Fact-Checking Group Rebuts FCC’s Carr Over 'False Reports'

WASHINGTON, Nov. 18, 2024 – NewsGuard responded Friday to a letter from the next Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Commissioner Brendan Carr, accusing him of relying on “false reports” with “low credibility scores” to inform recent statements he made about the organization. 

“Every statement in the letter about NewsGuard is false, citing unreliable sources,” NewsGuard, an organization that evaluates the credibility of news and information outlets, said in response to a letter Carr sent last week to the CEOs of major tech companies, including Alphabet, Apple, Meta, and Microsoft.

In his letter sent Wednesday Carr alleged that “Americans have lived through an unprecedented surge in censorship” in recent years, and specifically accused NewsGuard of being “part of the broader censorship cartel."

President-elect Donald Trump named Carr the next FCC Chair on Sunday. Set to take office in January, Carr has positioned himself as a champion of conservative concerns over perceived censorship by Big Tech, a narrative that gained prominence during Trump’s first term. 

Carr outlined in Project 2025 his primary goal as Chairman would be revising Section 230, the law shielding platforms from liability for user-generated content.

In his letter to the tech CEOs, Carr emphasized, “I am confident that once the ongoing transition is complete, the Administration and Congress will take broad ranging actions to restore the First Amendment that the constitution grants to all Americans – and those actions include a review of your companies’ activities.”

“Section 230 only confers benefits on Big Tech when they operate, in the words of the statute ‘in good faith,’” Carr reminded.

NewsGuard countered Carr’s claims Friday, which the organization said were influenced by outlets like Newsmax, an outlet that has earned a 20/100 score from NewsGuard, placing it among the least credible of the over 10,000 news websites rated by the organization.

“Commissioner Carr’s letter states, citing Newsmax, that NewsGuard favors censorship. This is false,” NewsGuard said. The organization was “founded in 2018 explicitly as an alternative to government censorship. . . We take the opposite approach: We apply nine transparent and apolitical criteria for rating news websites and our ratings are disclosed.”

On its website, for-profit NewsGuard says its mission is to help "enterprises and consumers identify reliable information online."

NewsGuard addressed several of Carr’s accusations:

1. It rejected claims that it works with ad agencies to censor conservative sites, explaining that its ratings help direct ads toward credible sources and noting that many conservative outlets, like Fox News and The Washington Examiner, score higher than liberal ones.
2. It denied allegations of rating Chinese state media as credible or penalizing outlets for publishing the COVID-19 lab-leak theory, affirming that it has always found the theory credible.
3. It dismissed the suggestion that it labeled the Hunter Biden laptop story as Russian disinformation, clarifying that it only criticized outlets falsely denying the laptop’s authenticity or claiming it was part of a Russian operation.

“Our work does not involve any censorship or blocking of speech at all,” NewsGuard said. “Instead of blocking information, we provide users with apolitical reliability analysis. Instead of censorship, we provide users with more information.”

“Finally, we note that our journalism is itself speech protected by the First Amendment, and we're concerned to see a government official using the powers of his office, however unwittingly, to rely on false claims, to benefit the very publishers who make the false claims, such as Newsmax,” NewsGuard concluded.