Boy, have I been asleep at the switch with this one.

The Unethical Website of the Month was a regular feature on the Ethics Alarms predecessor The Ethics Scoreboard, but I have fallen down on the job. There are probably more unethical websites than ever, but the last one officially posted here was in July (though this site also qualified a month later). Here is an area where reader tips would be especially helpful, because typically (or tipically?)I only stumble across unethical websites by accident.

That’s not the case this time, however. NewsGuard has been around since 2018, and I have been blithely ignorant of it nonetheless. Here is how it describes itself on its “About” page:

Founded by media entrepreneur and award-winning journalist Steven Brill and former Wall Street Journal publisher Gordon Crovitz, NewsGuard provides transparent tools to counter misinformation for readers, brands, and democracies. Since launching in 2018, its global staff of trained journalists and information specialists has collected, updated, and deployed more than 6.9 million data points on more than 35,000 news and information sources, and cataloged and tracked all of the top false narratives spreading online.

NewsGuard’s analysts, powered by multiple AI tools, operate the trust industry’s most accountable and largest dataset on news. These data are deployed to fine-tune and provide guardrails for generative AI models, enable brands to advertise on quality news sites and avoid propaganda or hoax sites, provide media literacy guidance for individuals, and support democratic governments in countering hostile disinformation operations targeting their citizens.

Among other indicators of the scale of its operations is that NewsGuard’s apolitical and transparent criteria have been applied by its analysts to rate news sources accounting for 95% of online engagement with news across nine countries.

Impressive! What the page doesn’t tell you is that it has received about 750 thousand dollars from the federal government. It claims, however, to be completely transparent about its “investors” and income ( “Revenue Sources: NewsGuard’s revenue comes from Internet Service Providers, browsers, search engines, social platforms, education providers, hospital systems, advertising agencies, brand safety providers, researchers, and others paying to use NewsGuard’s ratings and Nutrition Labels and associated data.”) “Only” $750,000 seems like a proverbial drop in the bucket for a government that spends like Barnacle Bill the Sailor, but being funded in any way by the government means that a conflict of interest exists that needs to be prominently revealed. I find NewsGuard so non-user friendly and confusing that it would qualify as an unethical website on the basis of incompetence alone, but it is also untrustworthy.

The New York Post had a recent story about how NewsGuard allied itself with Biden Administration pandemic propaganda to targeting websites that shared or promoted the lab-leak theory of the origins of the Wuhan virus. Websites mentioning the lab leak were promoting “unfounded conspiracy theories about the virus’s origins” and deserved to be branded “misinformation.”

Because of that and other episodes, The Federalist and the Daily Wire , both targets of NewsGuard (which rates the New York Times and the Washington Post as the “most reliable” news sources), jointly filed a complaint with Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and the New Civil Liberties Alliance, a nonprofit civil rights group, in the US Eastern District of Texas this month. The suit alleges that the Biden administration has used US funds for censorship-abetting enterprises like NewsGuard that have relationships with social media platforms like Facebook, YouTube and TikTok. The lawsuit claims that NewsGuard and a similar operation, the Global Disinformation Index, are “government-promoted censorship enterprises” that are designed to attack conservative-leaning news sites by undermining their advertising revenue “and reducing the circulation of their reporting and speech.”

I don’t know if the allegations of the lawsuit can be proved in court, but it doesn’t matter. A supposedly non-partisan “factchecker” cannot accept two-bits from the government and be regarded as trustworthy.