Taking Back Our Stolen History
NewsGuard
NewsGuard

NewsGuard

A propaganda and fake-ratings research firm started in 2018 that claims to be a non-partisan fact-checking organization, but uses pseudo-journalists to create new fake news filters as further promotion of misinformation and disinformation coming from today’s top 7,500 news sources. The Dept. of Defense paid the propaganda outlet $750,000 in Sept. 2021 to censor conservative media. A quick glance at its operations and related social media accounts shows an unhinged group of committed Trump-haters. Their trained analysts review online news brands to help propaganda mass media rule the internet by censoring, banning, abolishing, and bankrupting legitimate journalism that supports and propels healthy eating, natural medicine, sustainable farming practices, critical thinking, individualism, self-reliance, and of course, the Constitution. To accomplish all of this, NewsGuard created a hokey “green-yellow-red” ratings signal for differentiating between fake news (labeled as green) and actual news that counters the scripted, hidden agenda narrative (labeled as red), so that the brainwashed, medicated masses can use the dumbed-down ratings to continue believing that the mass media propaganda and falsehoods are all real.

NewsGuard’s main function is to keep truth news from running advertising that would support their continued functioning. They’ve gone so far as to create a “Nutrition Label” to promote anything that makes Americans sick as being safe, effective, sustainable, and nutritious, such as GMOs, processed foods, and anything made with conventional meat and dairy products. Their “SWAT” team of analysts supposedly works around the clock to identify any real news that’s trending so they can help shut it down. They’re long term goal is to ensure that everyone continues to watch CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, and NBC, then read the Washington Post and the New York Times, and finally go to fake new sites like Forbes.com and FactCheck.org for their daily fake news feed.

The establishment’s latest effort at a ‘ministry of truth’ has given its sign of approval to proven hoaxes, even to stories that have been retracted. Included automatically with the mobile version of Microsoft’s edge browser, NewsGuard quickly came under fire for giving a “red” rating to a number of conservative news outlets, while giving a “green” rating to several sites notorious for uncorrected falsehoods. There’s also a plugin to install in Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Mozilla Firefox, or Apple Safari browsers (all Communistic-style search engine filters) in one simple click. It is run by neoconservatives, Obama-Clinton alumni, and other assorted Trump haters, and has advised advertisers to withdraw their business from websites on its blacklist of “unreliable” news websites — a list that includes Breitbart News, The Drudge Report, and the Daily Mail. 

NewsGuard gave its seal of approval (on the Google search page) for Rolling Stone’s 2014 hoax about a gang rape at the University of Virginia (UVA). Rolling Stone (which NewsGuard also gave a passing grade) was eventually forced to retract the story and settle some lawsuits, but the far-left HuffPost’s aggregation of Rolling Stone’s proven lie is still live, and that green checkmark is NewsGuard’s way of telling readers they are reading something credible:

You see, when you do a Google search of stories, NewsGuard and Microsoft use the green checkmark to tell you what is and is not credible, what is and is not blacklisted, and this is NewsGuard giving the green light to a story that was so fake, it had to be retracted.

Compare that to NewsGuard’s labeling as fake news a basic news story like this one…

Why is NewsGuard labeling that fake news? Simply because Breitbart News published it. They didn’t even write that story. The AP did. Breitbart News was simply aggregating the AP. Look at the roundup below, which took less than 20 minutes to track down. Every single one of these stories is fake news, starting with BuzzFeed’s debunked lie about President Trump telling his then-personal attorney, Michael Cohen, to lie to Congress. Look at how NewsGuard and Microsoft openly and audaciously deceive their readers…

  • The Washington Post’s debunked hoax about Russia hacking Vermont’s utility grid — credible!!
  • The lie about first lady Melania Trump being an illegal alien — credible!!
  • The lie about Trump changing the name of Black History Month — credible!!
  • The lie about Trump threatening to invade Mexico — credible!!
  • The lie about Congress investigating a Russian fund with ties to Trump — credible!!

Reporting extensively on this topic, Breitbart‘s Allum Bokhari and John Nolte have catalogued NewsGuard’s neocon-packed board, its promotion by Fox News and the plugin’s selective and rampant bias. Now – Bokhari reports that NewsGuard is linked to a Paris-based advertising multinational that has made millions of dollars whitewashing Saudi Arabia’s image following the 9/11 attacks.

