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House Republicans are sounding the alarm over the misinformation prevention partnership between NewsGuard, the news rating tool, and the American Federation of Teachers, which is putting NewsGuard rating tools on the devices of millions of American teachers and schoolchildren.
Indiana Representative Jim Banks, Virginia Foxx of North Carolina and Burgess Owens of Utah said in letters to both organizations Wednesday that both the AFT and NewsGuard’s “history of left-wing bias” raises concerns that they are aimed at politicizing class.
“As members of Congress, it is our duty to investigate efforts to politicize classes in the United States with a biased misinformation rating system,” the lawmakers said. “We hope you will agree that American parents and students deserve full transparency and that this includes the information provided to students.”
Lawmakers gave NewsGuard and AFT 30 days to respond to a list of requests, including details behind the events leading up to the partnership and whether parents can stop installing NewsGuard on their children’s devices.
NewsGuard and AFT did not respond to a request for comment.
NewsGuard CEO Gordon Crovitz told Fox News Digital that his company would respond to the concerns of lawmakers and defended his company’s “apolitical process to rank news and information sources based on nine key criteria of journalistic practice.”
“The legislators and staff who prepared this letter appear to have been misinformed about our process and its consequences and our relationship with the American Federation of Teachers. We look forward to rectifying the record,” said Mr. Crovitz.
NewsGuard sees itself as an impartial, apolitical tool for assessing the “credibility and transparency” of news and information through its scoring system that can alert users of problematic web content using plug-ins installed in their web browser.
According to a press release announcing NewsGuard’s partnership with AFT in January, 1.7 million school teachers and the millions of children they teach have been granted free access to “traffic light” news ratings and “Nutrition Label” reviews through a licensed copy of NewsGuard’s browser. addition.
But lawmakers say NewsGuard hints at the scales in their ratings, citing a Media Research Center (MRC) analysis that showed “clear liberal bias in NewsGuard’s misinformation scoring system.”
According to the analysis quoted by lawmakers, NewsGuard rated left-leaning news organizations an average of 27 points higher than right-leaning news organizations.
MRC is a non-profit research and education organization that describes itself as “a commitment to neutralize left-wing bias in the news media and popular culture” through its news monitoring capabilities and “advanced marketing operation”.
Lawmakers also say the company rates Chinese state media outlets as more credible than conservative US-based news outlets.
“Taken together, these factors suggest that NewsGuard is not sufficient to establish the veracity of any news, let alone the truth, for millions of American schoolchildren,” the lawmakers said.
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