Members of Congress:
We write to you today deeply concerned on behalf of millions of schoolchildren and their
parents regarding a new threat to the principles of free expression, open dialogue, diversity of
political thought, and freedom from harassment in our classrooms.
In January 2022, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), the nation’s second largest
teachers’ union, announced it would partner with NewsGuard, a company which features an
internet browser tool that claims to rate the trustworthiness of more than 7,500 news and
information websites, “to protect and champion legitimate journalism and fact-based reporting
and to help educators and their students navigate a sea of online disinformation.”
Given the rise of political intolerance within academic institutions and censorship from the tech
industry, we are alarmed by this partnership and its implications for core American values in our
schools.
The AFT is led by Randi Weingarten, a liberal union activist who over the past several years
during the pandemic has been a leading source of misinformation and political partisanship to
obscure scientific facts—all at the expense of parents and children. In 2020, Weingarten claimed
she favored schools re-opening once a vaccine was available, but throughout 2021 and 2022,
she and her affiliate organizations fought to keep schools closed and misrepresented their
position on school closures, CDC guidance, and the efficacy of the vaccine.345678 Considering the
physical, mental, and developmental damage done to students—and particularly to students of
color—due to AFT-backed school closures, the AFT cannot be trusted on matters of child welfare
and routinely demonstrates that it puts its own political interests ahead of students.91011 The
AFT is indisputably partisan and donates overwhelmingly to the Democratic Party and allied
causes. In the 2022 election cycle, 99.99% of campaign contributions from the American
Federation of Teachers have gone to Democrats. It is hard to imagine an organization that has
less credibility or standing as a judge of journalistic truth than the AFT.
NewsGuard claims its “apolitical journalistic criteria are applied fairly and accurately to all sites,
regardless of the site’s topic, tone, or political leaning,” but multiple third-party analyses
indicate this is untrue. NewsGuard’s stakeholders—its advisors, leadership, and
investors—heavily favor the left. According to one analysis, NewsGuard donations favor
Democrats more than 3 to 1. “Twenty NewsGuard executives and advisers have contributed to
Democratic candidates since 2015, with only six giving to Republicans, according to Federal
Election Commission records. Nine gave more than $10,000 to Democratic candidates, while
just three Republicans surpassed that threshold.” The analysis also found that NewsGuard employs several senior staff with a history of working in Democratic politics. “The group’s deputy general manager volunteered for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign and served as a delegate to the Democratic National Convention, according to the NewsGuard
website. One staff analyst volunteered for Obama’s 2012 campaign, and another served on a
Democratic political committee in Connecticut. NewsGuard’s general counsel has served on the
board of the League of Conservation Voters, a Democrat-aligned environmental group. The
lawyer, Cynthia Brill, has also contributed thousands of dollars to Democratic candidates. None
of the NewsGuard staffers listed online have worked for Republicans.” This bias is clearly reflected in NewsGuard ratings. According to another analysis of NewsGuard’s ratings, “liberal outlets were rated 27 points higher on average than news organizations on the right.”
There are endless examples of NewsGuard ratings that have no basis in reality and disprove the
claim that its ratings are impartial. RawStory, an online blog that functions as a progressive
attack dog and which is widely known for its left-wing extremism, receives a perfect rating of
100/100 for trustworthiness by NewsGuard. Shockingly, even Media Matters, a left-wing
political activist organization whose sole mission is attacking and denigrating conservatives,
receives an 80/100 favorable grade from NewsGuard.
According to an independent study by Nieman Journalism Lab:
- Mother Jones and Slate—both left-leaning news websites that depend on sensational
headlines for clicks—were ranked the 7th and 8th least trustworthy news websites
among the 38 major news organizations rated. Yet according to NewsGuard, both
websites are rated as trustworthy and receive high grades. NewsGuard claimed both
websites “avoid[ed] deceptive headlines” and “gather[ed] and present[ed] information
responsibly.” - Buzzfeed, which infamously published the fake Trump-Russia dossier that was the
catalyst for years of misinformation and false claims about collusion and which is rated
the 9th least trustworthy news website, also receives a 100/100 from NewsGuard. - Perhaps most unbelievably, Occupy Democrats, the 3rd least trusted according to the
Nieman Journalism Lab study, receives a perfect score. According to an article in LA
Weekly, Occupy Democrats repeatedly publishes “unabashedly partisan news…free
from the constraints of objectivity and, in some cases, facts.” According to an analysis by Buzzfeed, nearly 20% of the stories posted by Occupy Democrats on Facebook in the
lead up to the 2016 election were either partly or mostly false.
