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<\/a><\/p>\nINNEAPOLIS \u2014\u00a0<\/b>Soon after the social media \u201cpurge\u201d of independent media sites and pages this past October, a top neoconservative insider \u2014 Jamie Fly \u2014\u00a0was caught<\/a>\u00a0stating that the mass deletion of anti-establishment and anti-war pages on Facebook and Twitter was \u201cjust the beginning\u201d of a concerted effort by the U.S. government and powerful corporations to silence online dissent within the United States and beyond.<\/p>\n While a few, relatively uneventful months in the online news sphere have come and gone since Fly made this ominous warning, it appears that the neoconservatives and other standard bearers of the military-industrial complex and the U.S. oligarchy are now poised to let loose their latest digital offensive against independent media outlets that seek to expose wrongdoing in both the private and public sectors.<\/p>\n As\u00a0MintPress News<\/i>\u00a0Editor-in-Chief Mnar Muhawesh\u00a0recently wrote<\/a>,\u00a0MintPress<\/i>\u00a0was informed that it was under review by an organization called Newsguard Technologies, which described itself to\u00a0MintPress<\/i>\u00a0as simply a \u201cnews rating agency\u201d and asked Muhawesh to comment on a series of allegations, several of which were blatantly untrue. However, further examination of this organization reveals that it is funded by and deeply connected to the U.S. government, neo-conservatives, and powerful monied interests, all of whom have been working overtime since the 2016 election to silence dissent to American forever-wars and corporate-led oligarchy.<\/p>\n <\/span>More troubling still, Newsguard \u2014 by virtue of its deep connections to government and Silicon Valley \u2014 is lobbying to have its rankings of news sites installed\u00a0by default<\/i>\u00a0on computers in U.S. public libraries, schools, and universities as well as on all smartphones and computers sold in the United States.<\/p>\n In other words, as Newsguard\u2019s project advances, it will soon become almost impossible to avoid this neocon-approved news site\u2019s ranking systems on any technological device sold in the United States. Worse still, if its efforts to quash dissenting voices in the U.S. are successful, Newsguard promises that its next move will be to take its system global.<\/p>\n Newsguard has received considerable attention in the mainstream media of late, having been the subject of a\u00a0slew of articles<\/a>\u00a0in the\u00a0Washington Post, the Hill<\/i>,\u00a0the Boston Globe, Politico, Bloomberg, Wired,\u00a0<\/i>and many others just over the past few months. Those articles portray Newsguard as using \u201cold-school journalism\u201d to fight \u201cfake news\u201d through its reliance on nine criteria allegedly intended to separate the wheat from the chaff when it comes to online news.<\/p>\n Newsguard separates sites it deems worthy and sites it considers unreliable by using a color-coded rating \u2014 green, yellow, or red \u2014 and more detailed \u201cnutrition labels\u201d regarding a site\u2019s credibility or lack thereof. Rankings are created by Newsguard\u2019s team of \u201ctrained analysts.\u201d The color-coding system may remind some readers of the color-coded terror threat-level warning system that was created after 9\/11, making it worth noting that Tom Ridge, the former secretary of Homeland Security who oversaw the implementation of that system under George W. Bush, is on Newsguard\u2019s\u00a0advisory board<\/a>.<\/p>\n As Newsguard releases a new rating of a site, that rating automatically spreads to all computers that have installed its news ranking browser plug-in. That plug-in is currently available for free for the most commonly used internet browsers. NewsGuard directly markets the browser plug-in to libraries, schools and internet users in general.<\/p>\n According to\u00a0its website<\/a>, Newsguard has rated more than 2,000 news and information sites. However, it plans to take its ranking efforts much farther by\u00a0eventually reviewing<\/a>\u00a0\u201cthe 7,500 most-read news and information websites in the U.S.\u2014about 98 percent of news and information people read and share online\u201d in the United States in English.<\/p>\n A\u00a0recent Gallup study,<\/a>\u00a0which was supported and funded by Newsguard as well as the Knight Foundation (itself a major investor in Newsguard), stated that a green rating increased users likelihood to share and read content while a red rating decreased that likelihood. Specifically, it found 63 percent would be less likely to share news stories from red-rated websites, and 56 percent would be more likely to share news from green-rated websites, though the fact that Newsguard and one of its top investors funded the poll makes it necessary to take these findings with a grain of salt.