Transcript: NewsGuard Takes on Fake News with Real Journalism
Interview with Gordon Crovitz
For podcast release Monday, August 12, 2019
KENNEALLY: Misinformation and disinformation thrive best in the dark. And like fungus and mildew in a cellar, they disintegrate quickly when air and sunlight arrive on the scene.
Welcome to Copyright Clearance Center’s podcast series. I’m Christopher Kenneally for Beyond the Book. In the emerging area of online trust technology, the startup NewsGuard has decided to disinfect the web of false reporting with the detergent of journalism. A team of experienced journalists researches online news brands, determines when a website has a hidden agenda or publishes falsehoods, and then posts red or green rating signals visible as a plugin on many web browsers. Public libraries can use NewsGuard as a news literacy tool, while advertisers can keep their brands off unreliable sites. Journalism advocates the Knight Foundation and global advertising conglomerate Publicis are among the company’s investors.
Gordon Crovitz is a distinguished publishing veteran who co-founded NewsGuard with acclaimed journalist Steve Brill in 2018. In 2016 and 2017, Crovitz was interim CEO, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, the largest K-12 education publisher in the US. He is also a former publisher, editorial board member, and opinion columnist for the Wall Street Journal. Welcome to Beyond the Book, Gordon Crovitz.
CROVITZ: Very nice to be with you. Thanks for having me.
KENNEALLY: This is such a very important topic, especially in 2019, Gordon – making the web a better place one website at a time, one maybe news article at a time. I have to start out by asking you about the state of the web today, because your team has really looked at things – you’re looking at things that maybe some of us would rather not see. What have you seen? How bad is it out there?
CROVITZ: It’s not good. As you were describing, the way NewsGuard operates, our analysts look at all of the news and information websites that account for at least 90% of online engagement in every country in which we operate – that’s the US, UK, Germany, France, and Italy. In the US market, we’ve looked at 96% of all the news and information sites that people look at, and we’ve been a little bit surprised by what we’ve found. For example, more than one in 10 of those popular news websites contains health misinformation – false reporting, for example, about the dangers of vaccines. So when you think that one in 10 of the websites that Americans read for news and information contain misinformation about health issues, it’s not a surprise that measles is back. It’s not a surprise that people feel very anxious about the quality of the news that they’re getting online, whether it’s about health or about politics or other topics.
The world has become such that regular people feel very anxious about whether they’re getting news from reliable sources or not. And this is the downside of the brilliance of the internet. In the print era, some of your listeners may remember, people would go to a newsstand in order to acquire newspapers, and they might say I like the Philadelphia Inquirer, I don’t want the National Enquirer – knowing that one of them was a respected local newspaper and the other one was a kind of grocery store checkout gossip sheet. On the internet, where people are thumbing through their Facebook feeds or their Twitter feeds or looking at the next video that pops up on YouTube, the value of those brands has so disappeared. There are so many brands, people don’t know what to make of any particular one.
And that is the problem that NewsGuard set out to help solve on behalf of news consumers – which websites are trying to do journalism? Which ones are doing something else? And for all of them, to give them a red rating or a green rating and a nutrition label writeup that explains everything that a reader would want to know about that particular website so that he or she can make up his or her mind about whether to read news from that website with an extra grain or two of salt.
KENNEALLY: Well, we want to talk about exactly how all this works, but I think it’s important to underscore just how pervasive the problem is. It’s not simply the prototypical reader, consumer of news, the average Joe or Jane, but there are people who really think they know better, and yet they can be susceptible. They are vulnerable, too. I believe there’s a story of a Wired editor who used NewsGuard and discovered that among the many websites that he was checking for news were some that were not what he thought they were.
CROVITZ: Yeah, Nicholas Thompson, the editor of Wired magazine, has downloaded NewsGuard onto his browser, and he did a search on Facebook – I believe his search was for vaccines and autism, something like that – and most of the websites that popped up among the top search results on Facebook were from websites that we had rated unreliable because they misinform. They have false information about the dangers of vaccines, for example, or how certain fruits can cause cancer, that sort of thing. It’s very common.
For example, in the United States, every month on YouTube, one of the top two or three sources of news is RT – RT, formerly known as Russia Today, funded by the Russian government. Most Americans don’t know RT from the AP or from AFP or from any other news source. They just know that it’s something that’s popping up, and they want to follow it, because there’s interesting video. In the case of RT, they specialize in wonderful video for social media, sharing topics like natural disaster and car crashes, and then every once in a while, you get a story about how Ukrainians really are Russians and how Vladimir Putin is really a good guy. The downside of the internet is that it’s become very difficult for people to know the difference between journalists who are trying to do a good job and people who are publishing online in order to publish false information, misinformation, or disinformation.
KENNEALLY: And the way you go about it, Gordon Crovitz – describe how you work at NewsGuard. There is this team of experienced journalists who do the research, so it’s humanly curated. That’s really the very opposite of the sites that are propagating these kinds of news sites, because they use algorithms. You use human beings.
CROVITZ: Everything we do is the opposite of an algorithm. We try to be completely transparent. We use nine basic apolitical criteria of journalistic practice. For every website, our analysts look to see how they do on these nine. Among the nine are criteria such as, is there a corrections policy? And you find out who owns this website. Do they responsibly treat news and opinion differently? In other words, are they trying to follow basic journalistic practices or not?
