MRC's New Target For Loud And Lame Attacks

The Media Research Center has targeted Ad Fontes Media for documenting the shoddiness of right-wing media -- repeating the same bogus tactics it has used in its war against NewsGuard.

By Terry Krepel
Posted 3/6/2024

The left’s crusade against media critical of the Biden agenda has entered a new disturbing stage that should send chills down every American’s spine.

Meet Ad Fontes: a powerful media ratings firm positioning itself to be the arbiter of truth and facts. Founded in 2018, Ad Fontes has established close partnerships with the nation’s largest Big Tech platforms, advertising agencies and educational institutions. But Ad Fontes is just getting started.

Ad Fontes seeks to determine which media platforms are acceptable for Americans to use and which ought to be dismantled—all under the guise of non-partisanship and impartiality. However, an MRC Free Speech America investigation into Ad Fontes exposed the company’s claim of impartiality to be a mere facade. Our findings revealed that Ad Fontes’s entire methodology is designed to harm conservatives while championing liberal outlets. In addition, our investigation showed that its executives rigged its “Media Bias Chart” to hide the disturbing fact that Ad Fontes exists to promote the left’s political agenda.

Of course, the fact that it rates some right-wing websites lower than other ones is not, in itself, evidence of bias, however much Cornelio and Kilcullen want you to believe that to advance their narrative -- they simply assume that anyone who doesn't push the same right-wing narratives are biased and evil and must be destroyed for such wrongthink. They went on to shoehorn their attacks on Ad Fontes into the MRC's existing narratives:

Ad Fontes achieves its ratings by having nameless, faceless analysts making subjective editorial decisions consistent with the views of its founder and CEO.

Ad Fontes claims to deploy teams of three unnamed individuals with different ideological leanings (allegedly right, center and left) to review and rate news stories. Ad Fontes CEO Vanessa Otero told MRC Free Speech America that this so-called diversity guards against biases in their ratings of media. Ad Fontes asks Americans to accept its anonymous analysis as objective, scientific and empirical. Regrettably, it’s not. Our findings reveal that Ad Fontes’s analysis is categorically plagued with leftist bias.

Otero claimed her ratings are meant to check bias but she consistently failed to see how her own biases and repeated contradictions are systemic in Ad Fontes’s work. From how stories are initially selected for review to how these stories are analyzed, Otero provided information in statements to MRC Free Speech America that contradicted her assertions. 

Notably, Ad Fontes glosses over legacy media’s most effective political activism tool, bias by omission. These are the stories the media refuse to cover — such as the Biden family scandals (e.g. the legacy media blackout of information harmful to Joe Biden) to swing elections in favor of the left. MRC published a detailed report showing how the media and Big Tech defeated former President Donald Trump in the 2020 election utilizing this powerful tactic.

That "detailed report," as ConWebWatch has documented, is nothing but a conspiracy theory that ignores the fact there was no reason to trust the New York Post's reporting on Hunter Biden's laptop given its status as a pro-Trump lackey and based on findings the MRC paid biased right-wing pollsters to generate.

The lead attack was on Ad Fontes' media bias chart:

The Ad Fontes business model is built around the idea that it is “non-partisan,” “impartial” and fact-based. This is a facade. An investigation by MRC Free Speech America reveals that in both approach and application, Ad Fontes exists to amplify media on the political left while suppressing media that report facts inconsistent with Otero’s worldview.

"Ad Fontes is a for-profit company run by a left-winger purporting to objectively rank media outlets,” said Brent Bozell, founder and president of the Media Research Center. “But no honest American believes that PBS, CNN and The New York Times are objective media outlets. Their whole ranking system is a lie aimed at telling Americans to trust the leftist media and not to trust anyone on the right."

[...]

MRC Free Speech America staff analyzed the reliability scores of the 3,134 media entities rated by Ad Fontes between July 31 and Aug. 7. The disparity in scoring was readily apparent. Of the 2,032 media that Ad Fontes rated on the political “left,” 1,299 (64%) were given a score of 40 or above, solidifying their status as “reliable.” 