<\/p>\n However, some of the rankings Newsguard itself has publicized show that it is manifestly uninterested in fighting \u201cmisinformation.\u201d How else to explain the fact that the\u00a0Washington Post<\/i>\u00a0and\u00a0CNN<\/i>\u00a0both received high scores even though both have written stories or made statements that later proved to be entirely false? For example, CNN\u00a0falsely claimed<\/a>\u00a0in 2016 that it was illegal for Americans to read WikiLeaks releases and illegally colluded with the DNC to craft presidential debate questions.<\/p>\n In addition, in 2017, CNN published\u00a0a fake story<\/a>\u00a0that a Russian bank linked to a close ally of President Donald Trump was under Senate investigation. That same year, CNN was forced to retract a report that the Trump campaign had been tipped off early about WikiLeaks documents damaging to Hillary Clinton when it later learned the alert was about material already publicly available.<\/p>\n The\u00a0Washington Post<\/i>, whose $600 million\u00a0conflict of interest with the CIA<\/a>\u00a0goes unnoted by Newsguard, has also published false stories since the 2016 election, including\u00a0one article<\/a>\u00a0that falsely claimed that \u201cRussian hackers\u201d had tapped into Vermont\u2019s electrical grid. It was later found that the grid itself was never breached and the \u201chack\u201d was only an isolated laptop with a minor malware problem. Yet, such acts of journalistic malpractice are apparently of little concern to Newsguard when those committing such acts are big-name corporate media outlets.<\/p>\n Furthermore, Newsguard gives a high rating to\u00a0Voice of America<\/i>, the U.S. state-funded media outlet, even though its former acting associate director\u00a0said<\/a>\u00a0that the outlet produces \u201cfluff journalism\u201d and despite the fact that it was recently reformed to \u201cprovide news that supports our [U.S.] national security objectives.\u201d However,\u00a0RT\u00a0<\/i>receives a low \u201cred\u201d rating<\/a>\u00a0for being funded by the Russian government and for \u201craising doubts about other countries and their institutions\u201d (i.e., including reporting critical of the institutions and governments of the U.S. and its allies).<\/p>\n Newsguard\u00a0describes itself<\/a>\u00a0as an organization dedicated to \u201crestoring trust and accountability\u201d and using \u201cjournalism to fight false news, misinformation and disinformation.\u201d While it\u00a0repeatedly claims<\/a>\u00a0on its website that its employees \u201chave no political axes to grind\u201d and \u201ccare deeply about reliable journalism\u2019s pivotal role in democracy,\u201d a quick look at its co-founders, top funders and advisory board make it clear that Newsguard is aimed at curbing voices that hold the powerful \u2014 in both government and the private sector \u2014 to account.<\/p>\n Newsguard is the latest venture to result from the partnership between Steven Brill and Louis Gordon Crovitz, who currently serve as co-CEOs of the group. Brill is a long-time journalist \u2014 \u00a0published in\u00a0TIME<\/i>\u00a0and\u00a0The New Yorker<\/i>, among others \u2014 who most recently founded the Yale Journalism Initiative, which\u00a0aims to encourage<\/a>Yale students who \u201caspire to contribute to democracy in the United States and around the world\u201d to become journalists at top U.S. and international media organizations. He first teamed up with Crovitz in 2009\u00a0to create<\/a>\u00a0Journalism Online<\/i>, which sought to make the online presence of top American newspapers and other publishers profitable, and was also\u00a0the CEO of the company<\/a>\u00a0that partnered up with the TSA to offer \u201cregistered\u201d travelers the ability to move more quickly through airport security \u2014 for a price, of course.<\/p>\n While Brill\u2019s past does not in itself raise red flags, Crovitz \u2014 his partner in founding\u00a0Journalism Online<\/i>, then Press+, and now Newsguard \u2014 is the last person one would expect to find promoting any legitimate effort to \u201crestore trust and accountability\u201d in journalism. In the early 1980s. Crovitz\u00a0held<\/a>\u00a0a number of positions at Dow Jones and at the\u00a0Wall Street Journal<\/i>, eventually becoming executive vice president of the former and the publisher of the latter before both were sold to Rupert Murdoch\u2019s News Corp in 2007. He is also a board member of\u00a0Business Insider<\/i>, which has received\u00a0over $30 million<\/a>\u00a0from\u00a0Washington Post<\/i>\u00a0owner Jeff Bezos in recent years.