The House Judiciary Committee last week issued a report and held a hearing on “How the World’s Biggest Brands Seek to Control Online Speech.” The Republican -majority committee focused on conservative news outlets denied advertising revenue by being placed on secret blacklists. But the committee understated the multibillion-dollar scale of the matter and, in one case, criticized a company founded to solve the problem.
After a long career as a conservative editorial writer, columnist, and publisher of the Wall Street Journal, I co-founded NewsGuard with Steven Brill in 2018. We saw that news publishers were secretly rated by Silicon Valley platforms such as Facebook and Google and by a left-wing advocacy group called the Global Disinformation Index. Publishers had no idea what criteria the platforms and GDI used to rate them and were not told their rating when they asked.
We adopted the opposite approach by being apolitical and transparent: We rate news websites using nine fully disclosed basic criteria of journalistic practice, such as whether they disclose their ownership and separate news and opinion. We engage with publishers before rating them, and more than a quarter have taken steps to increase their ratings. The result is that many conservative sites get high trust scores, many liberal sites get low trust scores, and vice versa.
During the hearing, the topic came up of whether NewsGuard rates any conservative websites brand-safe for advertisers. Of course. Here’s a sampling of right-wing and libertarian news sites on our brand-safe inclusion list: Fox News, the New York Post, the Washington Examiner, the Daily Caller, National Review, Reason, Spectator, Commentary, the Western Journal, the Post Millennial, the Heritage Foundation, and the Cato Institute.
In contrast, half the sites on left-wing GDI’s “Ten Riskiest Online News Sites” exclusion list are on NewsGuard’s inclusion list: The New York Post, RealClearPolitics, the American Spectator, the American Conservative, and Reason. Indeed, there are more conservative news sites on NewsGuard’s inclusion list for advertising than liberal sites.
Other right-wing sites do get low NewsGuard ratings, such as OAN and Newsmax. But that’s not because of their politics: It’s because our analysts found that they traffic in significant false narratives, such as repeatedly spreading claims of fraud by Dominion Voting Systems in the 2020 election.
During the hearing, Rep. Victoria Spartz (R-IN) asked a witness who runs the GroupM advertising agency if there were any liberal sites on his firm’s exclusion list. He didn’t provide examples.
Among the liberal sites on the NewsGuard exclusion list, MSNBC gets a low trust score for failing to separate news and opinion and for false claims, including that the classified documents case against former President Donald Trump is an “espionage” charge, that Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) had enacted a “total ban on abortion,” and that Trump administration deregulation caused the train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio. Other liberal sites on our exclusion list include the Daily Kos, Palmer Report, and World Socialist Web Site.
Our exclusion list also includes networks of websites NewsGuard analysts discovered masquerading as independent local news sites that are secretly funded by left-wing PACs or other liberal funding: These “pink slime” networks include the Courier Newsroom, whose funders include George Soros and Reid Hoffman, with websites that sound like legacy newspapers such as the Copper Courier in Arizona; American Independent Network, founded by Democratic operative David Brock; and States Newsroom, funded by the left-wing Hopewell Fund.
However, one fact that emerged from the hearing deserves far more attention than the misinformation about NewsGuard. The head of the GroupM advertising agency, Christian Juhl, testified that only 1.28% of brand advertising now goes to online news sites.
“Trust in news sites is at a low point, and brands generally disfavor advertising next to news," Juhl said.
In 1980, print newspapers and magazines accounted for 62% of all global ad spending. No wonder newsrooms across the country are shrinking.
Many brands are so worried that their ads will appear alongside false claims that they exclude news sites altogether. Ads are now largely purchased through “programmatic advertising,” with algorithms selecting where ads run regardless of the nature of the website. NewsGuard and Comscore estimate this leads to $2.6 billion a year unintentionally going to misinformation websites, even as sites doing journalism are starved for support. In other words, while conservative sites are on GDI’s exclusion list and are thereby blacklisted by entities using GDI’s ratings, ad dollars are flowing to sites trafficking in misinformation, even Russian propaganda sites.
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In one recent year, Warren Buffett was the biggest advertiser on Russian propaganda sites when his Geico insurance company unintentionally bought millions of dollars of programmatic ads on the Kremlin’s Sputnik News. NewsGuard analysts this month identified accounts on advertising-supported TikTok making up claims that Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) is pregnant with Trump’s child and that Trump was arrested after assaulting a state official in Maine.
The crisis of only 1.28% of advertising now going to news sites should alarm people of all political views. This isn’t enough revenue to fund the lively and diverse sources of news we need. This is also why an increasing number of responsible advertisers rely on apolitical ratings and inclusion lists so they can safely restore advertising to trustworthy news sites — conservative, middle of the road, and liberal — that so badly need their revenues.
Gordon Crovitz is co-CEO of NewsGuard and former publisher of the Wall Street Journal.
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