Examples of left-leaning media awarded this highest rating include CNN, The New York Times, NPR, Associated Press, Vox, ABC, CBS and NBC. However, of the 975 media Ad Fontes rated on the “right,” only 313 (32%) were given a “reliable” score of 40 or above. (e.g. The Wall Street Journal, Fox Business, National Post, CATO Institute). Ad Fontes was exactly twice as likely to award its highest rating to media on the left.

“The left’s most powerful tool you’ve never heard of, Ad Fontes’s official ratings chart resembles a fairytale rainbow of vibrant colors, but the actual data is nightmare for people who want straight news,” said MRC Free Speech America Vice President Dan Schneider. “This so-called media literacy firm seems to have worked overtime to make its rating system look benevolent, but when you look deeper into the real data, it’s not. The chart offered to students and advertisers is clearly deceptive and tailor-made to create a veneer of objectivity. I can see why advertisers would be induced to direct their advertising dollars to the left and why kids would be influenced not to read another article critical of liberal policies.”

As the head of NewsGuard occasionally did, Otero made the mistake of trying to cooperate with the MRC, which was interested only in bad-faith attacks and planning a hit job on her organization:

Ad Fontes’s leader, Otero, claimed her media ratings system is meant to check bias, but in an interview with MRC Free Speech America, she recited vague platitudes about her own biases but then consistently refused to acknowledge how her own prejudices are reflected in her company’s work.

Even if something as subjective as reliability could be quantified in a single number, Otero is ill-suited for such a task. This is because, despite her enthusiastic presentation, she has massive blindspots to the flaws in her methodology and is reflexively hostile to data that challenges her worldview. 

MRC Free Speech America pressed Otero about the issue of bias by omission in an Aug. 8 interview. Bias by omission is the most insidious form of media manipulation: Instead of misrepresenting facts, outlets simply refuse to report news contrary to their own political agenda. Sometimes, legacy media will bury an entire story, such as legacy media’s refusal to cover the Hunter Biden laptop exposé until after the election. This well-researched story, published in October of 2020, included emails recovered from abandoned Biden family laptops that revealed Joe Biden participating in his son’s dealings with the shady Ukrainian energy firm Burisma Holdings.

Speaking of bias by omission: Cornelio and Kilcullen touted how "MRC commissioned a detailed survey of 1,750 swing state voters that pulled the lever for then-candidate Joe Biden," finding that "82 percent of Biden voters were unaware of at least one of eight news stories that legacy media had buried." They didn't disclose that the poll -- part of the MRC's conspiracy theory over the election -- was conducted by The Polling Company, which was founded by Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway, so its fairness and accuracy can reasonably be questioned. When Otero pointed out how biased the MRC "study" was, Cornelio and Kilcullen objected:

Ad Fontes gave the MRC study on the media coverup of the Biden family scandals an abysmal 11.33 reliability rating on a scale where anything below 24 is considered unreliable. Otero spared no words in assailing the piece: “It’s based on a supposition, a premise that you all—you advocate that the media doesn’t cover these things.”  

When MRC Free Speech America researchers pointed out that the study revealed that a large portion of Biden voters had never heard of the Hunter Biden laptop story and that 9.4 percent of his voters would not have voted for him if they had known of it, Otero doubled down. “I don’t agree with that ... there was so much attention on the Hunter Biden laptop thing,” she claimed. “Like, regardless of the fact that it was, like, suppressed on Twitter and Facebook. There is no lack of coverage of, like, Hunter Biden stories, right?”

[...]

Otero’s response highlights one of the fatal weaknesses with Ad Fontes’s methodology: In training analysts to adopt a uniform approach consistent with Otero’s vision, her opinions are used as the standard to determine the reliability of stories.  Actual facts that contradict her opinions are therefore deemed misinformation. Thus, many of the 1,750 Biden voters who were scientifically polled but reported views that contradicted Otero’s alternative reality were once again erased.

Again, Cornelio and Kilcullen refused to disclose the logical reason the study should be dismissed: the bias of the pollsters on which the study relies (the other one being McLaughlin, who was the pollster for Trump's 2020 presidential campaign and, thus, is even more compromised).

