoms that are not even theirs to take away. I, for one, will not take my orders from the likes of Deep State veterans, militarists and credibly accused liars Mike Hayden, Tom Ridge, Anders Rasmussen or the former corporate journalists who employ them.<\/p>\n

In the meantime, we must all support Consortium News\u2019s David versus the Pentagon\u2019s and NewsGuard\u2019s Goliath. It\u2019s hard to trust in the system that we\u2019ve given ourselves.\u00a0 But that\u2019s what we have to do here. And in the meantime, I will remain a loyal and regular reader of ScheerPost, Consortium News, antiwar.com, The Grayzone and others who have the guts to give me the truthful and independent news I need. You should, too.<\/p>\n

__________________________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a> John Kiriakou was a CIA analyst and case officer from 1990 to 2004. In December 2007, John was the first U.S. government official to confirm that waterboarding was used to interrogate al-Qaeda prisoners, a practice he described as torture. While employed with the CIA, he refused to be trained in so-called \u201cenhanced interrogation techniques,\u201d and never authorized or engaged in such crimes. Kiriakou is the sole CIA agent to go to jail in connection with the U.S. torture program, despite the fact that he never tortured anyone. Rather, he blew the whistle on this horrific wrongdoing. John can be reached at: <\/em>jkiriakou@mac.com<\/em><\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 scheerpost.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

29 Nov 2023 – NewsGuard at first glance looks like a media watchdog organization, a group that seeks to keep misinformation and disinformation out of the mainstream. That notion is quickly dispelled, however, as soon as one takes a look under the hood.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":249400,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[62],"tags":[1138,1748,1113,378,234,2618,112,1109,911],"class_list":["post-249399","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-media","tag-fake-news","tag-fake-report","tag-hoax","tag-journalism","tag-media","tag-misinformation","tag-pentagon","tag-spying","tag-surveillance"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/249399","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=249399"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/249399\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":249401,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/249399\/revisions\/249401"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/249400"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=249399"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=249399"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=249399"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}