The Daily Signal - #342: How to Tell If the News Is Reliable

Episode Date: November 18, 2018

On today’s show, we’ll feature an interview with the founders of NewsGuard, a journalism project that applies nutrition labels to media outlets. Steve Brill and Gordon Crovitz, the co-CEOs of NewsGuard, speak to The Daily Signal about the mission of NewsGuard and how their rating system works. Earlier this year, NewsGuard gave The Daily Signal a rare perfect rating.The two veteran journalists and news entrepreneurs also share their advice for journalists and discuss the impact social media companies have had on misinformation circulating today. Listen to the full interview below.Also on today’s show:• Your letters to the editor. Don’t forget, your letter could be featured on our show; write us at [e-mail] or call 202-608-6205.• We’ll also share your letters, and heartwarming story about a veteran in Tennessee.The Daily Signal podcast is available on the Ricochet Audio Network. You also can listen on iTunes, SoundCloud, Stitcher, or your favorite podcast app. All of our podcasts can be found at DailySignal.com/podcasts.If you like what you hear, please leave a review or give us feedback. Enjoy the show! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Daily Signal podcast for Monday, November 19th. I'm Rob Blewey, editor-in-chief. And I'm Ginny Malsabano. On today's show, we'll feature an interview with the founders of NewsGuard, a journalism project that applies nutrition labels to media outlets. We'll also share your letters and a heartwarming story about a veteran in Tennessee. We're joined on today's show by Steve Brill and Gordon Krovitz. They're both veteran journalists, news entrepreneurs, and the co-CEOs of NewsGuard.

Steve and Gordon, thanks for speaking to The Daily Signal. Thank you. It's good to be here. It's our pleasure. Now, Steve, you founded the American Lawyer, Court TV, the Yale Journalism Initiative. And Gordon, you've been publisher of the Wall Street Journal and also a columnist for the paper. What inspired you to create NewsGuard? Well, I think we saw that there was a lot of garbage online. And the issue is that the average person looking at a Google search or Facebook news feed or a Twitter feed, can't tell the difference between the garbage and the good stuff,

just to put it as simply as that. Because what you see is a headline and, you know, the first sentence of a story, and if it's a really intriguing or even wild or crazy headline, you're tempted to click on it, and you forget or you never know in the first place what the source is. So if you see something, let's say from, you know, the National Review, which is a very high-quality publication,

or the Nation magazine, also a high-quality publication, but that takes the opposite view of the National Review, and then you see something from the Denver Guardian, which is a phony publication that doesn't actually exist, but it's just there to, you know, to peddle this stuff, you don't know where you are. So it's almost as if you walked into a public library, and instead of books being on the shelves

and you know who the publisher is, you know, the title of the book, You know the author. There's a librarian there who tells you, well, if you're interested in this stuff, you should go here. This is really reliable. This, not so much. Instead of that happening, it's as if you walked into a library and there were a million pieces of paper just flying around. And you grab one piece of paper and you don't know, for example, that it's from the Daily Signal, which has a bunch of really careful reporters who do careful research, try to be fair.

You have no idea what that is. And our goal through our nutrition labels and our red and green ratings is to restore that sense of what's in that library. When it comes to your ratings, how exactly does it work? And also, what are some of the nine criteria that you use to devise those? Sure. We have nine criteria. They're split between credibility criteria and transparency criteria. The main thing about them is they are standard journalistic criteria.

So no practicing journalist objects to any of the nine. They're very standard. One would be repeatedly publishes false information, doesn't separate news and opinion, does or doesn't have a corrections policy, does or doesn't disclose who owns the place or who runs the website. So of quite standard criteria. We have a team of several dozen analysts who are trained, journalists with varied backgrounds. Each one of the ratings is reviewed by layers of people and

Steve or I, or both of us, read each one of the nutrition labels and ratings for every one of the thousands of websites that we have reviewed. So it's a, this is an area where we think human intelligence is better than artificial intelligence. If any of the websites fail on any one of the nine criteria, our analysts call for comment. Algorithms don't call for comment. So we do think this is an area where human beings can do a much better job than machines. The technology companies that have tried to use technology to address this kind of issue have basically concluded that it's so easy to come up with the Denver Guardian, a fake website, that a machine will never know. And in fact, it's difficult for our analysts who really do the work of more akin to fact checkers who report

the background of every website. It's difficult work. It's traditional journalistic kind of work. And we've been very pleased by the response so far from publishers who I think are grateful that there's finally some way to separate the folks who are doing some form of real journalism versus people who are taking advantage of technology to peddle information they know is not true or misinformation or disinformation or propaganda. Or they just don't care if it's not true. You know, I just walked through a newsroom here to get to the studio.