Cornelio and Kilcullen dubiously framed the fact that Ad Fontes rates right-wing websites lower than liberal-leaning websites as some sort of conspiracy:

With regard to its “reliability” scoring, Ad Fontes ranks media sources from a high of 64 to a low of zero. As Ad Fontes explains it, “Scores above 40 are “reliable” and “generally good;” scores below 24 are “unreliable” and “generally problematic.” 

MRC Free Speech America staff analyzed the reliability scores of the 3,134 media entities rated by Ad Fontes between July 31 and Aug. 7. The disparity in scoring was readily apparent. Of the 2,032 media that Ad Fontes rated on the political “left,” 1,299 (64%) were given a score of 40 or above, solidifying their status as “reliable.” 

Examples of left-leaning media awarded this highest rating include CNN, The New York Times,NPR, Associated Press, Vox, ABC, CBS and NBC. However, of the 975 media Ad Fontes rated on the “right,” only 313 (32%) were given a “reliable” score of 40 or above. (e.g. The Wall Street Journal, Fox Business, National Post, CATO Institute). Ad Fontes was exactly twice as likely to award its highest rating to media on the left.

[...]

The bias is even more extreme in terms of what media Ad Fontes considered to be “unreliable” and “generally problematic.” Ad Fontes rated only 59 of the 2,032 (2.9%) media on the political left as “unreliable” (scores below 24). Media in that group included MSNBC’s The ReidOut and The Daily Dot. By contrast, Ad Fontes rated a sizable 286 of the 975 (29%) media on the political right as “unreliable.” Included among that tier were: The Federalist; Fox News shows Jesse Watters Primetime, Hannity and The Ingraham Angle; The Epoch Times; PragerU; The Daily Signal; RedState; Turning Point USA; NewsmaxTV, Timcast IRL,OAN, and The Matt Walsh Show. This means that Ad Fontes is exactly 10 times more likely to rate right-leaning media as “unreliable” and “generally problematic.”

Comparing the overall scores of comparable media further emphasizes how relentlessly Ad Fontes’s reliability system favors big media entities on the left and punishes media it labels as on the political right:

Cornelio and Kilcullen are trying to impose false balance on Ad Fontes; there's no reason for it to give equivalent ratings to an equal number of left-leaning and right-leaning websites if the data doesn't support it, and they offer no actual evidence that it doesn't. Instead, they cherry-pick stories from right-wing media they believe are rated lower than they desire:

Take, for example, a Breitbart article summarizing the testimony of a mother accusing Fairfax County’s school lockdown policies of exacerbating her autistic son’s fatal depression. Ad Fontes gave this story a rare single-digit rating (9.33), far beneath the score of 24 that marks something as “unreliable.” The article did not endorse the woman’s speech, but merely quoted and embedded the video of the mother’s public testimony and transcribed what she said.

Cornelio and Kilcullen are dishonestly portraying the story; in fact, the headline claimed the mother blamed "critical race theory" for her son's suicide. And their insistence that Breitbart "did not endorse the woman’s speech" is laughable since its decision to publish the story was an effective endorsement -- it would not have allowed this woman's testimony to stand without comment if it didn't fit into right-wing narratives against CRT and COVID-era lockdowns.

Cornelio and Kilcullen further showed their hostility to Ad Fontes by arguing with Otero and laughably denying that right-wing media outlets have any sort of reach and are staffed with ideologues:

Otero’s willful disregard of facts contrary to her worldview is not limited to the subject of Biden bribery. When pressed about the left’s disproportionate representation in the media, Otero interjected: “I don't agree with your premise that ... there are more left leaning folks in that field than right leaning folks.”

When it was pointed out to Otero that by her own site’s designations left-leaning sources more than double right-leaning ones (2,032 to 975), Otero still refused to acknowledge the disparity. “There's a lot of media out there and like, like Fox News, New York Post, you know, the Daily Mail, those are some of the biggest media organizations in the world,” she insisted. “And they're not populated by left-leaning journalists.”

