As reported by Breitbart Tech, instead the tool, called “NewsGuard,” works to promote content from a host of discredited mainstream media (MSM) sites with a long history of publishing distorted, false, and discriminatory news designed to discredit the president and his media supporters.
Case in point: The NewsGuard tool is giving favorable “green flag,” “trustworthy” ratings to several MSM sites which falsely reported that the teenage Catholic boys in MAGA hats from Covington Catholic High harassed and shouted racial-tinged obscenities at a Native American provocateur in Washington, D.C., recently.
Breitbart Tech reports that the tool recently became a default extension in Microsoft’s mobile Edge browser. A team of establishment neocons and liberals advised Microsoft during the development of NewsGuard including Tom Ridge, the first-ever Homeland Security secretary who was appointed by President George W. Bush; Richard Stengel, the former Time magazine editor and undersecretary of state for public diplomacy under President Obama; and Don Baer, a former White House communications director under President Clinton.
The tool was primarily developed to provide users with a “trustworthiness” rating of media they encounter online, ostensibly in a bid to combat “fake news.”
But what the tool really does is create a blacklist of sites that are simply not preferable to the “establishment” political order including, not surprisingly, Breitbart News but also the Drudge Report and even the U.K.’s third-largest newspaper, the Daily Mail, which has a massive readership online as well as a stellar reputation for accuracy (as does Breitbart, by the way).
This is nothing but a censorship tool aimed at conservative and independent media accurately covering the Trump administration
By comparison, several news sites rated “trustworthy” by NewsGuard include legacy media like CNN, The New York Times, The Washington Post and even a ‘conservative’ publication, National Review — all of which pounced on the Covington teens for allegedly harassing Nathan Phillips, a Native American activist who has a history of being a provocateur on behalf of Left-wing causes. (Related: Journo-terrorism: Democrat-aligned media promoted the endangerment of Catholic CHILDREN because of mindless Trump hate.)
But soon after their initial reports in which they condemned the mostly white teens, many of whom were wearing MAGA hats and having just come from a March for Life event, video evidence surfaced proving that Phillips initiated contact with the teens, not the other way around, and that the kids were also harassed by a small group of Black Israelites.
“Video first began circulating Saturday showing a student wearing a Make America Great Again hat staring into the face of 64-year-old Nathan Phillips, a Native American man beating a drum,” wrote Breitbart News’ Kristina Wong. “However, by Sunday, a fuller video of the incident emerged, showing ‘Black Israelite’ protesters taunting the students with insults and gay slurs, and then Phillips approaching the boys where they were waiting for their bus to leave.”
The National Review was one of the most surprising outlets to publish a fake report under the headline, “The Covington Students Might as Well Have Just Spit on the Cross.” The site has since retracted the article, but nevertheless, NewsGuard gives National Review Online an extremely trustworthy rating.
Regardless of what Microsoft says publicly about this tool, it’s not meant to be a “fake news” filter because if it was, several news sites with a history of publishing fake news, especially in the Trump era, wouldn’t be green-checked.
No, NewsGuard’s primary function is to serve as a Big Tech censorship tool aimed at discrediting legitimate news sources that the political establishment simply cannot tolerate.
Read more about the censorship of independent media by Big Tech at Censorship.news.
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