And it's a newsroom filled with people who wake up in the morning and want to do serious work. And you're paying them to do it. And it's the real deal. But there's no way artificial intelligence can tell that. You know, if people type out words that kind of mimic your words, but they don't do the research, they don't call for comment, they don't do all the things that are nine criteria say you should do. Online, there's no difference between the hard work

that you do or the hard work that some liberally organization does. There's no difference online, frankly, without our red and green icons and our nutrition labels. So that's why we're doing Well, thank you for that. And The Daily Signal is proud to have a green rating and we worked closely with NewsGuard on helping your analysts coming up with when they had questions for us, providing answers. I want to ask you about your experience with other publishers and what it's been like as you started this new venture. And then not only here you are in Washington, I imagine you're meeting with publishers, news organizations. What has that been like and what kind of reception have you received? I think in the case of publishers, they've been relieved. I think, you know, when people are getting their news, say on Facebook, which a very large percentage of people around the world, including Americans do, it's very hard to tell one brand from another. And Facebook and Twitter and YouTube and others, the way they present the information, it's very hard to tell one from another. So legitimate publishers are very pleased that there's an independent group doing

this kind of work using the nine journalistic criteria. And in fact, of all the thousands of websites that we have rated, we make it very easy for publishers to complain about their rating. We promise to post their comments online, which we have done. And of all the thousands that we've reviewed, only two have posted complaints, one alt-right website and one an alt-left website. And even they didn't oppose the nine criteria. They just didn't like the fact that they failed them. Yeah, there are some instances where, either because people had no idea who we were or what we were,

and again, we call everybody for comment about everything, as you know, where they were dismissive, and I think the nastiest one, and there weren't that many, but there probably a couple handfuls of them, but the one I remember was Josh Marshall, who publishes the Talking Points Memes, one of our, you know, younger analysts, she's got two or three years of experience as a journalist, was in my program that I run at Yale.

She emails him and asks him something, I think about his corrections policy or something. And he replied, well, you know, I've been doing this for 12 years or 13 years. I don't have to answer to any outfit that I've never heard of. I don't have any idea who you are, you know, just stop bothering me. So then I got into the conversation with him. And frankly, when he realized I was involved, then he got real defensive. And I said, well, you know, why are you so, you know, nasty to this kid who's just doing her job asking questions? And he kind of apologized.

Well, let me follow up on that because I noticed that you gave Breitbart a red rating. And you've also encountered some criticism among the journalism profession. for your rating of green for Fox News. So walk through those two examples because I think it would be helpful for our listeners to understand why Breitbart has read and Fox News. You just have to unflinchingly apply the criteria.

We have a meeting every morning at 10 o'clock in the office with everybody on the staff to go over things that don't seem clear or things that are sort of hanging his issues. And politics is just never in those discussions. I mean, you'd be. shocked to hear that. Or maybe you wouldn't be shocked since you got a green rating, but politics is just not in those discussions. So in the case of Breitbart, it's easy for me to explain how they got the rating because what we do on our site in the nutrition label is

explain how they got the rating. And if they simply disclose their ownership, which they don't, but which everybody knows, it's just that the average person online doesn't, you know, know, but all four of us in this room know what their ownership is, they would get over the line and into green. And they can tell that simply by looking at the nutrition label as we wrote it. This isn't a secret. Again, it's not an algorithm. You know, the tech companies say, well, if we told you what our algorithm was, you would game

our system. Well, we want people to game our system. We want people to say, hey, gee, if I had a corrections policy, I'd get a higher rating from NewsGuard. That's why we started the company. So we want them to game our system. And, you know, in the case of Fox, Fox News.com met most of the criteria.

And you don't have to have a debate about the politics of Fox. You just have to look down the column of those criteria. And if you're honest with yourself, and we all try to be honest with ourselves in these discussions, they meet the criteria. Now, whether I like Fox or you like Fox or you like Fox, that doesn't matter. Well, it sounds very straightforward.

