NewsGuard, WorldNetDaily and the pitched battle for a free press

Is NewsGuard, the controversial media-rating company that recently sued the Trump administration for investigating it, genuinely committed to impartially assessing news organizations’ “accountability, transparency and credibility,” as it claims?

Or is it – as three different federal investigations all now contend, including an ongoing congressional probe and independent investigations by the Federal Trade Commission and the Federal Communications Commission – that NewsGuard is actually all about driving conservative news organizations out of business?

For almost two years, Congress has been investigating NewsGuard with regard to exactly this issue. Rep. James Comer, R-Ky., chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, crystalized his committee’s chief concern when he commented, “One concerned journalist expressed fear that NewsGuard’s activities” are intended to “destroy the financial survival of disfavored outlets.”

That is why, in a separate investigation launched in May 2025, the Federal Trade Commission claims NewsGuard is actually an anti-conservative operation designed to hurt and “blacklist” conservative news outlets, with FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson accusing NewsGuard of leading “collusive ad-boycotts” against conservative journalism organizations.

In response to all of this, NewsGuard on Feb. 6 filed a lawsuit against the FTC (Read NewsGuard’s entire complaint here) alleging the Trump administration is censoring it “simply out of disagreement with NewsGuard’s First Amendment-protected journalistic judgments about the reliability of news sources.”

The FTC’s concerns regarding NewsGuard mirror those of the Federal Communications Commission, whose chairman, Brendan Carr, likewise accuses “the Orwellian named NewsGuard” of participating in nothing less than a “censorship cartel” intended to silence conservative media by hurting them financially.

Case in point: WorldNetDaily, one of the Internet’s earliest conservative news sites, founded back in 1997, received a low (“Red label/Unreliable”) rating from NewsGuard several years ago. This was soon followed by multiple major advertising companies suddenly blacklisting the site, causing severe financial repercussions still felt to this day.

Other prominent conservative news sites receiving “Red Label/Unreliable” NewsGuard ratings include Newsmax, Breitbart, the Gateway Pundit, the Federalist, the Daily Wire, the Epoch Times and others.

Even the much-loved PragerU was given a “Red Label” by NewsGuard. As the Epoch Times reported at the time, in late 2023:

When conservative education platform PragerU was slapped with a red label by NewsGuard, PragerU CEO Marissa Streit attempted to rectify the situation in good faith, she said.

“We really believed it was a mistake,” she told PragerU founder Dennis Prager during an interview on his podcast.

In response, she received “basically a list of demands,” she said.

NewsGuard wanted PragerU to stop criticizing the COVID-19 lockdown policies, stop questioning the safety of the COVID-19 vaccines, stop talking about any COVID-19 treatments not endorsed by the government, stop questioning the seriousness of climate change – and the list went on.

“Part of their demands were basically dictating to us what kind of content we’re allowed and not allowed to share,” she said. …

Ms. Streit did try to make changes to satisfy some of NewsGuard’s demands and to see how it would respond.

“The goalposts kept changing. Every time we would make a change, they would want more changes,” she said. …

The bad rating caused PragerU’s video-hosting provider, JW Player, to abandon it, Ms. Streit said. …

PragerU has since launched an online petition against NewsGuard.

“They are powerful in a very bad, malevolent, malicious, destructive way,” Mr. Prager said.

On the other hand, the New York Times, Washington Post, Associated Press, CNN, and even the openly leftwing Huffington Post and Daily Beast all are favored with “high credibility” NewsGuard ratings.

WorldNetDaily has received much the same treatment from NewsGuard as the aforementioned conservative organizations, including with regard to its reality-based reporting throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.

What follows is a highly revealing and never-before-published account of one pivotal interaction between NewsGuard and WND.

‘The site makes claims that the virus may have originated in a biosafety lab in Wuhan’

Back in April 2020, early in the COVID-19 pandemic, NewsGuard contacted WND by email, regarding supposedly “inaccurate information” about COVID on the site:

“We are in the process of updating several of NewsGuard’s reviews with information about news websites’ coverage of coronavirus. I’m writing because we have found inaccurate information about the topic on WND.com and wanted to get your comment before publishing.”

“For example,” NewsGuard continued, “in the story ‘Hold your breath – coronavirus is coming!’ the site makes claims that the virus may have originated in a biosafety lab in Wuhan … [but] medical authorities have found no evidence that the virus was created intentionally or otherwise in a lab; the CDC states that its research suggests ‘recent emergence of this virus from an animal reservoir’ and the World Health Organization states that it likely emerged from bats and that ‘it is believed that the virus jumped the species barrier to humans from another intermediate animal host.'”

