Entrepreneur Steve Brill has an idea to help consumers navigate the scourge of so-called fake news, where the line between fact and fiction has blurred in the last couple of years thanks to a glut of intentionally-fraudulent stories. The only hitch is that his solution is also part of the problem.
Brill has launched a new venture, Newsguard, which will ask independent journalists to act as media judges, ruling what is legitimate news and what is intentionally fraudulent.
“What we’re doing is no more and no less than telling people the difference between the Denver Post, which is a real newspaper, and the Denver Guardian, which broke a bunch of, you know, completely fake stories right before the election,” Brill told CNN. “We’re going to solve that problem using, guess what, human beings.”
The journalists heading up the fake news fighting initiative, which is being backed by roughly $6 million in venture funding, are going to apply reliability ratings to some 7,500 news sites, which “account for 98 percent of engagement with news online in the U.S.,” added Newsguard co-CEO Gordon Crovitz.
The group will use a color-coding system. Legitimate news websites with good track records will be tagged green, suspicious sites that have been consistently inaccurate will be tagged yellow, and anything that is outright and obviously fake will be tagged red.
The labels “are intended to let readers know if they need to take particular brands they see online with a grain of salt – or with an entire shaker,” Crovitz said. “These write-ups will describe the mission, history and any viewpoints of the sites relevant to readers.”
They haven’t gotten hard commitments from leading tech giants, but the group’s founders hope to license their materials to companies like Facebook and Google, which have discussed applying warning labels to widely-shared stories.
Though it’s not a bad idea, the Newsguard model isn’t going to solve the overall problem of fake news.
Fake news has found a foothold in the U.S. precisely because trust in media has fallen to disastrous lows. Sloppy and outright false reporting have done more than anything else to drive consumers into searching out more reliable sources of information. The general turning away from older, more established newsrooms it what opened the door for fake news-peddling grifters to swoop in and take advantage of the growing demand for trustworthy reporting.
Sure, a system whereby journalists label sites “reliable” or “unreliable” isn’t a terrible idea. But people aren’t going to dismiss a story they read just because someone from an untrusted industry said so. If these Newsguard ratings are going to have any bite, the news industry as a whole is going to have to win back some the trust it has squandered.