And through that process, when it looks to one of our analysts as if a website is going to get a negative mark on any of the nine criteria, the analyst practices journalism. He or she calls that website, contacts that website, and asks to speak about those criteria or that criterion. And in many cases – more than one-quarter of all the cases so far – a news website has actually changed its journalistic practice in order to do better on our ratings, which we think is great.
The companies driven by algorithms – social media and search companies – will say we can’t disclose our algorithms or people will game our system. We hope that people do game our system. We hope that more and more websites are more and more transparent about how they operate, for example. So far from the secret algorithmic-based suppression of some news and promotion of other news that the social media companies and search companies acknowledge that they do, we take the other approach, which is let’s help readers learn more about the news websites they rely on and give them some guidance as to which ones are generally reliable – nobody is perfect – or generally not reliable.
KENNEALLY: And that transparency that you emphasize, Gordon, it’s a two-way street here, because you have published online a NewsGuard ethics and conflicts of interest policy. You do not accept any fees from the news sites that you rate. You don’t collect personal information of any kind. You’ve made that all available to anyone to look into and be sure that NewsGuard is what it says it is.
CROVITZ: That’s right, Chris. Among the earliest adopters of NewsGuard, we were gratified to see, were librarians. Librarians, in a way, are the ultimate in guides for the reliability of information, and there are now hundreds of public libraries across the US that have NewsGuard loaded onto the computers that patrons use. And librarians explain that it is a practical news literacy tool. It’s apolitical. Everything that we do is transparent. And we’ve been very pleased to have the support of librarians.
Microsoft also is our first technology distributor, and we are in active discussions with others, including internet providers and mobile phone companies, about adding NewsGuard to their parental controls and providing it in other contexts so that readers can have a better experience on the internet and have some warnings about misinformation and hoaxes.
KENNEALLY: As I said earlier, this all comes at really a critical time for the web, because there have been cries here in the United States and in Europe – indeed, around the world – for something to be done about this spread of disinformation. We have seen efforts in Europe to apply regulation to the problem. There is a code of practice on disinformation. Here in this country, hearings are held in Congress seemingly on a weekly basis about the problem. And it seems as if NewsGuard is trying to provide a kind of private solution that puts you between regulation by governments and self-regulation by the social media platforms.
CROVITZ: Yeah, you’re exactly right. In Europe, there is a very strong move toward regulation. You mentioned the European Commission has a code of practice on disinformation that Facebook, Google, Twitter, and others have signed onto that carries with it significant duties, including giving news consumers more information about news sources on their platforms. In the United Kingdom, there is an active move toward a new duty of care digital platforms would have when it comes to what they publish online. In the United States, ever since 1996, there’s been kind of a safe harbor provision in what’s called Section 230 of the Telecommunications Act that has allowed the platforms to publish information without being treated the way a newspaper or a broadcaster would in terms of potential liability.
NewsGuard is really offered as a solution that’s not the status quo – tries to solve the problem – but does not require government regulation, either. We think that it would be great if the social media companies and the search companies did more to educate their users about the reliability of news on their platforms. They could join Microsoft in providing NewsGuard ratings and nutrition labels to their users. We think, actually, it would be great for them. It would take some of the pressure off from the regulation that otherwise seems likely in Europe. And as you said, there are congressional hearings it seems like every week here in the United States.
KENNEALLY: We opened the interview, Gordon, by talking about the rather disheartening state of the web and the proliferation of disinformation. I wonder whether you, as a member of this emerging online trust technology innovation effort, think that there is yet some hope for the future, that we may be able to turn a corner and find a way to trust the internet again.
CROVITZ: The internet is a marvelous innovation. It has made it possible for new publishers to come along. It’s made it possible for journalists to become publishers themselves without relying on established media. That’s all great. The problem is just for the same reason that it’s been great to enable everybody to become a publisher, it’s enabled some bad actors also to become publishers.
I think the reason to be optimistic is, as you began the show, sunlight and information is the best disinfectant. And more information in the hands of news consumers, including about the general reliability of the news sources they’re seeing online, I think is the best solution to this problem. Over time, as people are more and more aware of which websites are generally trustworthy and which ones are not, I think we’ll see more trust in journalistic efforts that deserve to be more trusted.
As you know, the level of trust in the United States in news across the political spectrum is terribly low. And I think part of that is that it’s hard for news consumers to be able to distinguish people who are trying their best to do fair and honest journalism versus those who are using what appears to be journalism for some other purpose – by the way, often for programmatic advertising revenues. In the case of misinformation health sites, their business model often is to identify people who would be good prospects for their nutritional supplements, and they make money that way.
So I think on the one hand, the internet is a generation old. On the other hand, it’s only a generation old. And I think NewsGuard, and there will be many other tools to help people know what they can trust and what they can’t trust on the internet – long-term, I’m quite optimistic. But in the short term, we’ve got some difficult problems to solve.
KENNEALLY: Gordon Crovitz, co-founder of NewsGuard and a pioneer of online trust technology, thanks so much for joining us on Beyond the Book.
CROVITZ: It’s a pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.
KENNEALLY: Beyond the Book is produced by Copyright Clearance Center. Our co-producer and recording engineer is Jeremy Brieske of Burst Marketing. Subscribe to the program wherever you go for podcasts and follow us on Twitter and Facebook. The complete Beyond the Book podcast archive is available at beyondthebook.com. I’m Christopher Kenneally. Thanks for listening and join us again soon on CCC’s Beyond the Book.