Federal Judge Tosses Defamation Lawsuit Against NewsGuard
This week, a federal judge dismissed a lawsuit brought against the U.S. government and an internet watchdog organization.
NewsGuard was founded by Gordon Crovitz, a former editor of The Wall Street Journal, and Steven Brill, an attorney who started Court TV; they serve as co-CEOs. The company employs journalists to assess and rate the reliability of news outlets on a scale of 0–100. The ratings—what it calls “nutrition reports“—are offered to advertisers and news aggregators but can also be displayed in search results for users who download NewsGuard’s software.
Consortium News is an online news outlet founded in 1995 to counteract what its founder deemed the mainstream media’s “pattern of groupthink on issue after issue” and “the silliness and propaganda that had come to pervade American journalism.”
In 2022, NewsGuard assessed Consortium News‘ reliability and found it lacking: It rated the outlet 47.5/100 and said it “covers international politics from a left-wing, anti-U.S. perspective [and] has published false claims about the Ukraine-Russia war and other international conflicts.”
“Proceed with caution,” NewsGuard advised readers. “This website fails to adhere to several basic journalistic standards.” Anyone with a NewsGuard web browser extension would see a red flag attached to Consortium News links.
In posts on the site, Consortium News Editor in Chief Joe Lauria strenuously denied the accusations at length. “If CN were really an ‘anti-U.S.’ website it would be happy to let things in the U.S. run its course towards steep decline,” he wrote in December 2022. “It would welcome rather than criticize foreign and domestic policy decisions by U.S. leaders that are harming the nation.”
The following year, the Consortium for Independent Journalism (CIJ)—the nonprofit that publishes Consortium News—sued NewsGuard for defamation.
“NewsGuard has identified no ‘false content’ but disputes the opinion of five CN commentaries on matters concerning Ukraine and Syria and because of such dispute, NewsGuard has labelled all 20,000-plus CN articles and videos, while reviewing only five of them, as purveying ‘false content’ and failing to meet minimum journalistic standards,” the lawsuit claimed. “By placing the red flag warning…appended to works that NewsGuard has not read, NewsGuard has acted to defame, libel and slander CN’s entire production and its writers, recklessly and without regard to the truth.”
In fairness, the articles NewsGuard did object to were doozies: “NewsGuard says Consortium News is publishing ‘false content’ because it has reported on a 2014 U.S.-backed coup in Kiev and on the pervasive influenc
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