NewsGuard Says Carr Letter Based on False Claims, Slams Newsmax
FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr’s Nov. 13 letters to tech companies (see 2411150032) about their relationship with news website rating service NewsGuard are inaccurate and repeat false information, NewsGuard co-CEOs Steven Brill and Gordon Crovitz said in a letter Friday to Carr, the agency's incoming chair. “We wish you had reached out to us before sending your letter because it relies on false reporting about us,” the co-CEOs wrote. Carr also relied on reporting from Newsmax, which has “misled” the commissioner in order to undermine the service’s credibility because it rates Newsmax poorly, NewsGuard's letter said. “An analogy would be a maker of unsafe cars objecting to its rating by Consumer Reports by making false claims about the magazine’s testing process,” NewsGuard said.
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In letters to Facebook, Google, Apple and Microsoft, Carr said that tech companies using NewsGuard’s products may be outside the limits of their protections against liability under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act and referred to the company as “Orwellian.” Section 230 “only confers benefits on Big Tech companies when they operate in the words of the statute, ‘in good faith.’” The First Amendment protects journalism, NewsGuard said in its letter. It added, “We’re concerned to see a government official using the powers of his office” to “interfere with us providing access to our journalistic content.” Carr, Newsmax and tech trade group CCIA didn’t comment.
“Our work does not involve any censorship or blocking of speech,” said NewsGuard. “Instead of censorship, we provide viewers with more information -- reliability ratings of news publishers based on apolitical criteria.” NewsGuard took particular aim at Carr’s statements about its relationship with advertisers. Carr has said advertising agencies colluding with fact-checkers to direct ad dollars away from conservative media outlets are part of “the censorship cartel.” NewsGuard leverages partnerships with ad agencies to “effectively censor targeted outlets,” Carr said in his November letter.
NewsGuard responded, “There are more conservative websites on our advertising inclusion target list than liberal sites.” In addition, Fox products have a higher NewsGuard score than MSNBC, the letter said. Fox News, the New York Post, the Daily Caller, the National Review and the Heritage Foundation’s publication, The Daily Signal, are among conservative publications that benefit from NewsGuard driving revenue to them, and “Newsmax is not one of them, which is the root of its antagonism,” NewsGuard said. Newsmax’s low ratings are based on claims it made related to voting machines in the 2020 election that have led to litigation against the network from Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic, NewsGuard said.
NewsGuard said statements in Carr’s letter accusing it of rating Chinese state media as credible and treating reports about COVID-19 being caused by a lab leak as misinformation are false. “In fact, we do not rate any Chinese State Media as credible and have never rated a website as unreliable for publishing the lab leak theory,” the letter said. NewsGuard also has no relationships with Meta or Alphabet, two of the companies Carr requested information from, the news rating company said.
The FCC lacks jurisdiction over NewsGuard’s content, said Freedom Forum First Amendment specialist Kevin Goldberg in an email Monday. Carr’s letters or comments about NewsGuard likely don’t, on their own, infringe the company’s First Amendment rights, Goldberg said. However, the U.S. Supreme Court looked at two cases last term “where government officials engaged in censorship of speech they didn’t like by exerting pressure not on the speaker but on third parties interacting with the speaker,” Goldberg said. That issue could arise if Carr took action to restrict FCC regulatees from doing business with NewsGuard, he said.
"What Brendan Carr is doing here is fundamentally the same thing that he himself has complained about: Using the weight of government and threats of official retribution to coerce social media platforms into not exercising their expressive rights in a way that he dislikes," emailed Ari Cohn, Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression lead counsel-tech policy. "Carr may claim that he is trying to 'protect' free speech, but whether he likes it or not, platforms have their own First Amendment rights. And any way you slice it, violating the First Amendment is certainly no way to protect free speech."
In Monday’s letter, NewsGuard requested a chance to discuss the matter with Carr and provide him with facts about its rating system. “We look forward to the chance to provide more information to you,” the letter said. “This will include an explanation of how sources such as Newsmax, with poor journalistic practices, make false claims about NewsGuard in order to undermine us as an independent provider of reliability data empowering news consumers.”