So why? Why are NewsGuard and Microsoft deliberately marking fake news as credible? Why are they looking to fool people into believing proven hoaxes are legitimate stories — even outrageous ones about the first lady coming to the country illegally? NewsGuard marks as fake every single story Breitbart News publishes — not because the story is inaccurate, but because they report stories NewsGuard does not believe should be reported. Nowhere in NewsGuard’s lengthy attack on Breitbart News will you find a single example of a story they got wrong. Nowhere can NewsGuard point to an example where their readers were misled.

You can see for yourself. So Breitbart News was not placed on NewsGuard’s blacklist for being inaccurate, for being deceptive, or for not being careful. No, they are blacklisted for uncovering and reporting things NewsGuard does not want uncovered and reported. Meanwhile, NewsGuard is literally marking fake news stories as credible. So what we have here is a fascist group of blacklisters looking to dupe as many people as possible into believing UVA has a rape problem, Melania Trump was an illegal alien, the Russians hacked into our electric grid, Trump told his attorney to lie, and so on…

In a 50/50 country, NewsGuard and Microsoft are obviously hoping to tip the 2020 election by fooling enough people into believing up is down and black is white. There is no other explanation for Microsoft and NewsGuard deliberately marking proven fake news as “credible” and legitimate news as fake.

In their ongoing efforts to discredit, marginalize, and silence all those who dissent from their agenda, Leftists are increasingly trying to fool the public by establishing ostensibly neutral “fact-checking” organizations that purport to identify “fake news,” but which actually apply that label only to those who don’t parrot their nonsense. Newsguard, in response to Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch, told him that the Southern Poverty Law Center’s labeling of Jihad Watch as a hate group would weigh into their evaluation. The SPLC IS a hate group masquerading as a civil liberties advocate.

According to the group’s website:

“NewsGuard uses journalism to fight false news, misinformation and disinformation. Our trained analysts, who are experienced journalists, research online news brands to help readers and viewers know which ones are trying to do legitimate journalism — and which are not.

Our Green-Red ratings signal if a website is trying to get it right or instead has a hidden agenda or knowingly publishes falsehoods or propaganda.”

Currently, the NewsGuard “SWAT team” is only focusing on U.S.-based media brands, but is planning on expanding “to serve the billions of people globally who get news online.” In other words, NewsGuard is setting itself up as the self-appointed global arbiter of what information is “trustworthy” — based on nine “credibility and transparency” factors — not only for information viewed on private electronic devices, but also for information accessible in public libraries and schools. Librarians will even provide instructions to patrons on how to install the NewsGuard extension on their personal computers, tablets and cell phones.

Once you’ve installed the NewsGuard browser plugin on your computer or cellphone, the NewsGuard icon rating will appear on all Google and Bing searches and on articles featured in your social media news feeds:

These icons are meant to influence readers, instructing them to disregard content with cautionary colors and cautions. While the warnings may be enough to prevent someone from clicking these links, I believe the true intent will be to bury this content entirely from search results and social media feeds. It is very likely Google, Facebook, Twitter and other platforms will use these ratings to lower the visibility of content — making nonconformist views disappear entirely.

Eight Days Before the 2020 Election, Shayna Elliot of NewsGuard, sent an email to 1oo Percent Fed Up informing us that they were planning to write a report “highlighting social media accounts with high follower counts who have shared what we have found to be voting or election-related misinformation to their large audiences.” As an example of “election-related misinformation,” NewsGuard located ONE article from the 100percentfedup.com website that was posted on the 100 Percent Fed Up Facebook page that they used an example. The article, titled: Critical Swing State of PA: 372,000 Mail-In Ballot Applications Rejected After Discovering 90% Were DUPLICATES, was originally missing the word “Applications.” Once it was brought to our attention, it was immediately corrected.

NewsGuard’s Shayna Elliot wrote to 100 Percent Fed Up on Wednesday:

Your Facebook account (100 Percent Fed Up) is included based on a post* reviewed by NewsGuard which claims “372,000 mail-in ballots rejected” in “critical swing state” Pennsylvania, when in reality 372,000 ballot applications were rejected, a seemingly small but crucial distinction. Voters who were denied a mail-in ballot are still able to vote in person.

If you would like to include an on the record comment, please let me know as soon as possible. We intend to publish our report tomorrow morning, Wednesday, October 28.

100 Percent Fed Up co-owner Patty McMurray responded to Elliot’s email:

Patty's Email to NewsGuard

Hi Shayna. My name is Patty McMurray. I wrote the article you are referring to. Unfortunately, when we wrote the article, ProPublica, the source we used that broke the story did not, from what I recall, mention “applications,” but instead, focused on mail-in-ballots. We were given a fact check violation by Lead Stories. We immediately corrected our title to add “applications,” and within hours, the fact check violation was removed. End of story.

