The news ratings are in

In a digital age, as the bounds between fact and fiction blur, it’s hard to know which news you can trust. If only we had an independent, impartial body to assess the trustworthiness of news outlets. But wait, we do! It’s called NewsGuard, and it arrived in Australia last week.

NewsGuard rates news sites based on credibility and transparency. It delivers these ratings through a browser extension you can buy for $7 per month – although Microsoft Edge users will get it for free. Here at the CMT, we first noted NewsGuard in our report, Trust and News Media in Australia. That was in 2018, the year the service launched in the US. As we wrote, NewsGuard ‘is building a database of news sources whose trustworthiness has been assessed with a traffic light rating system: green means trustworthy; red means untrustworthy; amber means mixed.’ Since then, the method has been refined. Instead of traffic light colours, it uses human experts to dole out ‘Reliability Ratings’ to mastheads and networks in the shape of a score out of 100. Results can range from the ringing endorsement of a perfect hundred to the public shaming of a complete zero. Following its US launch, NewsGuard has expanded to the UK, Italy, France and Germany, then Austria and Canada. And now, Australia and New Zealand.

‘Since 2018, NewsGuard has protected internet users, brands, and democracies from the evolving threats of misinformation,’ said NewsGuard co-CEO Gordon Crovitz. ‘Now, our team has expanded to Australia and New Zealand ... to support quality journalism and systemically defund sources of harmful misinformation.’

Still, there has been controversy. In 2018, NewsGuard awarded the Daily Mail a red (bad) rating. As The Guardian gleefully reported, NewsGuard’s browser extension warned users: ‘Proceed with caution: this website generally fails to maintain basic standards of accuracy and accountability.’ But in early 2019 NewsGuard changed its assessment of the Daily Mail to a green (good) rating, distancing itself from earlier claims about deceptive headlines and false content. And just this month, US Republican Matt Gaetz called for a Congress investigation, given that NewsGuard’s ratings can drive ad revenue from one news company to another.

In Australia, the only three major publications to receive a perfect score are the ABC, the Guardian and News Corp’s The Australian. NewsGuard found the Oz, for example, refrained from repeatedly publishing false content, clearly labelled advertising, and declared who was in charge at the paper, including names and contact information. SBS scored 95, Crikey scored 87.5, The Sydney Morning Herald scored 80 and The Saturday Paper scored a meagre 75. For some, these scores will surprise. Is this an exercise in identifying trustworthiness? Or in process and box-ticking?

The short-lived news ranking system Nuzzelrank is a cautionary tale. Also launched in 2018, it ranked TechCrunch above CNN and The New Yorker for credibility. This raised alarms, particularly since it was TechCrunch that had published the ‘exclusive’ about Nuzzelrank’s launch. As Will Oremus wrote in early 2019, ‘The trust industry is quietly taking shape. Should we trust it?’ What we need now, clearly, is a ratings system to assess the credibility of ratings systems.

Sacha Molitorisz
Senior Lecturer, UTS Law