NewsGuard Responds To Public

The references to NewsGuard in your January 26, 2024 story, “With Revenues Declining, Corporate Media Demand Substack Censorship,” are ridiculous. We're accused of "denigrating alternative media," but our rating system means that start-ups and one-person newsletters can — and many do — get the same high trust scores as the most ancient legacy media. And many legacy brands get low scores from us. Far from denigrating, we have empowered alternative media since our launch: Many startup news sites brag about their high NewsGuard ratings and use the ratings to generate memberships and subscriptions as journalism worth paying for. 

This story claims we went out of our way to rate what it called "Newton’s pro-censorship Platformer," but when we rated Platformer, it was on Substack and there were no issues about it leaving. It's also silly to cite a journalist's report last year that we have had Defense Department contracts (or as the story tendentiously puts it, "works closely with the Defense Department") when our contracts were not only public, we also issued news releases about them at the time. Some scoop.

Finally, I'll say this again: We aren't for censorship. We don't want governments to regulate content or for news consumers to remain at the whim of the tech platforms for what news they can see. We are instead for news consumers to have access to apolitical, transparent, and accountable information about news sources and claims in the news of the kind we provide so that they have more information to decide for themselves whom and what to trust.

Gordon Crovitz, Co-CEO, NewsGuard