These are just the tip of the iceberg. As you might imagine, conservative news and opinion
websites are not treated so generously. A year and a half after the New York Post published its
Hunter Biden exposé—for which Big Tech censored, de-prioritized and de-platformed the oldest
newspaper in the country and its social media accounts—The New York Times finally admitted
the Post’s reporting was correct. News outlets from Politico to NPR to CBS News all got the
story wrong, yet unsurprisingly all receive ratings ranging from 95/100 to 100/100 from
NewsGuard. The news organization that got the story right and got banned for it by Big Tech,
the New York Post, receives a 69.5/100. In fact, NewsGuard currently features Michael Hayden—a co-signer of a now infamous letter falsely alleging the Hunter Biden story was a
Russian disinformation plot on the eve of the election–on its Board of Advisors.
If students were to debate the 2020 presidential election in a classroom where NewsGuard was
used, would the news outlets that got the Hunter Biden story wrong be the only acceptable
sources to cite and the news outlets that got this story right be banned? This is one of the many
potential dangers of relying on a partisan, biased rating system in classrooms to analyze news
information sources, instead of individually analyzing the information itself.
It seems that this partnership is another effort to politicize our schools, censor disapproved
political thought and sources of information, and silence critics of teachers’ unions.
Institutionalizing the censorship of news and information sources that may provide alternative
views–or even facts that cannot be found elsewhere but that appear on an unapproved news
source–is an attack on the values of our Constitution and on the basic liberal values that all
western societies strive to uphold.
We do not dispute that “fake news” and misleading or discredited journalism are a problem for
educators. But the role of educators in teaching students the critical thinking skills needed to
determine fact from fiction is harmed when popular sources of information are labeled as
either trustworthy or untrustworthy largely based on their political leanings. Educators should
teach students to think openly and critically, challenge ideas, make their own assessments,
conduct independent research, check facts, and do their own due diligence, not outsource the
very essence of what it means to learn, think, and judge.
With the rise and fall of news “fact checkers”—who so often fail to provide clarity in their
opinion-based ratings and frequently must retract their determinations—asserting an absolute grade of trustworthiness or untrustworthiness to sources of information is bound to fail and
promotes more cynicism and distrust, not less.
As champions for accountability in technology and education, we are calling on Congress to
investigate this partnership, including its origins, its intentions, its applications, and the broader
issue of biased and conflicted so-called “anti-misinformation” tools used in classrooms.
As leaders in Congress on education policy and oversight, we know you understand the
importance of free speech and critical thinking in our classrooms, as well as the increasing need
to set boundaries with educators to keep political agendas out of our schools. The dangers we
have highlighted will only continue to grow if left unchecked.
We appreciate your urgent attention to this matter.
Sincerely,
Ian Prior
Executive Director, Fight for Schools
Senior Advisor, America First Legal
Corey A. DeAngelis, Ph.D.
National Director of Research, American Federation for Children
Ryan P. Williams
President, The Claremont Institute
Arthur Milikh
Executive Director, Center for the American Way of Life, Claremont Institute
Nicole Neily
President, Parents Defending Education
Tiffany Justice & Tina Descovich
Co-Founders, Moms for Liberty
Mike Davis
President & Founder, Internet Accountability Project
Will Chamberlain
Senior Counsel, Internet Accountability Project
Dr. Elana Yaron Fishbein
Founder & President, No Left Turn in Education
Christopher F. Rufo
Senior Fellow, Manhattan Institute
Terry Schilling
President, American Principles Project
Jon Schweppe
Policy Director, American Principles Project
Jody Stone
Legislation & Policy Director, Students First Rhode Island
Aiden Buzzetti
President, Bull Moose Project
Ziven Havens
Managing Director, Bull Moose Project
Laurie Gaddis Barrett
Founder, Parents United Rhode Island
Josh Hammer
Research Fellow, Edmund Burke Foundation
Carol Platt Liebau
President, Yankee Institute
Shannon Adcock
President, Awake Illinois
Rachel Bovard
Senior Director of Policy, Conservative Partnership Institute
Will Swaim
President, California Policy Center
Jim Blew
Cofounder, Defense of Freedom Institute for Policy Studies