If you want to talk about election-related misinformation, you might want to focus on CNN, MSNBC, NBC, ABC, CBS, New York Times, Washington Post, etc., who all reported a lie that President Trump was somehow working with the Russians to get elected, when in fact, it was the Democrats and Deep State who pushed a lie about the now disproven Steele Dossier, funded by Hillary Clinton’s campaign. You might also want to look into Hunter Biden’s emails and question why the mainstream media refuses to report on his father’s involvement in his dirty foreign deals. But alas, your focus is on the big stuff, like mail-in-applications vs. mail-in-ballots.

NewsGuard is of no interest to me. Feel free to write whatever you’d like. I’ve actually been waiting for the moment your organization attempted to threaten me again so I could write about NewsGuard and the research I did on the last guy who threatened me from your organization. I’ve taken over 100 screenshots of David Lepeska’s anti- Trump tweets, yet he was posing as a neutral “fact-checker” for your organization when he contacted us and asked us to give him information that we felt was none of his business. Your so-called “fact-check” group behaves more like a mob with a shakedown mentality than a professional organization. I will not be threatened by you or anyone at NewsGuard over the prospect of receiving negative press from you. We are two moms who’ve been publishing accurate conservative news for over 7 years. We have over 2.5  million followers who appreciate our hard work and dedication to the truth. NewsGuard is irrelevant to us.

Please feel free to print my statement (in bold).

– Patty McMurray

Four days later and four days before the election, NewsGuard published their ridiculous smear article titled: Tracking Facebook’s Election Misinformation ‘Super-Spreaders’

NewsGuard’s article, a hit piece on 38 major conservative Facebook pages and only TWO small liberal Facebook pages, the Palmer Report, and “Greg Palast” (each page has about 100K likes).

Four of the 38 conservative pages called out by NewsGuard are owned by 100 Perecentfedup.com (100 Percent Fed Up, Rush Limbaugh Radio Fan page, Women For Trump and Fed Up Americans) with a combined estimated 2.5 million likes. Other legitimate conservative pages with massive reach include the wildly popular “The Gateway Pundit,” “Glenn Beck,” and “The Federalist.” Many of the names of the Facebook pages targeted by the self-appointed arbiter of truth, NewsGuard, had either “Trump” or “Conservative” in them.

While both of the liberal Facebook pages NewsGuard included in their report are, for the most part, insignificant players, curiously, Facebook’s top liberal page, Occupy Democrats, with over 10 million followers, is not included in their report. Most of Occupy Democrat’s multiple fact-check violations on Politifact’s website are considered “Half True, “Mostly False” or “Pants on  Fire.”

NewsGuard began their article by telling their readers they have given the “conservative news site” 100percentfedup.com a “red rating,” adding that they are “anonymously operated.”

In their first paragraph, they hilariously contradict themselves as they identify Patty McMurray as the “co-owner of the site 100PercentFedUp.com and the author of the article.”

Although to their credit, they did include the part of the email where I referred to them as a “shakedown organization,” they neglected to include the part about how I couldn’t wait for NewsGuard to threaten me again, so I could expose David Lepeska, who originally contacted us on behalf of NewsGuard on July 12, 2018.

“I’ve actually been waiting for the moment your organization attempted to threaten me again so I could write about NewsGuard and the research I did on the last guy who threatened me from your organization”

Here’s the original email I received from the anti-Trump David Lepeska, who, according to him, was hired by NewsGuard, “a new service that reviews news and information websites for credibility and transparency.”

David Lepeska, like many of the so-called “fact-checkers” or researchers hired by “fact-check” organizations to determine for the public what is and what isn’t true, are nothing more than leftist activists.

NewGuard’s David Lepeska, who was tasked with researching our conservative, pro-Trump website, is hardly a politically neutral journalist.

Mr. Lepeska really doesn’t like President Trump, and his tweets and retweets prove it.

In a June 1 tweet by Lepeska, he posted a tweet by Melania Trump and claimed our First Lady is somehow “reaching out to us” for HELP! His tweet could easily be compared to a tweet by QAnon, a group Twitter refers to as a dangerous “conspiracy group” and has banned from their platform. But it’s okay with Twitter when “journalists” working for NewsGuard make incredible conspiracy claims about Melania Trump?

