If a news site claims to be the truth, it's probably lying

The truth may set you free, but first you have to find it. And in the golden age of bullshit, that's harder than ever. 

NewsGuard, a mis/disinformation watchdog organization, analyzed 55 sites that use the word "truth" in their titles and/or domain names. It turns out that if a website claims to reveal the truth about a topic, it's a clear signal there's a three-alarm fire raging inside its trousers. [1]

NewsGuard applies a 100-point scoring system to every alleged news site, rating how frequently it publishes false information, corrects errors, avoids deceptive headlines, discloses who's behind it, and clearly distinguishes between news and opinion, as well as between editorial content and advertising. It then creates a "Nutrition Label" for each site, telling you whether you're about to consume a healthy diet of fiber-rich factual information, or sugar-coated propaganda with a side order of manure. 

Some of the sites lying about their 'news-tritional' value include TheTruthAboutCancer (NG Trust Score: 12.5), Truth11 (7.5), and RussiaTruth (7.5), all which were used to spread misinformation about Covid-19 vaccines, the war in Ukraine, and Hillary Clinton, among other topics.

All the news that drives you into fits of rage

NewsGuard applies that same criteria to all news sites, not just bottom-feeding scum like those named above. For example, here's part of the nutrition label for Foxnews.com.

Personally, I think NewsGuard is being generous about how clearly Fox separates news from opinion — in the minds of Fox viewers, every batshit crazy thing that gurgles out of Jeanine Pirro's box-wine-stained lips qualifies as news. Interestingly, NewsGuard gives NYTimes.com a Trust Score of 87.5, saying that the Gray Lady met every criteria except the one about offering a clear distinction between news and opinion. 

I suspect NewsGuard is also being generous here. Because the Times clearly has some 'splainin to do. I am hardly alone in expressing extreme angst over how the Times has been downplaying and both-sidesing the existential crisis our democracy is facing. 

Earlier this week, Ben Smith of Semafor (Trust Score: 92.5) published an interview NY Time's Executive Editor Joe Kahn about why people are so pissed off at his paper. The interview was illuminating, but not in a way that made Smith, Kahn, or the Times look very good. 

Let's start with the very first paragraph of Smith's intro.

I stopped by Joe Kahn’s modest office in the New York Times newsroom Thursday to ask him what some of his readers want to know: Why doesn’t the executive editor see it as his job to help Joe Biden win? 

Intercourse Ben Smith. [2]

Nobody is asking the Times to help Biden win. We're asking it to stop treating Biden and Trump as equally dangerous to the future of this country. One of these candidates is not like the other. But you wouldn't know that by reading the "Paper of Record." [3]

Kahn's smug responses to Smith's softball questions didn't help matters. Here's one getting a lot of attention from people who are as equally gobsmacked by that interview as I am.

So, to recap: The Times bases its coverage based on polls, democracy isn't as important to readers as immigration and the economy, and these are issues on which Trump is somehow superior? What the absolute f**k?

If I were conducting that interview, I'd have asked Kahn what he thinks of the New York Times Pitchbot, a Xitter account that satirizes Times' headlines with surgical precision. Does he think maybe there's a reason it's attracted 264K followers? 

A cure for fake news

I've written a few times already about NewsGuard's excellent work identifying AI-generated deep fakes and fake news spam farms. The site was started by Steven Brill, who made his money producing Court TV, and Gordon Crovitz, former publisher of the Wall Street Journal. It employs dozens of journalists, who have used their well-honed BS detectors to analyze the content of more than 8,500 news sites. It is nonpartisan; legitimate news sources that express a conservative viewpoint, like the National Review (Trust Score: 92.5), get the same treatment as more liberal leaning ones like the New Republic (Trust Score: 92.5). 

And it offers these ratings as a subscription service. For $5 a month, you can install a browser plug-in that gives you a Trust Score for each news site you visit — or if there is no score, it lets you request one. It also helpfully inserts those ratings into search results, so you can quickly scan to find the most reputable information sources for a particular topic.

To be clear, NewsGuard is not guaranteeing a particular story is true, or that a site is always accurate. It's not even rating the quality of the reporting. It's just establishing whether a site follows the bare minimum of journalistic practices that separate it from the exponentially increasing volumes of fake news and propaganda.

The next time your crazy uncle tells you how he "did his own research" to discover that eating broiled rat feces cures prostate cancer, show him what NewsGuard thinks of that site. It won't change his mind, but there's a good chance it will really irritate him. That alone is worth the $5.

What news sources do you trust? Post yours in the comments below or email me: [email protected].

[1] I know what you're thinking. But because NewsGuard only rates news sites, it offers no rating for Truth Social. 

[2] Smith has his own issues. Prior to founding Semafor, he was the NYT's media columnist for a couple of years. And prior to that, he ran Buzzfeed, which gained notoriety when it published the Steele Dossier without doing any fact checking. 

[3] A couple of weeks ago Politico (Trust Score: 100) published a deep dive into the ongoing fued between the Times and the White House, detailing how the Times has amped up its coverage of Biden's age in retaliation for POTUS's refusal to sit down for an extended interview with the paper. Somehow, that Politico story did not come up in Smith's interview.