by Alana Mastrangelo, Breitbart:
PragerU slammed NewsGuard, a for-profit company that is running a mass blacklisting campaign working with corporations and advertisers to strangle conservative media. PragerU is shining a light on its sly and “insidious” practices aimed at driving conservative media outlets “out of business.” The nonprofit founded by Dennis Prager has launched an X/Twitter takeover with the hashtag #EndBigTechCensorship to expose NewsGuard’s practices.
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PragerU CEO Marissa Streit pointed out in a new video that NewsGuard’s co-founder and CEO “is a Democrat Party loyalist,” who is “on record dismissing the Hunter Biden laptop,” adding that NewsGuard staff “is mostly comprised of left-leaning activists and ex-journalists.” Both its leaders and staff claim to target “misinformation,” but in practice, are attempting to shut down any conservative media outlet that dares to stand up to its leftist agenda. Along with launching a campaign on X, PragerU has also launched a petition to “expose NewsGuard and its cronies for suppressing free speech.”
Streit noted that NewsGuard actively works against organizations like PragerU, Breitbart News, the Daily Caller, the Federalist, “and news and opinion sources that are not on the left.”
The PragerU CEO explained how NewsGuard rolls out the same plan of attack against every media outlet it targets. First, it sends a list of “accusatory questions” on a hot button issue. If their target plays along and answers its questions in good faith, NewsGuard will quickly shift to other questions. If an outlet chooses not to respond, NewsGuard takes it as an admission that the outlet is not reliable.
“If you fail their test, and you will, NewsGuard informs their clients — PR firms, ad agencies, major corporations — that you’re toxic and that they should run in the opposite direction,” Streit said, noting that this “can get very expensive, very fast” for many companies living largely on advertising.
“It might drive you out of business if you don’t comply, but of course, that’s the plan,” Streit added, pointing out that the Federalist editor Mark Hemingway, who has gone through this type of lose-lose questioning, has referred to NewsGuard as “an extortion racket.”
“Having also lived through this experience, I can confirm that assessment,” Streit said.
The PragerU CEO also pointed out that Big Tech has found a loophole in censoring speech online with the help of NewsGuard:
NewsGuard works in another insidious way. Big tech titans don’t like taking grief from the public or from politicians who complain that their companies are censoring non-left viewpoints.
Now, thanks to NewsGuard, an enterprise Big Tech funds, they have a place to hide. They say, “We didn’t make any judgements. We hired this third-party fact checker and they told us this story or that website can’t be trusted.”
“In short, NewsGuard enables them to censor speech without leaving any fingerprints,” Streit said.
Moreover, the government has also found a way to censor speech, with the Defense Department paying NewsGuard over $700,000 to monitor “misinformation” on the internet — an Orwellian way of saying “information that the Defense Department doesn’t like,” Streit added.
