Book Review: ‘The Death of Truth’

The Death of Truth author Steven Brill and his business partner Gordon Crovitz created NewsGuard to combat the confusion caused by highly doubtful yet not entirely impossible declarations that the Internet presents as news. NewsGuard seeks to use the work of dozens of human editors and analysts to label news websites with nutritional ratings. In theory, news sources that violate basic journalistic standards would receive low NewsGuard ratings, and those that adhered to those standards would receive high ones.

If the big Internet companies such as Google and Facebook were to license NewsGuard’s labels and you were to find a shady news website through their products, its poor rating would great you, and you would see a prompt to let know that anything appearing at the site might be dubious. You could know upfront the reliability ratings of every site in your Google search results or social media feed. NewsGuard and other companies like them sound like a good faith solution to help filter out some of the bullshit we’re all forced to deal with online.

Others don’t see it that way, as revealed in The Death of Truth. According to Brill, disinformation campaigns from countries such as Russia, Iran, and China—as well as some portion of shoddy news outlets on both sides of the U.S.’s political spectrum—benefit from relaying untruths with no filter in real time. Right-wing stalwarts such as Jim Jordan have taken aim at NewsGuard for its purported bias against right-leaning outlets, this despite the fact that NewsGuard prides itself on their nonbiased model.

For example, the company rates Fox News as slightly more reliable than MSNBC, and they rate the hard left site the Daily Kos as lower than conservative outlets such as the Daily Caller. Folks on the left have taken aim at NewGuard as well. Markos Moulitsas of the Daily Kos is quoted in the book as saying of NewsGuard, “You are working hard to shut down political grassroots discussion.”

According to Brill, it’s not a question of denying any website free speech on any part of the spectrum. Putting truth ratings on news outlets doesn’t prevent those outlets from publishing whatever they want. It prevents audiences from necessarily believing the veracity of what the sites present as news, gives the audience a hint when they might be reading opinion—or even fiction—posing as nonfiction, and provides us all a better chance to understand what might actually be happening in the real world as opposed to a world of ghosts in someone else’s head.

NewsGuard’s struggle is to get powerful people and entities to see that the left-leaning Brill and his conservative business partner Crovitz actually look at the journalistic standards of these sites without regard to the sites’ political leanings. Is it possible to judge a news website without regard to its slant? Brill claims that by NewsGuard’s first anniversary, the company had robust ratings for the sources that provide 95 percent of all online engagement in the U.S., U.K., France, Germany, and Italy. How refreshing would it be to know that this or that piece criticizing this or that political person, or suggesting an alternative COVID treatment, or stating that Paul Pelosi was attacked by his homosexual lover, is actually relying on common journalistic standards to make their claims?

It sounds like the solution to so many of the problems with the internet, but Facebook, Google, X, and the like have largely ignored calls to include the ratings of NewsGuard or its competitors at their sites. People knowing the truth cuts into their ad sales and bottom lines. It’s been reported that Google made over $300 billion in 2023. Facebook’s parent company Meta made $139 billion that same year. That’s a lot of incentive to stick with the status quo.

Whether we like living inside the National Enquirer or not, the freewheeling quality of our collective news sources no doubt impacts our ability to function as a society. Brill reports that, according to the Pew Research Center, trust in the U.S. federal government to do the right thing all or most of the time declined from about 73 percent in 1958 to 16 percent in September 2023. How can our inability to discern the truth from the news not be impacting that trust?

Brill repeatedly points out that, as co-CEO of NewsGuard, he has a vested interest in the utilization of such a rating system by online sources. He also points out that other companies have products that would help with the problem as well. There are worse things than someone making money off of a good idea. That’s what Zuckerberg did when he initially tried to connect people via the internet, and now he boasts over two billion active users at his site. Many want and even need social media sites in their lives. If Zuckerberg, for one, adjusted his model to include the ratings of the news sources linked at Facebook, there would still be plenty of ad revenue. Just not enough, apparently. In the meantime, we get to guess whether or not the news we see at these sites is actually true.