Even if one takes at face value that these three organizations lack left-leaning journalists, it is ludicrous to claim that the market share of Fox News, the New York Post and Daily Mail approach the impact of legacy media. According to Nielsen ratings published by Variety in Dec. 2022, Fox News and its sister channel Fox Business had a combined 2.43 million total viewers in 2022. This is less than half of the 5.148 million viewers of NBC (NBC is owned by Comcast, which is actually one of “the biggest media organizations in the world”). The other two broadcast news channels—CBS at 5.144 million viewers and ABC (owned by Disney) at 3.867 million viewers—also dwarfed Fox News’s total viewership.  

The case is the same for news site traffic. According to an August report by the Press Gazette, Fox News has 262.1 million monthly visitors; Daily Mail has 125.3 million. The two websites’ combined influence is significant, but it is only a fraction of the 441.6 million that The New York Times or of the 415.2 million that CNN — two far-left outlets that are pushed by Big Tech giants like Google — receive.

Cornelio and Kilcullen were even mad that Ad Fontes endorsed the American justice system:

Otero and Berens’s political agenda pervades the actions of Ad Fontes, right down to its marketing. After nineteen MAGA Republicans, including former President Trump, were indicted in Atlanta, Georgia, Ad Fontes sent out a celebratory email declaring: “[t]he process of bringing those at the center of a conspiracy to defraud the American people and misrepresent the good work of the officials responsible for mounting a free and fair election in Georgia had been identified by Georgia District Attorney, Fani Willis, and indicted for their alleged actions. The wheels of justice, however slow, had turned in the general direction that they are supposed to turn.”

Yes, supporting the prosecution of alleged criminals is now a "political agenda" -- though it used to be the one on the right.

Cornelio and Kilcullen's attack seems to have been motivated by its criticism of the MRC itself:

Ad Fontes often gives “unreliable” ratings to stories critical of the Biden agenda that legacy media does not cover, even when there is no doubt as to their veracity. MRC Free Speech America’s February 2022 study documenting over 800 cases of COVID-19-related censorship by Big Tech platforms was labeled “unreliable” (15.67) despite the platforms themselves acknowledging they censor speech that disagrees with establishment guidelines.

As usual, the MRC is portraying correcting lies and misinformation about COVID as "censorship," or that prioritizing accurate information is somehow "establishment."

Cornelio and Kilcullen concluded:

While Ad Fontes claims to have a methodology for how it scores the articles it chooses, this framework is habitually abandoned so as to pursue Otero’s aggressive hard-left agenda. Concerningly, the brokenness of Ad Fontes’s methodology has not yet affected the firm’s effectiveness in pushing its product. Otero boasts that Ad Fontes has been imposed in schools across the country, removing the ability for students to access news sources skeptical of the left’s agenda. Ad Fontes also has partnered with Big Tech giants Meta and Microsoft, making it easier to pressure advertisers into blacklisting media Otero’s ratings system disapproves of. 

Censorship tools like Ad Fontes have no place in a free country. Americans benefit from a diversity of viewpoints, not conformity to Otero’s warped worldview.

Again, they want you to think that not being hard-right like they are means being "hard-left." This is not "media research" -- it's a political hit job designed to dishonestly portray the pursuit of accurate, trustworthy information as a partisan enterprise. Cornelio and Kilcullen need to explain their ideological motivation behind wanting to let misinformation spread unchecked and attacking anyone who opposes that.

Promoting the study

Because the MRC had to promote this study however shoddy it is, a Sept. 25 post by Cornelio hyped one of the MRC's favorite right-wing TV and radio ranters hyping the shoddy study:

Nationally syndicated radio host Mark Levin blasted the left’s newest tool to destroy right-leaning media outlets.

In a fiery segment of The Mark Levin Show on Sept. 22, host Levin highlighted an MRC Free Speech America exposé that detailed how Ad Fontes — a media ratings company and self-proclaimed arbiter of truth and facts — is working behind the scenes to redirect Americans from conservative media to leftist outlets through dubious ratings of reliability and bias.

“This is how totalitarian regimes conduct themselves,” Levin said of Ad Fontes’s reach, which extends to major educational institutions and government-tied entities.

The MRC report found that Ad Fontes gave 64 percent of media the rating firm deemed to be on the left as reliable, while only rating 32 percent of media it labeled on the right as reliable. Ad Fontes’s tirade against Levin was among the most disturbing in MRC Free Speech America’s findings. Levin’s flagship shows — The Mark Levin Show, The Blaze’s LevinTV and Fox News’s Life, Liberty and Levin — were all slapped down as “unreliable,” “misleading” and “problematic.”

