Feb 20, 2023

NewsGuard is gaming the system for Fox News

The company known as NewsGuard remains a menace in our fight against Fox News.

NewsGuard is a media reliability ratings company that rates news outlets and sells those ratings as a subscription service to public libraries, K-12 schools, and, of course, advertisers across the country.

The problem, though, is that NewsGuard games its own system for Fox News.

Despite the recent Dominion filings, the company continues to rate Fox News as "69.5/100 — Credible with Exceptions." An oversight, perhaps?

Hard to believe. NewsGuard maintains a "Nutrition Label" or a long-form report for every news outlet it rates. The rating system is based on a 100-point scale.

On March 9th, they updated Fox News’s ratings to include new details from the filings.

And yet, Fox News still gets full points on this criterion:

“Does not repeatedly publish false content (22/22 points)”

Interesting, isn’t it?

Why does this matter?

NewsGuard is working its way into public libraries and schools across the country. Their free browser extension tells millions of people that the articles they read on FoxNews.com are credible. But that’s not where it ends.

Crucially, NewsGuard ratings also help direct millions of ad dollars toward Fox News. Through its advertising product, BrandGuard, advertisers can automatically route their ad budgets toward the outlets that NewsGuard has rated as"credible."

By subtracting these points from its score, Fox News would and should have 47.5/100. Outlets that fall between 40-59 points are described as "Proceed with Caution: This website is unreliable because it fails to adhere to several basic journalistic standards." Such a label would stop millions of ad dollars being greenlit for Fox News.

Last summer, NewsGuard downgraded Fox News because you called them out. Let’s give them a chance to correct course again.

Today, we’re reaching out to their Corrections Team and the CEO himself, Gordon Crovitz.

Here are your contacts:

NewsGuard Corrections Team

[email protected]

Gordon Crovitz, CEO of NewsGuard

[email protected]

Subject line

Attn: Corrections Team please review your Fox News Rating

Copy and paste this template into a new email (feel free to make it your own!)

Hello Corrections Team and Gordon,

I’m reaching out to request a correction for your rating for Fox News. I see that Fox News currently maintains a score of 69.5/100 and a "Credible with Exceptions" rating. However, you have mistakenly given Fox News 22/22 points for "Does not repeatedly publish false content."

In your report about Fox News, you cite several instances of the outlet repeatedly publishing false information across multiple news topics.

For example, your report cites the following:

• "A January 2022 article titled ‘Ingraham: Democrat’s COVID lies are unraveling’ included a…misleading claim about COVID-19 vaccines from an episode of ‘The Ingraham Angle.’… A video clip and text transcript that repeated Ingraham’s false claim were also accessible on FoxNews.com."
• "A June 2021 op-ed titled ‘Tucker Carlson: Government agents may have helped organize the Jan. 6 Capitol riot’…was adapted from Carlson’s monologue from the June 15 2021 episode of his show… Carlson reiterated the claim in a June 18, 2021 broadcast, which also appeared on the Fox News website."

Additionally, your own report states that "FoxNews.com has regularly advanced false and misleading themes on topics including the Jan.6th, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol, the Russia-Ukraine war, COVID-19, and U.S. elections."

Your report also finds that "FoxNews.com has not corrected multiple text and video stories that advanced false claims about significant topics."

According to the Oxford Dictionary, the definition of "repeated" is "done or occurring again several times in the same way."

Your report suggests that you have mistakenly or improperly given Fox News 22 points for "Does not repeatedly publish false content."

By subtracting these points from its score, Fox News will have 47.5/100. Outlets that fall between 40-59 points are described on your website as "Proceed with Caution: This website is unreliable because it fails to adhere to several basic journalistic standards."

That would be more in line with Fox News.

Thank you!

Let us know if you hear back! We’ll email you updates. You can also follow us on Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok for the latest updates.

With love,

Claire & Nandini