In another tweet, Lepeska calls President Trump a “moron” in response to Trump hater Ian Bremmer’s tweet:

Lepeska openly brags about a record number of college students applying at far-left journalism schools. In his tweet, Lepeska claims they’re “Gunning for Trump.” It seems that an employee of a so-called neutral “fact-checking” organization would celebrate a new crop of journalists who are “gunning” for our president.

Finally, in another screenshot of a tweet by Lepeska (we have over 100 more), Lepeska posts a quote from a Breitbart article that states, “Still Rising”: Rasmussen Poll Shows Donald Trump Approval Ratings Now At 51%. The NewsGuard researcher warns Americans that they’re “looking down the barrel of 8 years of Trump,” telling them they need to “Step it up.”

Step it up??? Is that part of Lepeska’s role at NewsGuard to step up the activist fact-checkers’ efforts to discredit conservative news sites?

Editorial Editor of NewsGuard Eric Effron isn’t exactly a neutral player in the game of politics either.

On Oct 10, 2018, Eric Effron tweeted a fake news story from The Atlantic about a mystery Russian server connected to the Trump campaign. The story was completely debunked. Near the end of his article in The Atlantic, tweeted by the Editorial Editor of NewsGuard, the author, Franklin Foer, justifies pursuing his fantasy of catching Trump in a Russian scandal:

“How would I sleep the next week if Donald Trump were elected president, knowing that I had sat on a potentially important piece of information?In the end, Trump was elected president, and I still slept badly,” Foer writes.

On Nov 3, 2018, only days before the election, Effron tweeted a link from an anti-Donald Trump Jr. article by CNN, one of America’s most dishonest forms of “media.” Effron copied and pasted their idiotic headline along with the link.

Social media is a powerful tool, it can be used to silence the opposition, and it can also be used to reveal the true identity of your opposition, including third-rate “fact check” organizations posing as legitimate arbiters of truth.1

The Game Plan

The effect isn’t merely to silence pro-Trump, alternative, and conservative media. It also ensures advertisers don’t market their products to conservatives, causing them to rely less and less on consumers in the heartland, and more on progressive consumers who read establishment news sources. The ultimate result: corporations cater their products and “corporate values” even more to the latter, and not at all to the former.

“By licensing the NewsGuard ratings, advertisers limit their advertising, including programmatic advertising, to sites that meet the NewsGuard criteria” explains the neocon extension’s official website “Advertisers use this data and related information about sites to craft efficient—and safe—ad campaigns.” Programmatic advertising is essentially the use of automation to purchase ads, as opposed to manual selection and placement of ads by humans. Adweek calls programmatic advertising “the most important trend in advertising,” and estimates that 82 percent of ads will be programmatic by 2020.

“Ad tech companies have software to keep brands safe from hate speech and pornography. But artificial intelligence cannot root out false news because false news is designed to look like real news. NewsGuard adds an extra layer of protection as the only process that involves human beings—trained journalists—reviewing every website.”

The logic of their system leads towards the demonetization of pro-Trump and populist conservative media – an approach that dovetails with the rise of financial blacklisting, in which left-wing and anti-Trump agitators pressure online funding platforms, payment processors, and credit card companies to cut off service from conservatives and anti-establishment figures. The goal is to render independent media unprofitable; blacklisting and censoring them by cutting off their income.

This is further proof that establishment conservatives are just as eager as the far left to crush the populist movement. Even Bill Kristol, the arch-NeverTrumper let the truth about NewsGuard slip out during an interview with the browser extension’s “editor-in-chief.” “I guess the counter-argument to what you’re doing is, well, this is a bunch of establishment people deciding they like establishment websites,” said Kristol. It’s more than that — it’s also a bunch of establishment people deciding they don’t like anti-establishment websites, and wanting to wage financial warfare against them.

Media entrepreneurs and shills Gordon Crovitz (former Wall Street Journal publisher) and Steven Brill have only the worst intentions.

NewsGuard’s Own Transparency Is Wanting

Fake news is certainly a problem. But determining who should have the final word on credibility and what is “truth” is not a simple one. Who is going to verify the credibility and transparency of the verifiers, i.e., NewsGuard?

It was hard to believe multibillion-dollar companies would rely on the likes of Snopes or Web of Trust to be the guardians of truth and credibility, and in fact they didn’t. Over time, most people using the internet learned to disregard article and website ratings dispensed by either Snopes or Web of Trust.

