Mike Benz, a former Trump State Department official and current executive director of the Foundation for Freedom Online, revealed how NewsGuard is making its way into K-12 public schools and “warping” the minds of tens of millions of schoolchildren.
NewsGuard is a for-profit entity dedicated to countering what it calls “misinformation” founded by journalist Steven Brill and former Wall Street Journal publisher Gordon Crovitz.
The organization provides “reliability ratings and scores for news and information websites based on nine journalistic criteria.”
Benz (pictured above) said that in 2021, NewsGuard attempted to convince federal lawmakers to pass a bill that would force social media platforms to pay for NewsGuard’s censorship and media literacy technology.
However, when that effort failed, Benz said NewsGuard began to partner with the American Federation of Teachers and campaign in Democrat-run states, including New York, Illinois, Rhode Island, California, and others – all of which now have mandated media literacy courses at the K-12 level.
Benz branded the developments as the creation of a “government-backed news cartel system in the United States.”
“This is where we currently are and where it’s very nasty. The states of California, New York, Illinois, Rhode Island, and several others have passed mandatory media literacy programs through the state assembly. These are deep blue states that are starting to have mandated media literacy courses at the K-12 level in every public school in the country,” Benz explained on Tuesday’s edition of The Michael Patrick Leahy Show. “Now, at the same time, NewsGuard is partnered with the American Federation of Teachers. That’s Randi Weingarten’s 1.7 million-strong teachers union, the largest teachers union in the country, and they brag that tens of millions of school children are now going to be basically mind warped by NewsGuard’s censorship technology.”
Benz said NewsGuard has created the concept of “media literacy,” which he described as a “field” NewsGuard created to “call anybody who doesn’t read their media sources illiterate.”
“Media literacy is a field that was born after the 2016 election, created by the folks who felt that they lost the 2016 election and didn’t want to lose an election again, and blamed their loss of the 2016 election on alternative news outlets who were out competing legacy media. So they created this media literacy field to call anybody who doesn’t read their media sources illiterate because they’re not reading the right media sources,” Benz explained.
“So again, media literacy means if you listen to this radio broadcast, as we currently are speaking, you are media illiterate and need to get your mind right by reading media sources like The New York Times or The Washington Post instead of listening to The Michael Patrick Leahy Show. Now that’s bad enough in Orwellian on its face, but media literacy is again an entire field. It’s an industry now that has tens of millions of dollars flowing into it from at the state level, at the federal level. It’s being worked into social media algorithms and it’s basically a re-ranking of news and a news cartel system that boxes out anybody who doesn’t echo an establishment line by clockwork, arranging them into only reading sources approved as being media literate sources,” Benz added.
Benz said if NewsGuard is successful in implementing its media literacy concept in K-12 schools across the country, students will learn not to cite news outlets that NewsGuard does not approve.
“These classes will teach them not to cite The Michael Patrick Leahy Show on a test. They can only cite like what Wikipedia does with this vast blacklist of any news entity that doesn’t tow the party line and can’t be cited on Wikipedia. They’re now saying they can’t be cited on research projects at the school level, and that you’ll get docked for citing sources that render you media illiterate, i.e. anything that has a low NewsGuard news rating,” Benz explained.
“So this is really the creation for the first time of a government backed news cartel system in the United States,” Benz added.
Benz said conservative sites like The Tennessee Star are throttled by social media giants like Facebook and Google because sites protected by the censorship complex “would lose in a fair fight” if media competition wasn’t suppressed.
“They would lose in a fair fight so they need to rig it,” Benz said.
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Kaitlin Housler is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network. Follow Kaitlin on X / Twitter.
Photo “Mike Benz” by Mike Benz. Background Photo “NewsGuard Logo” by NewsGuard.