The article to which NewsGuard referred was a commentary piece authored exclusively for WorldNetDaily by veteran journalist and former TV news anchor Barbara Simpson, and was published on Jan. 24, 2000 – just four days after the very first confirmed COVID-19 case in the U.S.

Simpson’s article introduced to readers the possibility that instead of having originated spontaneously from an outdoor food market in Wuhan, China, as virtually all the “experts” and news organizations were then claiming, the pandemic virus might rather have originated in the only biohazard level-4 laboratory in all of China, the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Located just seven-and-a-half miles up the road from the supposed “ground zero” outdoor food market, the Wuhan lab – as a shocked world would later find out – just happened to be conducting dangerous “gain-of-function research” (the controversial practice of genetically altering a pathogen to purposely increase its transmissibility and virulence) on bat coronaviruses at the time.

Of course, today it is widely believed that COVID-19 originated at the Wuhan Institute of Virology – the so-called “lab-leak theory” – as a 2024 congressional investigation affirmed and this detailed, official White House document explains.

Here is some of what Simpson wrote for WND about COVID-19’s origins at the very beginning of the pandemic, which NewsGuard found so alarming:

“The culprit is called a ‘coronavirus.’ It’s new – never been seen before. We don’t know where it came from. There is no prevention, no cure, and even treatment is limited.

“What’s interesting is that China has a National Biosafety Laboratory in Wuhan. It opened in January 2018, and it’s dedicated to studying such viruses such as SARS and Ebola – and, yes, corona. There has been speculation that perhaps the virus got loose from the lab and that is what started it all.”

That’s it. WorldNetDaily’s piece simply introduced the possibility that “perhaps the virus got loose from the lab.” The rest is history. WND was possibly the first, or certainly one of the first, news organizations to point to what ultimately turned out to be the true origin of the COVID-19 pandemic virus.

Yet WorldNetDaily was severely penalized by NewsGuard over its early acknowledgement of the “lab-leak theory” and other violations of NewsGuard’s standards.

In reality, however, far from being a “COVID misinformation site,” WND proved to be one of the very best news and information sites in its pandemic coverage – boldly, accurately and relentlessly reporting on the routinely suppressed realities of COVID-19. Not only the outrageously concealed medical realities associated with COVID prevention and treatment – from the shocking health dangers inherent in the mRNA “vaccines” to the proven safety and life-saving efficacy of mocked and maligned drugs like ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine – but also the outrageous deceptions of key players, from NIAID Director Anthony Fauci to White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator Deborah Birx to CDC Director Rochelle Walensky. WND’s unrelenting and painstakingly accurate pandemic coverage – featuring exclusive video interviews with many of the world’s most knowledgeable, courageous and often persecuted doctors and scientists – undoubtedly saved lives and helped preserve the health of many others.

Today, however, the big question is, what has been the cost to WND of being rated a “low-credibility” site by this supposedly unbiased media rating service? As noted earlier, the FTC’s Chairman Ferguson says his agency’s chief concern is that by affixing poor credibility scores for conservative media, NewsGuard has become a de facto “censorship cartel” inducing advertisers to boycott disfavored news outlets like WorldNetDaily.

Sure enough, shortly after the 2020 communication from NewsGuard about COVID-19 detailed above, the media team handling WND’s advertising informed WND management that three major advertising companies had suddenly decided to officially blacklist WorldNetDaily. Explaining that advertisers routinely rely on NewsGuard ratings to protect them from doing business with disreputable news sites, WND’s advertising reps also revealed that an astounding 23 other advertising companies had recently either declined, or failed to respond to, all of their inquiries about serving ads on WorldNetDaily, once the poisonous “Red Label” rating from NewsGuard was attached to the site.

As a direct result, WND has had to go without a major share of its previous advertising-based revenue and has thus been forced to rely largely on reader support to continue its mission.

HOW YOU CAN HELP: Since the traditional advertising-based business model on which WorldNetDaily successfully relied for decades has been severely degraded, the pioneering news site is now largely dependent on direct reader support. But that’s not an insurmountable problem, providing readers step up and help.

As WND launches into its 30th year of producing courageous, pro-American, pro-Constitution, pro-TRUTH journalism, please help out by making a generous tax-deductible donation to the nonprofit 501(c)3 WND News Center.

Thank you very much from everyone at WND.