The bewildering number of news organizations has inspired entrepreneurs to create ways to rank them. The most prominent of them is NewsGuard. It ranks media organizations based on their trustworthiness and then provides these rankings to large corporate advertisers. NewsGuard’s co-CEOs are Steven Brill and Gordon Crovitz. Before starting NewsGuard, Brill had created CourtTV, and Crovitz was the publisher of The Wall Street Journal. I interviewed them in March.

I have two specific concerns with NewsGuard. First, it has taken money from the Pentagon. How could NewsGuard be objective in evaluating news media coverage of the Defense Department if the Defense Department funds it? Second, NewsGuard wrongly labeled the idea that Covid-19 escaped from a Chinese lab as a “conspiracy theory.” And given that NewsGuard spread misinformation about covid’s origins, what right does it have to criticize others for spreading misinformation?

To NewsGuard’s credit, it publicly acknowledges that it took money from the Pentagon and got covid origins wrong. On its website, NewsGuard writes, “NewsGuard either mischaracterized the sites’ claims about the lab leak theory, referred to the lab leak as a ‘conspiracy theory,’ or wrongly grouped together unproven claims about the lab leak with the separate, false claim that the COVID-19 virus was man-made without explaining that one claim was unsubstantiated, and the other was false. NewsGuard apologizes for these errors.”