<\/p>\n L. Gordon Crovitz, then-publisher of The Wall Street Journal, introduces the redesign of the newspaper, Dec. 4, 2006 in New York. Mark Lennihan | AP<\/p>\n<\/div>\n In addition to being a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, Crovitz proudly notes in his bio,\u00a0available on Newsguard\u2019s website<\/a>, that he has been an \u201ceditor or contributor to books published by the American Enterprise Institute and Heritage Foundation.\u201d Though many\u00a0MintPress\u00a0<\/i>readers are likely familiar with these two institutions, for those who are not, it is worth pointing out that the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) is one of the most influential neoconservative think tanks in the country and its \u201cscholars,\u201d directors and fellows have included neoconservative figures like Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, John Bolton and Frederick Kagan.<\/p>\n During the George W. Bush administration, AEI was instrumental in promoting the invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq and has since advocated for militaristic solutions to U.S. foreign policy objectives and the expansion of the U.S.\u2019 military empire as well as the \u201cWar on Terror.\u201d During the Bush years, AEI was also closely associated with the now defunct and controversial neoconservative organization known as the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), which presciently called, four years before 9\/11, for a \u201cnew Pearl Harbor\u201d as needed to rally support behind American military adventurism.<\/p>\n The Heritage Foundation, like AEI, was also supportive of the war in Iraq and has pushed for the expansion of the War on Terror and U.S. missile defense and military empire. Its corporate donors over the years have included Procter & Gamble, Chase Manhattan Bank, Dow Chemical, and Exxon Mobil, among others.<\/p>\n Crovitz\u2019s associations with AEI and the Heritage Foundation, as well as his ties to Wall Street and the upper echelons of corporate media, are enough to make any thinking person question his commitment to being a fair watchdog of \u201clegitimate journalism.\u201d Yet, beyond his innumerable connections to neoconservatives and powerful monied interest, Crovitz has\u00a0repeatedly been accused<\/a>\u00a0of inserting misinformation into his\u00a0Wall Street Journal<\/i>\u00a0columns, with groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation accusing him of \u201crepeatedly getting his facts wrong<\/a>\u201d on NSA surveillance and other issues. Some of the blatant falsehoods that have appeared in Crovitz\u2019s work have never been corrected, even when\u00a0his own sources\u00a0<\/i>called him out<\/a>\u00a0for misinformation.<\/p>\n For example, in a\u00a0WSJ<\/i>\u00a0opinion piece\u00a0<\/a>that was written by Crovitz in 2012, Crovitz was accused of making \u201cfantastically false claims\u201d about the history of the internet by the very people he had cited to support those claims.<\/p>\n As\u00a0TechDirt<\/i><\/a>\u00a0wrote at the time:<\/p>\n Almost everyone he [Crovitz] sourced or credited to support his argument that the internet was invented entirely privately at Xerox PARC and when Vint Cerf helped create TCP\/IP, has spoken out to say he\u2019s wrong. And that list includes both\u00a0Vint Cerf, himself,<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Xerox<\/a>. Other sources, including Robert Taylor (who was there when the internet was invented) and\u00a0Michael Hiltzik<\/a>, have rejected Crovitz\u2019s spinning of their own stories.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n <\/p>\n While Brill and Crovitz\u2019s connections alone should be enough cause for alarm, a cursory examination of Newsguard\u2019s\u00a0advisory board<\/a>\u00a0makes it clear that Newsguard was created to serve the interests of American oligarchy. Chief among Newsguard\u2019s advisors are Tom Ridge, the first Secretary of Homeland Security under George W. Bush and Ret. General Michael Hayden, a former CIA director, a former NSA director and principal at\u00a0the Chertoff Group<\/a>, a security consultancy seeking to \u201cadvise corporate clients and governments, including foreign governments\u201d on security matters that was co-founded by former Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, who also currently serves as the\u00a0board chairman<\/a>\u00a0of major weapons manufacturer BAE systems.<\/p>\nRed light, green light . . .<\/b><\/h2>\n
Keeping the conversation safe for the corporatocracy<\/b><\/h2>\n
<\/p>\nThe oligarch team\u2019s deep bench<\/b><\/h2>\n