We've talked about your relationship with publishers, how the rating system works. How can consumers best access your ratings and view those? Right. So our business model is that we hope and expect that the social media companies and the search companies will license our red and green ratings and nutrition labels integrate them into their products so that when somebody is on a Facebook feed or a Twitter feed, they'll see the red and the green and have access to the nutrition label. We're in discussions with all of the platforms right now.

In the meantime, we do have a browser extension version that's free for libraries to use and free for consumers who might want to download NewsGuard. It's available at newsgardeTech.com. It's one-click on your Chrome browser, Firefox, Safari, and others. And at that point, you will see the red and green ratings in search results on Google and Bing, in the Facebook news feed and Twitter and LinkedIn. But really for this to be effective, all the independent research says that the platforms need to integrate the ratings into their own product.

Browser extensions don't work on mobile, and of course mobile is how most people get there. Right. News these days. And Microsoft has gone first in sponsoring us and partnering with us. but we're confident that the others are moving ahead. Once we actually had a product, which we released, as you know, at the end of August, these discussions became, you know, very serious, especially once they saw that our product was not, you know, some left wing or some right-wing product that, you know, nailed

a people that were on one side or the other of the political fence. So we're asking these platforms, you know, to license this, The cost to them is very low in comparison with what they spend on, you know, public relations efforts to talk about how hard the problem is to solve. And we really see the opportunity for NewsGuard to play a role in something other than the two solutions that are currently being discussed in Washington. One is, should the government get in the business of regulating content on the Internet? We're in favor of free speech. We're really not comfortable with the idea of government regulating. So that seems like a terrible solution.

The other terrible solution is the technology companies continuing to do what they currently do, which is arbitrarily secretly, secretly suppress some websites and not suppress others. They're not comfortable either. They don't like being in the position of making editorial judgments. I don't think any of us wants them to make editorial judgments. So we provide a middle path, which is a free speech path, give consumers, more information about the sources of information that they're seeing online, don't have the government regulate,

but also don't have the technology companies continue to use secretive algorithms to make decisions that are completely non-transparent and unaccountable. Yeah, I mean, look at the situation now. Facebook, I mean, Twitter and some of the others, have all said, well, their algorithms are based on surveys they've done and other things they've done, to gauge the trustworthiness of various sites.

And they have a rating of trustworthiness for every site. Do you have any idea what your trustworthy rating is? I don't. And what do you think would happen if you called Facebook and asked them? Oh, I doubt they would tell me. They wouldn't tell you. So basically what they're saying is, you know, trust us. We know who's trustworthy and who's not.

And they may be making perfectly valid and great decisions, but none of us in this room have any idea whether that's true. They may not even be making any decisions at all for a way known. So the essence, I think, of having that kind of power is to be totally transparent about it. And what we do, and what I hope, you know, if we have a competitor, I hope they'll do, is we're totally transparent. You know exactly what your rating is. You know exactly why. If you do something and your rating goes down, you're going to know that too.

And if you think it's wrong, you'll be able to pick up the phone and call a human being and say, hey, I think you made a mistake. And if you complain about it in writing, that's going to be posted on your rating too so people can judge for themselves whether we're right or you're right. That's the way to do this. And as Gordon says,

the two alternatives out there being talked about in Washington, the first being, well, let's have the government do that. I mean, that's awful. I can't believe anybody thinks that's a good solution. But the second one, let's have the tech companies just do this in a completely unaccountable way. You know, if you're paranoid on the left or you're paranoid on the right or you're appropriately concerned on the left

and appropriately concerned on the right, that solution can't work because what they say is, well, we can't tell you what your rating is and we can't tell you how we rated it. Where else in life does anyone have that kind of unaccountable power? I'm so glad you raised those points. First of all, thank you for the transparency that NewsGuard offers. I mean, it is a high-quality product,

and we certainly appreciate it. I think the question of the social media companies is one that has frustrated the daily signal from our start when we were founded in 2014. It was at a time when almost daily you could have a story go viral. I mean, the algorithm was structured in a way that you posted something,

and we saw this with Upworthy and other sites that had rapid growth. Facebook decided to change that algorithm, right? And so then all of a sudden, it was investing in Facebook Live. And we shifted, and we're in, nimble enough team and small enough team that we can do that. Other publishers and news organizations can't necessarily do that. This year, it's been Facebook Watch where we've seen

