Millions of Americans now get their news from AI instead of a newspaper or TV.
What those chatbots tell you depends entirely on who programmed them – and who they were told to trust.
Someone just found a backdoor to pump liberal bias into every AI chatbot in the country.
NewsGuard Censored Conservative News While Protecting Liberal Outlets That Lied About Hunter Biden
NewsGuard is a self-appointed media watchdog that rates news outlets on a 100-point reliability scale.
When the New York Post broke the Hunter Biden laptop story in October 2020 – confirming that Biden's son was trading on his father's name and office – NewsGuard flagged the Post as fake news and unreliable.
The Washington Post, USA Today, and Politico all ran stories dismissing the laptop as Russian disinformation. NewsGuard gave all three perfect scores.
When the laptop story turned out to be completely true, NewsGuard never penalized any of them. The Post that got it right stayed flagged. The outlets that ran cover for Biden kept their perfect scores.
And the ratings weren't just a scorecard. NewsGuard shared them with advertisers specifically to brand conservative outlets as unreliable – cutting off their ad revenue and pushing them toward insolvency.
That's who NewsGuard is – and they just found a way to make it much worse.
NewsGuard Rates Chinese Communist Party Propaganda Higher Than Newsmax Federalist and OAN
NewsGuard rates news outlets and sells those ratings to tech platforms – and now AI companies.
The Washington Free Beacon just revealed that NewsGuard has been pitching its ratings to AI developers as data specifically formatted to teach chatbots which sources deserve trust.
The scores speak for themselves.
China Daily – the official publication of the Chinese Communist Party's Central Propaganda Department – gets a reliability score of 44.5 out of 100.
Newsmax gets a 20. The Federalist gets a 17.5. One America News Network gets a 22.5.
China's Global Television Network – which NewsGuard itself describes as a "mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party" – scores 44.5, within 5 points of the Daily Wire's 49.5.
NewsGuard's own rating of China Daily acknowledges the outlet has "published misleading and unsubstantiated content advancing the views of the Chinese government" – including denying "considerable evidence" of atrocities against Muslim minorities in Xinjiang.
NewsGuard gave it a pass anyway.
The company's own COO, Matt Skibinski, admitted the reason in writing to the Washington Free Beacon: "Due to China's stranglehold over information, it's of course possible that the site publishes some claims that are false, but which can't be proven false with available evidence."
Countries that silence dissent get cleaner scores. The propaganda looks credible because Beijing arrested everyone who could contradict it.
How AI Bias Gets Built In Before You Ever Type a Question
Most Americans over 60 don't use ChatGPT – but they do use Google.
This isn’t just a problem for AI chatbots that are increasingly popular with young people.
Google now places an AI-generated answer at the top of every search result before a single news link appears.
Every major search engine is doing the same. The answer Americans see first is no longer chosen by an editor or a reporter – it's generated by an algorithm trained on data from companies exactly like NewsGuard.
A search engine trained on NewsGuard's ratings steers users toward the outlets that called the Hunter Biden laptop a hoax – and away from the New York Post that got it right. It ranks Chinese Communist Party propaganda above Newsmax, The Federalist, and OAN.
That's not a glitch. That's the product NewsGuard is selling.
The Biden Apparatus That Built This System
NewsGuard was built with government money and Democrat connections from the start.
The Biden administration paid the company $750,000 in taxpayer money in 2021, routed through the Pentagon and the State Department's Global Engagement Center, to run a COVID "disinformation" program.
When the Biden White House pressured major AI companies into content restriction pledges in 2023, NewsGuard positioned itself as the informal auditor – the company that would certify compliance with White House directives.
America First Legal exposed NewsGuard's documented ties to the State Department's Global Engagement Center. Gene Hamilton, the group's president, put the core problem directly: "Who decides what's reliable and what's not?"
A Washington Free Beacon analysis found that 20 NewsGuard executives and advisers donated to Democrat candidates between 2015 and 2022, while just 6 gave to Republicans.
Senator Ted Cruz caught Microsoft funding NewsGuard's "Media Literacy" program and pushing its biased ratings into classrooms serving more than 200 million students. After Cruz went public, Microsoft disavowed the affiliation.
The FCC saw it too. Commissioner Brendan Carr wrote directly to tech platforms warning that "NewsGuard has consistently rated official propaganda from the Communist Party of China as more credible than American publications."
Mike Benz, a former State Department official who now runs the Foundation for Freedom Online, laid out exactly what's at stake: "The fear every citizen should rightly have is that a highly biased private firm could influence or effectively control the sources from which AI derives its decisions."
The Biden apparatus that built this system may be gone. The training data it's selling to reprogram American AI is not – and every chatbot it touches will be a little less likely to tell your grandchildren the truth.
Sources:
- Aaron Sibarium, "A Media Watchdog Is Helping To Program AI Models. It Says Chinese Propaganda Is More Reliable Than Many American News Sources," Washington Free Beacon, June 18, 2026.
- "Study Finds NewsGuard Overtly Biased Against Conservatives," The Federalist, December 13, 2023.
- "Cruz Calls Out Microsoft for Bankrolling Indoctrination Tool NewsGuard in Schools," U.S. Senate Commerce Committee, December 23, 2024.
- "Sen. Cruz's Investigation Leads Microsoft to Disavow Support for NewsGuard's Biased Indoctrination Tool," U.S. Senate Commerce Committee, February 6, 2025.
- "Pentagon, Other Agencies Funded Censorship Firm Accused of Suppressing The Post," House Oversight Committee, 2023.