But now in 2019, enter NewsGuard, which for all its promises to vet any and all independent online media for conflicts of interest, credibility and transparency, apparently does not expect you to put them under that same scrutiny. On NewsGuard’s United States Securities and Exchange Commission Form D filed March 5, 2018, there is an option for disclosing the size of its revenue, but that box was checked, “Decline to disclose.”

Shouldn’t a corporation setting itself up as the judge and validator of the transparency of others be 100 percent transparent as well? NewsGuard also claims a Rule 506(b) exemption, which among its benefits allows for an unlimited amount of money to be raised from an unlimited number of accredited investors.

Well, in doing some digging of our own, aside from internet giants Microsoft and Google — one of the largest monopolies in the world — it appears NewsGuard is backed by companies that are presently involved, or have been in the past, in advertising and marketing of pharmaceutical products, cigarettes and unhealthy junk food to kids. Are we to believe that the profit preferences of such entities will have no influence on NewsGuard’s ratings of individuals, organizations and companies that criticize the safety or effectiveness of those products?

NewsGuard and Microsoft are also partners in the Defending Democracy Program, a program aimed at safeguarding electoral processes by working with government.

According to Microsoft’s April 2018 announcement, “The Defending Democracy Program will work with all stakeholders in democratic countries globally” to protect campaigns from hacking, increase transparency in political advertising, exploring technological solutions to protect electoral processes and remediate cyber threats, and ward against disinformation campaigns. Overall, it appears NewsGuard is just another big business aimed at keeping the chemical, drug and food industries, as well as mainstream media, intact by discrediting and eliminating unwanted competition.

What You Need to Know About NewsGuard Backer, Publicis Groupe

NewsGuard’s $6 million startup was funded in part by the Publicis Groupe,11 the “third largest global communications group,” according to the Publicis website.12 Publicis was founded in 1926 by Marcel Bleustein-Blanchet, a French entrepreneur, with the goal of improving the image of advertising and turning it into “a real profession.” In fact, Publicis Groupe’s name is derived in part from the French word for advertising.13

The Publicis Groupe has been manipulating what people think about commercial products for nearly a century. Over that century, this advertising and communications firm bought or partnered with targeted advertising avenues, beginning with newspapers, followed by radio, TV, cinema and the internet. Some of its self-described accomplishments include:

  • The first press advertising appeared in 1927
  • In 1930, Bleustein-Blanchet pioneered the first radio advertising
  • In 1935 Publicis started acquiring cinemas
  • In 1958, after becoming heavily involved in newspapers and expanding into partnerships with major industry names like Colgate, he created the “industrial information” department
  • In 1972, he entered the technology world
  • In 1983, he introduced the concept of global communication driven by marketing

With revenue avenues secured, Publicis’ clients and partners built a global presence that dominated the advertising world. Be it tobacco or junk food, Publicis Groupe found a way to promote and strengthen big industries. Within the Publicis Groupe are four networks serving its clients, including Publicis Health,15 which boasts its clients are “some of the biggest and most exciting names in health and wellness.”

The wallpaper on the Publicis Health site shows Lilly, Abbot, Roche, Amgen, Genentech, Celgene, Gilead, Biogen, Astra Zeneca, Sanofi and Bayer, to name a few of those clients. The Publicis Health board also consists of a power pack of high-profile individuals with Big Pharma position backgrounds or affiliations:

Leo Burnett, the ad company famous for creating the Marlboro man ad campaigns that made Marlboro the best-selling cigarette in the world and led to the nicotine addiction of millions, many of whom died from smoking, is also part of Publicis.If a company such as NewsGuard has such atrocious conflicts of interests, they should take their own advice and be transparent about their investors’ sources of income. How can you trust a group associated with funders known for promoting cigarettes, drugs and junk food?

These Publicist Group subsidiary P.R. firms sole purpose is to spin the news and influence the public on behalf of corporate clients. Among these P.R. firms is Qorvis Group, a Washington, D.C.-based outfit whose clients include Saudi Arabia and the Kingdom of Bahrain. The firm has represented Saudi Arabia since the aftermath of the September 11 attacks when the Sharia-run country was desperate to protect its image amidst revelations that 15 of the 19 attacking terrorists were Saudi nationals. The Saudis were serious about too: in a seven-month period between March and September 2002, the Royal Embassy of Saudi Arabia spent an eye-popping $14.7 million on Qorvis’ services. (Breitbart)

Qorvis was raided by the FBI in 2004 “in conjunction with an ongoing investigation,” which the company said was simply a “compliance inquiry” under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). Meanwhile, in 2011 over 1/3 of Qorvis’s partners quit – in part due to the firm’s controversial work for foreign governments according to Slate, citing a former employee.

