Only transparent, apolitical ratings for news publishers can be trusted
Gordon Crovitz
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The following op-ed was submitted in response to the Washington Examiner’s exclusive series on “Disinformation, Inc.,” documenting an effort by global news rating companies and nonprofit groups to blacklist and defund conservative-leaning news websites.
A recent series of articles in the Washington Examiner cast a harsh spotlight on the $80 billion-a-year part of the advertising sector that, until now, has been shrouded in secrecy despite the outsize role it plays in supporting the news industry. As the series pointed out, programmatic advertising (digital ads delivered by black-box algorithms) is highly prone to political bias, disadvantaging conservative media. The series disclosed that many conservative sites, including the Washington Examiner, are on exclusion lists based on undisclosed criteria, with the result that they are secretly denied advertising. Worst of all, publishers like the Washington Examiner have no way of knowing if or how they have been rated, let alone get any chance to comment on or correct the rating.
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Here’s how the system works. Advertisers, ad agencies, and ad-tech companies have a legitimate problem: If “programmatic” ads are placed by algorithms alone, ads will appear on inappropriate sites. Thousands of blue-chip companies have their ads on the Chinese disinformation sites that claim its spy balloons are weather balloons and on Russian disinformation sites that claim Ukraine is a Nazi state. Top brands and even hospital systems end up with ads running on thousands of health hoax sites peddling quack remedies.
Warren Buffett was the No. 1 advertiser one year on Russian disinformation sites operated by Vladimir Putin. Buffett never intended that his Geico insurance company would be the biggest advertiser on the Kremlin’s Sputnik News, but it was because of the opaque programmatic advertising system. More recently, as the Pravda website, owned by a supporter of Putin, spread falsehoods about the Russian invasion of Ukraine, this disinformation was unintentionally supported by ads from brands including Hertz, Sotheby’s, Lending Tree, Toshiba, and Google.
This creates brand safety risk for advertisers who want to follow responsible practices for advertising. So they look for outside help to identify sites where their ads will be brand-safe.
I co-founded NewsGuard in 2018 with fellow journalism veteran Steven Brill to rate news sites based on apolitical criteria of journalistic practice to bring transparency to ratings, including for the programmatic advertising industry, and to get political bias out of the system. I understand why conservative journalists are skeptical about ratings of news sites done by Silicon Valley tech companies or liberal advocacy groups: I am skeptical, too, as a longtime editorial writer and conservative columnist for the Wall Street Journal who wrote or edited books for the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, and Regnery Publishing.
Unlike the ratings of news sites done by the entities cited in the Washington Examiner series (the nonprofit GDI and the multibillion-dollar ad tech companies IAS and DoubleVerify), NewsGuard ratings are done with full transparency and disclosure, using only apolitical criteria. Everything is done by humans, including the ratings by our analysts of all the news and information sites that account for 95% of engagement in the United States and the other countries where we operate.
Each site gets a score from 0-100 based on nine basic criteria of journalistic practice. Unlike others, we don’t rely on artificial intelligence — only human intelligence can be held accountable to be accurate and apolitical.
Publishers can also make changes to address our questions. More than one-quarter of the sites we’ve rated, including many conservative sites, have improved their scores by making additional disclosures or otherwise improving their practices after engaging with our analysts.
Compare that process to the experience of the Washington Examiner being rated by GDI. The Washington Examiner series disclosed that the Washington Examiner itself is on the GDI “exclusion” list. This means it is banned from programmatic advertising by any advertiser, agency, or ad tech company using the GDI list.
In contrast, the Washington Examiner gets a NewsGuard score of 92.5/100, putting it on all our “inclusion” lists for advertisers. (The Washington Examiner would get a perfect score if it made its ownership clearer to readers.)
Similarly, the series reported that the long-established libertarian magazine Reason was also on the GDI exclusion list. NewsGuard analysts rate Reason 100 out of 100 for the highest adherence to journalistic practice, again putting it on inclusion lists for advertising. We’re especially proud to have rated many startup sites, representing all political viewpoints, thus enabling them for the first time to be included in programmatic advertising campaigns.
I should note that one report by the conservative-funded Media Research Center alleged that NewsGuard was biased against conservative sites. The MRC report used a highly selective sample of only 54 sites out of the more than 8,500 sites we have rated — ignoring, for example, that Fox News gets a higher NewsGuard rating than MSNBC or that we fail news sites on our responsible reporting criterion for asserting that the laptop didn’t belong to Hunter Biden or declaring that the laptop was the product of a Russian disinformation effort.
When we launched NewsGuard, Brill and I wrote an op-ed pledging: “We understand that to be a trusted source of information about news websites, we must treat all of them alike and be wholly transparent about our criteria and processes. We know that if we make too many mistakes or veer from our common ground of focusing only on core standards of journalism, we will lose credibility.”
We’re proud to have built a mission-driven business by staying on that path and by always being transparent, including calling for comment before we publish anything negative about a website, let alone publish something that could cause advertisers to decide to shun a publisher.
The Washington Examiner should never have been the victim of a secret and unaccountable boycott. The Washington Examiner has done a public service by reminding the advertising industry that sunlight is the best disinfectant and that for assessments of news sites to be trusted, the work must always be transparent, apolitical, and accountable — never secret, biased, or unaccountable. Perhaps IAS, Double Verify, and GDI will get the message and change their processes.
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Gordon Crovitz, a former publisher of the Wall Street Journal, is the co-CEO of NewsGuard.