A group of leaders from 19 education and tech policy institutions sent a letter on Thursday asking members of Congress to investigate a new partnership between the nation’s second largest teachers’ union and NewsGuard, a tool that provides “trust ratings” for news and information websites.
Under the partnership with the American Federation of Teachers, NewsGuard’s browser extension would be added to the computers of the union’s 1.7 million members, tens of millions of students they teach and their families.
AFT President Randi Weingarten has touted the deal, which was first announced in January, as a “game-changer for teachers and families drowning in an ocean of online dishonesty.”
However, the group of education and tech policy leaders sent a letter to the chairs and ranking members of the Senate committees and subcommittees involved in education policy and oversight, as well as House and Senate leadership, to express concern about NewsGuard’s liberal bias.
“We write to you today deeply concerned on behalf of millions of schoolchildren and their parents regarding a new threat to the principles of free expression, open dialogue, diversity of political thought, and freedom from harassment in our classrooms,” writes the group of leaders, which includes Ian Prior from Fight for Schools, Corey A. DeAngelis from American Federation for Children, Christopher Rufo from the Manhattan Institute and Nicole Neily of Parents Defending Education.
“Given the rise of political intolerance within academic institutions and censorship from the tech industry, we are alarmed by this partnership and its implications for core American values in our schools,” the letter adds.
The group tells the lawmakers that the partnership seems to be “another effort to politicize our schools, censor disapproved political thought and sources of information, and silence critics of teachers’ unions.”
The letter describes the AFT’s Weingarten as a “liberal union activist” who has “been a leading source of misinformation and political partisanship to obscure scientific facts” during the pandemic.
The AFT fought to keep schools closed for in-person learning for months even after a vaccine became widely available.
The group argues it is “hard to imagine an organization that has less credibility or standing as a judge of journalistic truth than the AFT,” given that it donates overwhelmingly to the Democratic Party and allied causes.
Meanwhile, though NewsGuard claims its “apolitical journalistic criteria are applied fairly and accurately to all sites, regardless of the site’s topic, tone, or political leaning,” several third-party analyses indicate the tool has a liberal bias.
The letter notes that NewsGuard’s advisors, leadership and investors “heavily favor to the left,” with an analysis by the Washington Free Beacon showing NewsGuard donations favor Democrats more than three to one. Additionally, NewsGuard employs several senior staff with a history of working in Democratic politics, including its deputy general manager, who volunteered for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign and served as a delegate to the Democratic National Convention.
One staff analyst volunteered for Obama’s 2012 campaign and another served on a Democratic political committee in Connecticut, while none of the NewsGuard staffers listed online have worked for Republicans, according to the Washington Free Beacon.
“This bias is clearly reflected in NewsGuard ratings,” the group argues, citing a Media Research Center NewsBusters analysis that found “liberal outlets were rated 27 points higher on average than news organizations on the right.”
“There are endless examples of NewsGuard ratings that have no basis in reality and disprove the claim that its ratings are impartial,” the letter adds. It goes on to list several examples, including the rating for RawStory, an online blog known for its left-wing extremism, which NewsGuard rated a 100/100 for trustworthiness. Media Matters, another left-wing organization, received an 80/100 rating from NewsGuard.
While a Nieman Journalism Lab study rates BuzzFeed the 9th least trustworthy news website, the site received a 100/100 from NewsGuard. Even Occupy Democrats, which was the third least trustworthy according to the Nieman Lab study, receives a perfect score from NewsGuard.
However, while the New York Post published an oft-refuted but ultimately true story about Hunter Biden’s laptop in October 2020, the paper receives a 69.5/100 from NewsGuard.
“If students were to debate the 2020 presidential election in a classroom where NewsGuard was used, would the news outlets that got the Hunter Biden story wrong be the only acceptable sources to cite and the news outlets that got this story right be banned?” the group asks. “This is one of the many potential dangers of relying on a partisan, biased rating system in classrooms to analyze news information sources, instead of individually analyzing the information itself.”
The group writes that while they do not dispute that fake news and misleading or discredited journalism are a problem for educators, that the “role of educators in teaching students the critical thinking skills needed to determine fact from fiction is harmed when popular sources of information are labeled as either trustworthy or untrustworthy largely based on their political leanings.”
The letter calls on the lawmakers to investigate the partnership, “including its origins, its intentions, its applications, and the broader issue of biased and conflicted so-called ‘anti-misinformation tools used in classrooms.”
The letter comes months after Media Research Center president Brent Bozell told Fox News that the partnership represented a “dangerous and equally disingenuous new way” that the left will try to “indoctrinate our children, without their parents knowing.”
“NewsGuard is partnering with a national teachers’ union to bring their biased ratings into classrooms nationwide. This is as bad as CRT. In fact, it’s worse,” Bozell said at the time. “Like CRT, it is designed to push a leftist ideology on children, but unlike CRT, the left is not going to give it a name this time. This is purposely designed to go under the radar of public scrutiny.”
At the time, NewsGuard general manager Matt Skibinski rejected the criticism.
“The Media Research Center’s so-called study of NewsGuard’s ratings cannot be taken seriously by anyone who looks even briefly at the ridiculous methodology on which it was based,” Skibinski said.
“NewsGuard has rated many conservative-leaning websites as highly credible–including the MRC’s own website, NewsBusters.org, which receives a high Green score of 92.5 out of 100 points,” Skibinski added. “Dozens of sites on both the right and the left have achieved perfect NewsGuard scores… NewsGuard’s rating process is designed to be strictly apolitical and to review every site using the same standards. We do that by assessing each site using nine basic criteria that have nothing to do with politics.”