Cornelio offered no evidence that Ad Fontes' assessment of Levin's programs is in any way inaccurate, and he did not indicate that Levin himself disputed it. Instead, he continued to be Levin's servile stenographer:

In response, Levin did not mince his words. “Of course,” said Levin of Ad Fontes’s slap down of his popular shows. “I am considered ‘unreliable.’ ... Who else is considered unreliable? The Federalist, Jesse Watters Primetime, Hannity, The Ingraham Angle, The Epoch Time, PragerU, The Daily Signal, RedState, Turning Point USA, Newsmax [and] OAN.”

Ad Fontes, through its self-proclaimed leftist executives, has partnered with some of the largest Big Tech platforms like Meta and advertising agencies to target right-leaning outlets, including Levin’s own radio show. Ad Fontes was the subject of a months-long MRC Free Speech America study that ultimately revealed that the media ratings firm skews its analysis to treat media critical of the Biden regime more harshly than legacy outlets, such as NBC, CBS, ABC, The New York Times and The Washington Post. 

Later in the segment, Levin issued a dire warning. “We’re way beyond the world liberal and progressive,”  Levin said after citing the damning findings in the 12-page report. “We’re way, way beyond that America.”

Because Cornelio is one of the co-authors of the study, he will not be making an effort to fact-check anything Levin says.

In more self-promotion, Tim Graham used his Sept. 28 podcast to hype the so-called study:

Then we discuss [MRC Free Speech America]'s big investigation into Ad Fontes Media, one of those businesses that claim to measure the reliability and tilt of media outlets in the interest of "media literacy." We never trust any chart that puts AP and PBS and NPR in the "Middle" with high reliability. NewsBusters and Fox News and most conservative outlets are painted as unreliable and "hyperpartisan." 

But this is worse. The Ad Fontes team wants to use their cockamamie ratings and suppress conservative advertising and go into schools and teach "media literacy," as in "kids, stay away from those dangerous conservative neighborhoods."

But the study made no serious attempt to prove the reliability of right-wing websites -- it simply cherry-picked examples to attack Ad Fontes' rating system -- nor did it prove that its findings about those sites was driven by partisan animosity (like the MRC's attack on Ad Fontes). And Graham didn't explain why "media literacy" is a bad thing if it teaches people how to recognize shoddy websites -- unless pushing bad and biased misinformation is the goal of right-wing media.

More attacks -- with "editor's notes"

The MRC has unsurprisingly continued to smear Ad Fontes. A Nov. 3 post by Cornelio huffed that “Media ratings firm Ad Fontes turned a blind eye to several of the leftist media outlets that infamously ran the Hamas-driven Gaza hospital hoax, thus shielding their favorable ratings. But he offered no evidence that Ad Fontes did instantaneous ratings on news articles. This manufactured rage was undercut by the “editor’s note” (read: correction) that was added to the post on Jan. 19:

An earlier version of this article reported that Ad Fontes did not rate The New York Times’ infamous hospital hoax story. However, Ad Fontes did rate The Times’ story, giving it a relatively low score of 23.67 for reliability and 0 for bias. Ad Fontes’ highly favorable ratings for innocuous articles such as the obituaries remain on the media ratings firm’s page for The Times.

Cornelio returned for a Dec. 6 post whining that Ad Fontes changed company policies to reduce the amount of data available to subscribers:

Disgraced media ratings firm Ad Fontes shut the curtains and hid damning data from paying subscribers following MRC Free Speech America’s scathing exposé on the self-dubbed arbiter of truth and facts. So much for the company’s claims of being transparent.

Ad Fontes, a powerful tool in the left’s arsenal as it attempts to destroy right-leaning media, will limit users’ ability to review the company’s dubious ratings, according to a press release from the company. Strikingly, the move came after MRC researchers used this now-limited data to expose the company’s partisan targeting of right-leaning media.