After the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in 2001, Qorvis/MSLGroup began defending Saudi Arabia against claims that the country was soft on terrorism. The work led three founding partners to quit over discomfort in representing the Gulf nation. Two years later, the FBI searched the firm’s offices for information about its work for Saudi Arabia in connection with an investigation into compliance with foreign lobbying regulations. (No charges were filed.)

In 2011, more than a third of the firm’s partners quit. The firm’s work for foreign governments was at least partially responsible for some of the departures that year, said a former Qorvis/MSLGroup employee who did not want to be named. Saudi Arabia, the firm’s biggest foreign client, has spent $46 million in total on contracts to improve its image in the United States over the past five years. It is the top spender on representation among countries with poor human rights records. This year, it hired five firms. –Slate

And what did Qorvis do for the Saudis? According to Mother Jones, “Qorvis launched a TV campaign with ads on political talk shows featuring a procession of Saudi royals appearing alongside U.S. presidents, to highlight Riyadh as a close ally,” while running TV spots in 15 US cities touting the “shared values” of the United States and Saudi Arabia.

“Saudi King Doubles Humanitarian Aid to Yemen to More Than $500 Million,” read one Qorvis-placed press release.

The media blitz went beyond TV – as Saudi royals embarked on PR junkets on major media outlets while Qorvis broadcast advertisements promoting the 9/11 Commission finding that there was “no evidence that the Saudi government as an institution or senior Saudi officials individually funded [Al Qaeda].” Of course, said advertising failed to mention the report’s conclusion that “Saudi Arabia has been a problematic ally in combating Islamic extremism.”

According to Bokhari, Quorvis still represents Saudi Arabia as their parent company backs NewsGuard.

The P.R. campaign worked — despite former senators who served on the 9/11 commission now claiming significant links between the 9/11 attackers and Saudi Arabia, media attention (following the lead of the Bush Administration) in the aftermath of 9/11 instead shifted to Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq. We all know how that ended.

Qorvis continues to represent Saudi Arabia, and more recently promoted its brutal war in Yemen, which has featured numerous alleged human rights violations, including the use of cluster bombs to attack civilian locations. The Trump administration has stubbornly supported the Saudi intervention in Yemen, but bipartisan majorities in both the Senate and House have both resolved that the U.S. support lacks congressional authorization. –Breitbart

And hey, Saudi Arabia – which executed cleric Sheikh Nimr after he called for free elections, and sentenced a blogger to 1,000 lashes for writing about free speech – is on the UN’s Human Rights Council, perhaps thanks tro Qorvis’ PR boost.

NewsGuard co-founder Steven Brill told Breitbart that their association with Quorvis’ parent company would undermine public trust in the project.

“Publicis has nothing to do with the content or operations of NewsGuard and has a small stake in the company,” Brill commented. “Gordon [Crovitz] and I have the controlling interest.”

The Fourth Estate

While pro-industry advertising worked well for decades, there was still the irksome problem of the Fourth Estate, a term that refers to the press. The problem was that professional investigative journalists working for magazines, newspapers and broadcast outlets would write in-depth exposés, outing the truth behind deceptive advertising and countering industry propaganda with science, statistics and other documented facts — and when a free press with honest reporting based on verifiable facts actually does its job, ineffective or toxic products are driven off the market.

So, the answer that industry came up with in the late 20th century to combat truth in journalism was, pure and simple: Control the Fourth Estate with advertising dollars. By partnering with the “big guns” of media, such as The Paley Center for Media, Publicis and its industry clients were able to influence and, essentially, control the press to restrict or virtually eliminate your ability to ever hear the truth on many important issues, especially ones that affect your health.

The Paley Center, by the way, is composed of every major media in the world, including Microsoft, AOL, CBS, Fox, Tribune Media and entertainment — and those are just a handful of the big-name media. One of The Paley Center’s activities is to sponsor an annual global forum for industry leaders.24

NewsGuard, founded by journalists Steven Brill and Gordon Crovitz, is housed in The Paley Center in New York City and, in November 2015, Publicis’ chairman of North America, Susan Gianinno, joined the Paley Center’s board of trustees.25 Additionally, Brill’s and Crovitz’s former business partner in a different venture, Leo Hindery,26,27 was a prior trustee and director of The Paley Center, adding up to some fairly influential connections that NewsGuard has with the Center besides being a tenant in their building.

