Politics - News Analysis

Fox News in TROUBLE: Loses Certification as a Trusted News Source and Could Now Lose Top Advertisers

Well, here’s some GREAT news about our least favorite “news” network, Fox News.

Fox News’s credibility score has been downgraded to “red” by media watchdog NewsGuard, meaning it “fails to adhere to several basic journalistic standards.” Fox has had an overall passing score since the rating agency launched in 2018. It has lost its NewsGuard certification due to its “fake news” (so ironic).

It is huge. A lot of news feeds will not accept any story from any news service that isn’t certified by NewsGuard because, well, it can no longer be trusted, and it reflects poorly upon the feed. Fox News now faces getting kicked off those services. It can and will cost Fox News… it is almost impossible to guess how much money this can cost Fox.

The really odd thing is that reporting the truth doesn’t require one to be a MENSA member, just cautious. One simply has to care. And from the very beginning, Fox has been more about pushing opinion rather than reflecting the actual news and facts.

Fox News’s updated “nutrition label” from NewsGuard.

As explained by Nandini Jammi, the head of Check My Ads:

“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.’”

Fox News losing advertisers would put them in major trouble. They already have lost advertisers due to campaigns against Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity. But losing the green NewsGuard rating will cause Fox to lose advertisers automatically, no boycott or letter writing is necessary. It’s terrible news for the network, that is still facing a major lawsuit from Dominion Voting Systems.

And of course, Fox News blames the rating slip on NewsGuard being left-leaning, which we can personally tell you, they are not.

meet the author

Nicole Hickman James is a lifelong Democrat and political activist who first cut her teeth as a teenager volunteering for Mike Dukakis’ presidential campaign. She has worked and volunteered for John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, HFA (Hillary For America), and Organizing For Action. She’s passionate about liberal and progressive causes and considers President Obama her favorite president ever. She holds her Bachelor’s from Boston College in Economics and her Master's from Columbia, also in Economics. When not working as a writer, she enjoys traveling and spending time with her three college-aged children.

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