News Corp’s The Australian has emerged as one of only three major Australian news publications to receive full points for the credibility and transparency of its news, as misinformation firm NewsGuard launches in Australia and New Zealand.
The national broadsheet joins the ABC and Guardian Australia in scoring 100/100 in all nine of the outfit’s marking criteria, which found all three outlets gather and present information responsibly, regularly correct errors, handle differences between news and opinion responsibly, avoid deceptive headlines, and clearly disclose ownership.
NewsGuard also found the Oz refrained from repeatedly publishing false content, clearly labelled advertising, and made clear who was in charge at the paper, including names and contact information.
The findings can be easily accessed by anyone with NewsGuard’s web browser plugin, for a fee of about $7 a month. Users of Microsoft’s Edge browser will be able to access the service free after the tech giant penned a new licensing deal with the news watchdog that will see the NewsGuard service integrated into the updated version of Microsoft’s search engine, Bing.
NewsGuard was launched in 2018 by journalist Steven Brill and former publisher of The Wall Street Journal Gordon Crovitz, with a mission to counter misinformation by providing credibility ratings and “nutrition labels” on thousands of news publishers globally.
The firm started with the US media market, before expanding into the UK, Italy, France and Germany. Last year it launched in Austria and Canada.
“Now our team has expanded to Australia and New Zealand to provide our journalistic credibility assessments of news sources to empower governments, brands, advertising agencies and non-profit organisations with human-vetted insights to support quality journalism and systemically defund sources of harmful misinformation,” Crovitz said.
On launch, the firm found that one in five of the Australian news sites assessed received “untrustworthy” scores.
Among the lowest was the website “australiannationalreview.com”, which NewsGuard discovered had a network of 14 associated domains, which researchers said could be mistaken by readers for credible national news outlets, with names such as the “australianmorningherald.com” and “newzealandtimes.live”.
The “Australian National Review”, founded by disgraced WA property developer Jamie McIntyre, got a score of 7.5/100 for publishing false claims on the COVID-19 pandemic and vaccines, as well as the 2020 US election and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Ratings for other major news publishers may shock. Nine’s The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age each received scores of 80/100, lower than their News Corp competitors, The Daily Telegraph and the Herald Sun, which each scored 92.5/100.
Schwartz Media’s The Saturday Paper, meanwhile, scored a low 75/100, news.com.au 92.5/100; nine.com.au and Crikey 87.5/100 and The New Daily 85/100. The SBS, meanwhile, fell short of a perfect score, securing 95/100.
In the UK London’s The Telegraph got just 80/100, while its US competitors The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal each returned perfect scores.
As part of its launch in Australia, NewsGuard will look to provide its services to democratic governments to counter “hostile disinformation operations” from foreign countries “such as China and Russia”.
