Guardians of truth in Silicon Valley have spoken: Newsrooms that correctly reported the facts related to Hunter Biden’s laptop are untrustworthy. Those that heroically sought to prevent voters from hearing about it are democracy’s real champions.
That’s the word from NewsGuard, a four-year-old, Microsoft-partnered browser extension that users can pay to download. The project uses what it calls “nutrition labels” to rate media outlets, using nine criteria to assign scores of 0-100. Factors include things such as whether an organization “gathers and presents information responsibly,” as well as whether it maintains the difference “between news and opinion responsibly.”
Thus it is, NewsGuard developers tell us, that Fox News scores just 57/100 on its scale, while a panoply of left-wing outlets score 80 or better. Outlets with an 80 include CNN—which botched the story about Hunter’s laptop while heavily promoting the discredited Steele Dossier, of Russian collusion hoax infamy—as well as the more radical activist group Media Matters. Liberal newsrooms that are slightly less vocal in their activism—such as Raw Story—earn a perfect 100.
What led to the contempt for Fox News? Explaining, NewsGuard claims, “While some FoxNews.com news coverage is well-sourced, NewsGuard found that the website has advanced false or misleading information in video and text stories that regularly support views of conservatives and of the Trump administration.”
As an example, it cites a March 10, 2020 statement by Fox News primetime host Sean Hannity that “99%” of “healthy people” recover from COVID-19 “very fast.” Never mind that the statement was true, according to testimony Dr. Anthony Fauci delivered to Congress that same month. The real problem, according to NewsGuard, was that Hannity didn’t quote the right people—namely, those who had been approved by the federal government and by “Chinese authorities.”
“International health authorities have not said as of May 2020, and did not say in March 2020, that 99% of ‘healthy people’ who contract the virus recover very quickly from it,” NewsGuard said. “As of March 2020, health authorities, including the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, as well as February 2020 research published by Chinese authorities, concluded that approximately 80% of the people who contract COVID-19 have mild cases.”
www.newsweek.com/newsrooms-may-suppress-more-hunter-biden-stories-2024-heres-why-opinion-1729333