Ad Fontes issued a mass email to its subscribers on Nov. 21 — exactly three months after MRC’s exposé — announcing the drastic change. According to the new policy, Ad Fontes will only allow users to review a scant total of 250 media entities, a stark contrast to its previous policy that permitted users to freely view its ratings of over 7,000 media entities.

[...]

Ad Fontes claimed that its dramatic limits are necessary “to grow sustainability as a business.” In an email, Ad Fontes declared, “Unfortunately, we’ve experienced too many instances of users working around our paywalls and/or buying low-cost individual memberships to scrape our data for commercial purposes.”

Again, the MRC’s so-called research provided no evidence of “partisan targeting” — it’s not Ad Fontes’ fault that right-wing websites produce such shoddy work. It could also be argued that the MRC misused Ad Fontes data for “commercial purposes: — it needs to generate these kinds of partisan attacks to keep the donations flowing. And, again, the post required a later “editor’s note” to clean up errors:

This article has been updated to clarify that Ad Fontes did not rate “some” of the leftist outlets that falsely the infamous Gaza hospital hoax story. Ad Fontes rated The New York Times’ infamous reporting, giving it a relatively low score of 23.67 for reliability and 0 for bias. Some of the largest media outlets reporting the hoax — Politico, Reuters and TIME Magazine — did not receive Ad Fontes ratings.

Cornelio unironically concluded: “In other words: Don’t believe your lying eyes, there’s nothing to see here, folks.” Cornelio and the MRC, of course, don’t want their partisan attacks on Ad Fontes to be questioned and exposed for the political hackwork they are -- or discuss the fact that, with those "editor's notes" correcting previous misinformation, Cornelio and the MRC, not Ad Fontes, are the ones who are "discredited."

When Ad Fontes downgraded the MRC for its shoddy attacks, Cornelio screeched in a Jan. 25 post:

MRC Free Speech America caught an anti-free speech organization with its hands in the cookie jar.  Ad Fontes, the notably leftist media ratings firm, reacted to MRC articles that criticized its left-wing bias by giving these articles unfavorable ratings. We kid you not!

The left-wing censorship firm, presenting itself as the arbiter of truth, pummelled two MRC articles—explicitly about Ad Fontes—with negative scores. In essence, Ad Fontes claimed articles accusing its system as biased and unreliable were … biased and unreliable.

The joke writes itself. After recognizing how ridiculous Ad Fontes looked targeting articles that questioned its ratings, the company enacted a new policy – it will no longer rate articles about itself. Tellingly, this decision was only made after being confronted by MRC staff. 

MRC reached out to Ad Fontes for comment on Jan. 15, 2024. In response, Ad Fontes admitted that rating articles about itself looked bad in retrospect. Citing growing scrutiny and an internal discussion, Ad Fontes founder and CEO Vanessa Otero declared to MRC that they “decided that moving forward, we won’t rate any articles that are about us or tangentially mention us.”

[...]

Ad Fontes inexplicably targeted both these articles to denigrate. First, Ad Fontes gave MRC’s initial exposé—published on Sept. 21, 2023—a scathingly low-reliability score of 5.33. This review placed the story near what Ad Fontes considers “Fabricated” or “Misleading” content. Ad Fontes later removed the rating completely, according to archived links reviewed by MRC Free Speech America.

Months later, Ad Fontes targeted another MRC article daring to call out the journalism gatekeepers at the firm. This time, the company selected MRC reporting on Ad Fontes’s decision to partially pull the curtain shut on its data following our exposé. The MRC report relied on an Ad Fontes mass email telling its subscribers that it took drastic measures to limit its previously available trove of data. 

Despite MRC using Ad Fontes’s own words, the company punished the article with yet another low-reliability score of 8.33. Similar to when it walked back its review of MRC’s initial exposé, Ad Fontes again removed its score for the second article on Jan. 15, 2023, hours after MRC Free Speech America reached out to the media ratings firm with questions about the increasingly glaring conflict of interest. 

Cornelio didn’t explain why Ad Fontes should be forbidden from responding to the MRC’s shoddy, bad-faith attacks. And Ad Fontes withdrawing its rating on the articles doesn’t change the fact that the the MRC’s attacks really are misleading and unreliable, as illustrated by the fact that two previous attacks required “editor’s note” corrections.