Chris Lange, FISM News
The American Federation of Teachers this week announced a new partnership with left-wing news-rating company NewsGuard to shield students from “online disinformation.”
NewsGuard promotes itself as a resource whereby Internet users can access “trust ratings for more than 7,500 news and information websites” by adding a browser extension when searching for information online. ATF says it plans to add the browser extension to computers used by the union’s “1.7 million members, tens of millions of kids they teach, and their families,” under the terms of the agreement.
Critics, however, are blasting the partnership as an overt effort to censor information in schools.
Conservative watchdog group Media Research Center says the partnership is yet another attempt to indoctrinate children with “leftist ideology,” equating the initiative with progressives’ relentless push to inject Critical Race Theory into schools.
“The left has found a dangerous and equally disingenuous new way to indoctrinate our children, without their parents knowing,” MRC president Brent Bozell said in a tweet.
“NewsGuard is partnering with a national teacher’s union to bring their biased ratings into classrooms nationwide. This is as bad as CRT. In fact, it’s worse,” Bozell told Fox News. “Like CRT, it is designed to push a leftist ideology on children, but unlike CRT, the left is not going to give it a name this time. This is purposely designed to go under the radar of public scrutiny.”
MRC associate editor Joseph Vazquez conducted a recent analysis of NewsGuard’s ratings and found “extraordinary left-wing bias.”
“Liberal outlets were rated 27 points higher on average than news organizations on the right,” Vazquez said in an MRC “Newsbuster” article published Wednesday.
The study looked at NewsGuard’s “bias” on a left-to-right scale. Results showed that 93% of liberal sites were deemed credible compared to only 66% percent of right-leaning media outlets.
“According to NewsGuard’s skewed ratings, left-leaning outlets have substantially more ‘credibility’ on average than right-leaning outlets,” Vazquez wrote. “The trend is very disturbing.”
NewsGuard general manager Matt Skibinski dismissed the Media Research Center’s criticism.
“The Media Research Center’s so-called study of NewsGuard’s ratings cannot be taken seriously by anyone who looks even briefly at the ridiculous methodology on which it was based,” Skibinski said. “NewsGuard’s rating process is designed to be strictly apolitical and to review every site using the same standards. We do that by assessing each site using nine basic criteria that have nothing to do with politics.”
AFT President Randi Weingarten hailed the new partnership as a “game-changer for teachers and families drowning in an ocean of online dishonesty” in a press release distributed by the union.
“We are constantly trying to help our students, particularly our middle, high school and postsecondary students, separate fact from fiction, as we help them develop their critical-thinking and analytical skills,” Weingarten said, calling NewsGuard a “beacon of clarity to expose the dark depths of the internet and uplift those outlets committed to truth and honesty rather than falsehoods and fabrications.” Weingarten said the partnership will offer teachers a platform to discuss with their students “what can, and can’t, be trusted.”