explosive growth in the number of video views. So it's constantly changing. You're absolutely correct. It's frustrating that as a publisher, we don't really know what they're doing behind the scenes. But at the same time, I know that the consumers are increasingly frustrated because we hear them that they're not getting, they're not able to access the news and information as they would prefer. Well, and as you know in the case of Facebook, in reaction to the problems that they have and all of the misinformation, disinformation that flows through Facebook, they made an enormous adjustment to their news feed, which essentially was to suppress all news. Right. And, you know, the last thing that's a great solution. The last thing news publishers want

is to be artificially suppressed. And by the way, that's the last thing consumers want. Consumers value news and information. They value news and information they can trust, and it should be on social media. It should be in their search results. They should be freely able to access the information that they want, but they should also have more information about the sources that they're accessing. How many news organizations do you currently write? We're approaching 2000 right now in the United States in English, and we've had much more interest than we anticipated this early. early in Europe and we're making plans now to start being in the United Kingdom, France, Italy, and Germany as early as this January.

And interestingly, while I think Americans, I think rightly, would never want government involved really in this area of regulating speech, Europe has got a different history and different position and the European Commission recently promulgated a rule which, is called a code of practice, code of conduct on disinformation, which puts the onus on the platforms to give their readers more information about the sources from using journalistic criteria so that people in Europe have a better idea of who's giving them the news. And that's us. Well, as somebody who uses the browser extension, I can tell you on a daily basis, I

I appreciate it and like having that red and green rating when I do a Google search and the results then display. I also notice that you have kind of an orangeish rating for like Wikipedia. Can you explain that? Sure. We're changing that to white because orange implies something negative, which we didn't mean to imply. Right. So that's a category for platforms like Wikipedia, like Medium, a few other platforms where in the case of Wikipedia, much of the content, of course, is terrific. but it's also sometimes completely wrong and malicious and disinformation.

And so in the case of platforms like that, we do have write-ups explaining their methodology where they're often reliable and where they're sometimes not reliable. We have a good relationship now with libraries across the United States that have downloaded our browser extension for the computers that their patrons use. And librarians, of course, are very concerned about some of those platforms like Wikipedia, as school teachers are and we have a news literacy effort with schools across the country. And in the case of Wikipedia, people should be careful because it's not always accurate. In a particular, on highly controversial news topics, it's particularly not reliable

because people will come in and edit and there'll be wars between editors. and while the Wikipedia editors do their very best to stay on top of it, and they do a usually great job, it's not perfect. I want to shift gears for a second. President Trump has had a contentious relationship with the media since before he was president, basically since day one when he started campaigning. What do you both make of his very combative approach with the press that some are criticizing? So, you know, we have a very narrow role to play here, which is, is this not a very narrow role to play here, which is, is this news organization trying to do some form of journalism?

Does it do well on these nine criteria of credibility and transparency? We usually refer to the problem here as false information, misinformation, and disinformation. I think we can all have disagreements, conversations, debates about any particular piece of reporting by any news organization. and there are fact-checking groups that try to chase down fact-checking by politicians and by media outlets, and those efforts are great. That's not what we do. What we do is we look at the domain, the website, and we try to help readers understand are the people behind this trying to do journalism

or they're trying to do something else. And one last question for you. As two veteran journalists, what's your advice to young reporters entering the field today? Well, I teach regularly to people who want to enter the field. And my advice, and this is actually advice that I give on the first day of my class at Yale, and it's a seminar of these kids who are writing for the school newspaper, editing it and everything. And I say to them, you know, I have really bad news for you. If you want to be a successful journalist, working hard counts more than being smart.

Now, we know you're all smart because you got into Yale, and certainly you think you're all smart, but the way to be a successful journalist is to get up earlier and stay up later and work harder. And my dream, my dream as a reporter is to be confronted with, you know, with a hundred boxes of legal documents to pour through because I know I'm the only one who's crazy enough who's actually going to read them all. And that's the advice, which is you've got to do the work. You can't, you know, you can't, you know, phone it in.

you've got to get up, you've got to go talk to people, and you've got to do the work. And part of the joy I get out of doing something like NewsGuard is that we're really ratifying that notion by helping to separate those who do the work from some kid in Macedonia who's just looking for some clicks to sell some ads. Stephen Gordon, thanks for telling us about NewsGuard and being on our show. Thank you so much. Thanks for having us. I'm Rob Blewee, editor-in-chief of The Daily Signal. And I'm Ginny Maltabano.

