NewsGuard, the establishment “news-rating” project that presents itself as a source of expert knowledge on which news sources can be trusted and which ones cannot, addressed its track record on the Hunter Biden laptop story in comments to Breitbart News, despite its co-founder labeling the story a Russian “hoax” at the time.
After two years of ignoring or denying the story, the New York Times has acknowledged that Hunter’s “laptop from hell,” one of the biggest bombshells of the 2020 election cycle despite social media censorship and the establishment media’s news blackout, is real.
Steven Brill and Gordon Crovitz, co-CEOs of NewsGuard (D Dipasupil and Stephen Chernin /Getty)
At the time, a wide swathe of establishment media figures and organizations sought to discredit the New York Post’s story. Taxpayer-funded NPR claimed there were “red flags” in the Post’s story, including unfounded claims from intelligence officials that Russia was involved, and claimed the story could not be “verified” – despite doing no work to verify it.
Politico, similarly, published a story with claims from “intelligence officials” calling the story “Russian disinfo,” without doing any independent work to verify the material in the laptop, which was widely available to news publications.
NewsGuard followed along with this narrative. In an interview with CNBC at the time, NewsGuard co-founder Steven Brill said “My personal opinion is there’s a high likelihood this story is a hoax, maybe even a hoax perpetrated by the Russians again.”
NewsGuard has a track record of giving negative ratings to conservative-leaning publications, while giving a positive “green” rating to establishment …