Publicis and Google are also partners, forming an interlocking triangle with NewsGuard. Publicis and Google joined forces with Condé Nast in 2014, creating the marketing service La Maison, “focused on producing engaging content for marketers in the luxury space.”28

The Rise of Fake News

In the 21st century, industry advertorials are looking more like editorial writing in mainstream publications, while news stories increasingly parrot press releases with no probing questions to balance industry perspectives. And, when news reporters like Sharyl Attkisson dare to tell the truth, they are bullied, threatened and/or fired to prevent damage to the bottom line.

Simultaneously, another proverbial fly in the ointment for industry has emerged — the growth of alternative internet media, beginning in the early 1990s. It’s easy to imagine how these independent, online news sources posed problems for the brand marketing initiatives that Publicis and similar mass communication corporations had worked so hard to develop for their industry clients.

So, consider how distraught those industry giants must have grown over time, as alternative internet media grew into a whole New Fourth Estate, with sourced analyses and investigative reporting that reflected what the old Fourth Estate used to do. Additionally, this alternative internet media has become a place where news and exchange of opinions are free, and where people all over the world can talk to each other in real time without being controlled by advertising dollars.

These alternative online news sources attract people who want to know more than what they see on TV or in paid subscription magazines and newspapers — they are people who don’t take everything at face value and who intelligently question marketing and propaganda tactics.

But, as more and more independent-thinking people gravitate toward alternative journalism in ever-growing numbers, everything these Wall Street corporations have built to influence mainstream media is at stake. Again, you can imagine what they were thinking: They had to come up with a way to stop the wide reach of these New Fourth Estate internet sites.

Their answer was to create a policeman, an arbiter of truth and credibility who appears upstanding and trustworthy but who, under the radar, with a single tap on a keyboard, can “undercut” those alternative websites, independent journalists and consumer advocates. That policeman is NewsGuard. And better yet, when they chose a policeman, they made sure those heading up this final arbiter of “truth” and “fake news” came from the original Fourth State itself.

This trend of industry infiltrating the Fourth Estate — the press — was in many ways the very root and beginning of the fake news problem. So, it’s ironic that NewsGuard, fronted by Publicis, connected to The Paley Center, is now cashing in on the fake news trend the press itself fostered.

Another irony is that NewsGuard’s cofounders, Steven Brill and Gordon Crovitz, have both written in the past, or supervised articles, about Big Pharma’s influence on the health care industry (Brill as an award-winning journalist and Crovitz as publisher of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Wall Street Journal — which is a business-friendly publication as it is.

But now, drug industry money is being used to fund the “fact-checking” Brill and Crovitz do of websites that expose the abuse of the people’s trust and health by the pharmaceutical industry.

Is NewsGuard Industry’s Ace Up the Sleeve?

We already have evidence that those of us providing free information and perspective that do not conform with what industry and media giants like Publicis want the people to think, believe and do, have been targeted for elimination by big search engines and social media platforms that label our information as “fake news.”

Is NewsGuard a very clever new media strategy influenced by industry and designed to further discredit and block public access to websites like ours? Is their real purpose a plan to squelch websites like ours that publish referenced information questioning the safety and effectiveness of commercial products aggressively marketed by industry, government and mainstream media? It appears that it is.

As I already mentioned, NewsGuard was founded by two Fourth Estate veterans: Gordon Crovitz32 is an attorney and former Wall Street Journal publisher and executive vice-president of Dow Jones; Steven Brill33 is an attorney “journalist-entrepreneur” who founded The American Lawyer magazine and the Court TV cable channel.

With plans of world domination as the arbiter of the “trustworthiness” of information published online, NewsGuard completes industry’s ring of power. With the help of NewsGuard, Wall Street-dominated media firms like Publicis can go on as before and industry can keep selling products to an unsuspecting public that has no clue they’re just pawns in the game.

While many fake news sites will be eliminated by the Google and Microsoft-backed NewsGuard rating system, many legitimate news sources and information-based nonprofit organizations publishing online will also get buried by it.

The Wheel of Industry Fortune

To make sense of why NewsGuard may not be in the best interest of truth seekers, it’s important to realize the key role of Publicis Groupe. By methodically acquiring and partnering with media, it has kept the wheel of industry profits going.

