According to a new media watchdog group, two major networks are presenting their mostly conservative viewers with an “alternate universe,” especially in their coverage of the January 6 Capitol riots and its aftermath and could lose lots of advertising over it.

via Twitter

Nandini Jammi, the head of Check My Ads, explains:

“Newsguard may not be a household name, but it is a highly influential player in the adtech industry. They solve a very important problem for ad exchanges: they give them access to a ratings library of 7000+ media outlets on a scale of 0-100 that tell them whether a media outlet is disinformation or not.

The product, known as BrandGuard, is a godsend for ad exchange executives who are under pressure to keep hate and disinfo outlets out of their networks, but don’t want to deal with the public (and potentially political) fallout of making those decisions themselves. A Newsguard partnership gives them something neutral and objective to point at. After all, the company is staffed by trained journalists and insists that their ratings process is ‘apolitical.’”

via Twitter

Fox News, of course, responded by accusing the group of being left-leaning, which they are absolutely not:

Newsmax, for their part of the disinformation campaign, has continually broadcast 40 false claims or conspiracy theories about the Capitol attack since June, when the House Select Committee began televising evidence that Donald Trump and his allies played a big role in the riots, according to NewsGuard.

NewsGuard analyst Jack Brewster explains:

“If you’re watching Newsmax, you may come away with an entirely different feeling of what happened at the hearings, and what happened on Jan. 6.”

January 6 Insurrection at the Capitol via Flickr / Tyler Merbler https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

Newsmax has claimed that only a few hundred unarmed rioters were responsible for the attacks, in spite of photos and video taken on Jan. 6 showing thousands of rioters, many of whom were clearly armed.

Brewster continued:

“I was most shocked by the durability of these claims. These are false claims that are not new. A lot of them have been repeated ad nauseum.”

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Christopher Powell