By rogistok @ Shutterstock.com
It’s an old adage but as pertinent as ever, follow the money. When fact-checkers come down hard on an online personality, it’s important to follow the money. The fact-checkers aren’t doing their jobs for free, and whoever is paying them has an agenda. In the case of Dr. Joseph Mercola, one of the most censored men on the internet, his fact checkers are getting paid by big pharmaceutical companies. He writes:
In the video above, PragerU CEO Marissa Streit takes a look at NewsGuard, a for-profit fact checking organization backed by Big Pharma, Big Tech, the teachers union and the U.S. government.
NewsGuard has set itself up as the self-appointed global arbiter of what information is “trustworthy” based on nine “credibility and transparency” factors, for information viewed on private electronic devices, in schools and in public libraries.1,2
NewsGuard’s $6 million startup was funded in part by the Publicis Groupe,3 one of the largest PR firms in the world.4 Many of the largest drug companies use their services, and the Publicis Health board also consists of a power pack of high-profile individuals with Big Pharma position backgrounds or affiliations.5,6,7,8 I detailed these connections in my October 5, 2021, article, “The Web of Players Trying to Silence Truth.”
NewsGuard Censors Truth, Not Fake News
In the spring of 2020, NewsGuard classified mercola.com as “fake news” because we reported the SARS-CoV-2 virus as potentially having been leaked from the biosafety level 4 laboratory in Wuhan City, China, the epicenter of the COVID-19 outbreak.
Fast-forward a year, and the U.S. Congress launched an investigation to explore the lab accident theory after it became apparent that the National Institutes of Health had funded gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Interestingly, an April 16, 2020, report9 by CNN revealed the censorship of articles mentioning the possibility that SARS-CoV-2 may have leaked from the Wuhan BSL4 facility appears to be directed by China, which means NewsGuard has been functionally protecting Chinese interests.
As noted by Streit, if you’re a for-profit company getting paid by Big Pharma, just how neutral and unbiased can you be when fact checking articles that are critical of the industry? It’s a well-known fact that the one with the purse strings has a lot of pull.
The NewsGuard Racket
According to Streit, most of the NewsGuard staff are also “left-leaning activists” who can’t stand non-liberal news outlets like PragerU, The Daily Wire, the Federalist and Breitbart.
She correctly explains how their little game of “unbiased investigation” works. First, they send you an email with a list of accusatory questions on a hot-button issue you’ve addressed on your site. If you respond, they ignore your answers and send you a new list of questions. If you do not respond, you have in their eyes confirmed that you are not a reliable source.
“Heads they win, tails you lose,” Streit says.
No matter which approach you use, NewsGuard will put a fake news label on your site to drive readers away and tell ad agencies and major corporations to steer clear and put their advertising dollars elsewhere.
As noted by Streit, for news outlets that require advertisers to stay afloat, “that can get very expensive, very fast.” Companies can easily be driven out of business this way, and “of course, that’s the plan,” she says.
NewsGuard also serves as a firewall that protects Big Tech companies from accusations of censorship.
When conservative sources say Big Tech is censoring their views, the tech companies simply say, “We didn’t make any judgments. 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 says.
Read more here.
If you’re willing to fight for Main Street America, click here to sign up for my free weekly email.