With the addition of the school system (Google’s domination in schools being one example), the circle was nearly complete when the stumbling block in the form of alternative media emerged. That’s where NewsGuard comes in — to destroy alternative media that might detract customers from Publicis Groupe’s clients — industry and their products, which include but are not limited to vaccines, drugs and junk food.34,35

At the center of this circle is industry — from agriculture to junk food to the drug and technology industries, and more. The Paley Center for Media is connected to all the major media companies, while the Fourth Estate represents the press at large, both big and small.

The school system is an important cog in this wheel, as that’s where indoctrination and generation of new customers begins. With NewsGuard’s partnering with public libraries and schools, this lagging cog is now being brought fully into the fold.

To this wheel you could add a number of other players as well, such as the legislative branches of government, government health agencies and governmental consumer protection agencies, the medical community, the internet as a whole, and institutions of higher education.

But regardless of how many spokes you add, Publicis Groupe is the organizer and therefore the anchor of this wheel of industry fortune. It helps pave the way in various ways to allow industry to generate revenue. As mentioned, Publicis Groupe consists of four separate but interconnected networks that service industry clients:36

  • Publicis Communications, where the client’s brand image and message are skillfully and creatively crafted37
  • Publicis Sapient, specializing in the design of digital business platforms38
  • Publicis Media, where “the power of the modern media landscape” is harnessed “to drive business transformation”39
  • Publicis Healthcare Communications Group

Now add NewsGuard, funded by Publicis and physically headquartered in The Paley Center.

Indebted to Big Industry through its funding, it appears that NewsGuard is being positioned as a “competition eradicator” that will allow Publicis and Big Industry to maintain their undisputed reign as shapers of public opinion about health-related issues, including the safety of food, air and water, medical devices and products, prescription drugs and vaccines, as well as public health policies that endorse the use of those products.

If I’m right about this, the influence of NewsGuard’s ratings of websites could pose a serious threat to freedom of the press across the world. With a simple check mark, this Wall Street corporation will have the power to direct online readers to industry-approved sources of information, and to block readers from accessing sources of information that enable them to make fully informed decisions about how to take control of their health.

Blowback from censorship and bias has plagued many of these platforms for years. NewsGuard is the third party the media and social platforms have been looking for to make nonconformist views disappear altogether.

The age of electronic book burning is advancing quickly as corporate elitists are losing control of the people. NewsGuard has become the latest weapon to fortify the crumbling walls of the Wall Street castle.

“NewsGuard”? More like “Fake NewsGuard.” 

NG is targeting educators at all levels with their propaganda promotion “filter”

Since the US government has their hands in all levels of education, of course NewsGuard sees an opportunity to “help” students filter out real news that might help them be healthy and self-reliant, critical thinking citizens. In this regard, NG wants their news filters installed for every civics classroom, from kindergarten through college, to ensure nobody ever learns about dirty politics, Big Food, or Big Pharma’s insidious agendas. Again, NG thinks their free browser plug-in and extension should do the trick here. This provides students with detailed information about what NG deems as newsworthy, and everything they censor that doesn’t fit the mainstream narrative. NG has even added their free “News Literacy Guide” that contains fake lesson plans, exercises, and an explanation of how to use their shill tools.

Breitbart.com reported on this organization and their goal to demonetize opposing voices online.

Financial Blacklisting: NewsGuard Advises Advertisers to Avoid Pro-Trump Media

NewsGuard, the news-filtering browser extension recently partnered with Microsoft and run by neoconservatives, Obama-Clinton alumni, and other assorted Trump haters, has advised advertisers to withdraw their business from websites on its blacklist of “unreliable” news websites — a list that includes Breitbart News, The Drudge Report, and the Daily Mail…

…The effect isn’t merely to silence pro-Trump media. It also ensures advertisers don’t market their products to Trump voters, causing them to rely less and less on consumers in the heartland, and more on progressive consumers who read establishment news sources.

In 2019 there was a report by La Corte News that revealed conservative sites are twice as likely to be rated unreliable as liberal publishers.

Today we found out the United States Department of Defense was using taxpayer dollars to censor conservatives and independent media online.

The DOD awarded $749,387 to Newsguard in September 2021.

From Matt Taibbi: “Some NGOs, like the GEC-funded Global Disinformation Index or the DOD-funded Newsguard, not only seek content moderation but apply subjective “risk” or “reliability” scores to media outlets, which can result in reduction in revenue. Do we want government in this role?”

Newsguard has consistently attacked The Gateway Pundit on COVID, the Hunter Biden laptop, and vaccines that have all been proven to be accurate, but has NEVER criticized the mainstream media for lying about Trump-Russia collusion, the Hunter Biden laptop, COVID and vaccines.

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