NewsGuard discovered that The New York Times was never worth its flawless 100/100 score, but apparently only after MRC Free Speech America repeatedly called it out.
NewsGuard finally downgraded The Times’ perfect score Feb.1 to a lukewarm 87.5/100. NewsGuard’s beef with the legacy leftist publication was that it “no longer meets NewsGuard standards for handling the difference between news and opinion responsibly.” Wow, what a revelation! Has the dystopian website traffic cop been living under a rock?
The head-turning move by the media ratings firm came after MRC released three studies of NewsGuard’s ridiculously skewed ratings system across three consecutive years consistently showing NewsGuard heavily favoring left-leaning publications like The Times over right-leaning media. MRC has repeatedly called NewsGuard out for attempting to legitimize The Times as an effectively flawless, balanced outlet, despite mountains of evidence showing otherwise. MRC even released a mini-documentary in February 2023 on the firm’s bias.
“The New York Times has been the same left-wing rag for decades,” said MRC Free Speech America Vice President Dan Schneider in a statement. But suddenly, said Schneider, after MRC research led Congress to get serious about “preventing the Department of Defense from funding the NewsGuard censorship regime, the folks at NewsGuard finally found some religion and are starting to better reflect what The Times has always been: An extreme, left-wing biased outlet.”
MRC specifically called out NewsGuard on October 20, 2023 for continuing to dole out perfect 100s to The Times and other media entities for wantonly taking the word of the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry to falsely blame an Israeli airstrike for the infamous al-Ahli hospital bombing, which sparked international furor and mass protests. NewsGuard, in its update of The Times Nutrition Label under the “Credibility” section, finally mentioned the scandal. NewsGuard conceded that “American and other international officials, as well as subsequent forensic analyses by media organizations, concluded that evidence suggested the rocket came from Palestinian fighter positions.” But even NewsGuard’s critical update, published over three months after MRC’s criticism, sugarcoated the full severity of the scandal.
Not only did The Times run a glaringly false headline — “Israeli Airstrike Hits Gaza Hospital, Killing 500, Palestinian Health Ministry Says” — the outlet used a photo of the wreckage of a completely different structure, not al-Ahli hospital. The Dispatch’s Jeryl Bier excoriated the leftist newspaper for the blatant deception: “[T]he accompanying photo was not even of the hospital, but rather of a building in a city some 15 miles to the south.” Bier also concluded that The Times’s framing, bolstered by its misleading imagery, would “likely” lead Times readers to believe that the depicted carnage was of the “hospital in question.” The original, false story was plastered on the front page of the newspaper’s website with the misleading photo prominently displayed. None of this context was mentioned in NewsGuard’s update.
But NewsGuard, in its recent update, did manage to depart from its leftist bent enough to highlight “conservative” impressions of The Times’ inherent leftist bias, despite the publication’s downplaying to the contrary. Exhibit “A” for NewsGuard was none other than The Times magazine’s racially charged and discredited 1619 Project spearheaded by insufferable activist Nikole Hannah-Jones.
Yes, you read that right. NewsGuard actually used one of the newspaper’s most notorious, anti-American projects as an example of how the paper doesn’t properly distinguish between news and opinion:
Nonetheless, an impression of partisanship lingers, especially among conservatives. There may be no better example than when the magazine’s ‘1619 Project,’ which was not labeled as opinion, sought, as it told readers, ‘to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are.’ The view was derided by prominent historians, including Gordon Wood, professor emeritus at Brown University, and James McPherson, professor emeritus at Princeton University, initially in interviews with the World Socialist Web Site and, later, in a request for corrections sent to the magazine and joined by three other academics.
Talk about a cold day in hell.
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