Each weekday, the Daily Signal delivers the Morning Bell email direct to your inbox. We created the Morning Bell to be your one-stop source for credible news reporting and insightful commentary on the issues that are shaping the agenda. You can subscribe today and get it delivered to your inbox each weekday morning. Sign up now at dailysignal.com. Just click on the Connect button at the top of the page and subscribe today. Thanks for sending us your letters to the editor. Each Monday we feature some of our favorites both on this show and in our Morning Bell email newsletter.

Ginny, what do we have this week? Well, first up, William Noakes says it has been noted on numerous media shows by White House journalist that CNN's Gemma Costa is a grandstander and takes up too much of the time needed by others to ask their questions. That, taken with his continual display of disrespect for President Trump and press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, makes it inevitable he was going to be thrown out. Since I like to hear reporters' questions and the president's answers, I hope Acosta is not allowed to return to the press briefings. Time for CNN to put a real journalist in his place.

Acosta was not elected. Trump was. And several people wrote to us about Ginny's story about Congressman-elect Dan Crenshaw of Texas and Saturday Night Live's treatment of him. Our first letter comes from Karen Calloway of Florida. She writes, Thank you, Dan Crenshaw, for your military service. and now for your service to the entire nation. God bless you and keep you under his wings.

Joey Smith says, thanks for your service. Now you have a new challenge. Let's see if you can be as good in Congress as you were with the seals. Good luck. And finally, Stephen Kinford says, thank you, sir, for your service to our great nation. Congratulations on your seat in the house. May you be blessed in all that you do. Your letter could be featured on next week's show. an email to letters at daily signal.com or leave a voicemail message at 202-608-6205. Hi, this is Rob Blewey, editor-in-chief of the Daily Signal. Check out Blueprint for balance, a federal budget. This Heritage Foundation budget plan balances the budget within seven years and cuts spending by more than $10 trillion. To find it, go to heritage.org and search for

budget or spending. This week, we have a heartwarming story out of Tennessee. Leo Stokely, a military veteran, passed away at the age of 69. He was all set to be buried but was listed as unclaimed, meaning no one would be attending his funeral. When other military veterans got word of this, they reached out to their community on Facebook, and the result was hundreds of people gathering to say a final farewell. The people of Middle Tennessee support their troops. So when some heard that a man named Leo Stokely might be buried alone because he has no family, they decided to show up, and show up they did in the hundreds.

Few people can understand the struggles of a veteran like another one, which is why when the call went out on Facebook, for a man no one here knows, the response was overwhelming. Stokely, a Vietnam vet in Murphysboro resident died this past week. With no family to speak of, it was looking like the funeral might have no attendees. A post by USAWTFM. That call, an effort to have this. This veteran's funeral less lonely than his end of life.

You start with first this week, nobody knows who this guy is and you end up with a family of probably 300 people here, fellow veterans and friends of veterans that send him off in, I think, proper fashion. It was standing room only in there all the way around the Rotunda. For other veterans, this is amazing. A response no one could have expected, but one that brings hope. Leo Stockley is a sergeant. He was a sergeant in the United States Marine Corps.

served during Vietnam. We're all brothers. It doesn't matter what war. You know, we're brothers. World War I, two, Afghanistan, Iraq, Vietnam. It doesn't matter. A send-off among kin, showing that all people are worth remembering. Well, Jenny, that clip comes from News Channel 5. And what a touching story as somebody who has military veterans in my own family, including my my grandfathers who have passed away, you know, it really does speak to the nature of that community and pulling together, even though they didn't know this gentleman, showing that love and support, especially just at the time when we've celebrated Veterans Day. Absolutely.

And I was able to actually watch the clip. And it was great to see how many children were there, families together. It was really something to see happen like that. All right, we're going to leave it there for today. The Daily Signal podcast is broadcast from the Robert H. Bruce, Radio Studio at the Heritage Foundation. You can find it on the Rurcache Audio Network, and all of our shows are available at DailySignal.com slash podcasts.

You can also subscribe on iTunes SoundCloud Stitcher or your favorite podcast app. And if you like what you hear, please leave us a review or give us feedback. Be sure to follow us on Twitter at DailySignal and Facebook.com slash the DailySignal News. The Daily Signal podcast will be back tomorrow with Kate and Daniel. Have a great week. You've been listening to the Daily Signal podcast, executive produced by Kate Trinko and Daniel Davis, sound design by Michael Gooden, Lauren Evans, and Thalia Rampersad. For more information, visitdailySignal.com.