Randi Weingarten handed a left-wing censorship tool to 1.7 million teachers and called it media literacy.
That partnership just took a form no parent was warned about.
Now teachers unions have a tool that can indoctrinate millions of children simultaneously without a single teacher saying a word.
Randi Weingarten Signed a Deal That Put NewsGuard in American Classrooms
In January 2022, American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten signed a licensing deal with NewsGuard – a self-described "apolitical" news rating organization – and distributed it to every teacher in the union and the tens of millions of students they serve.
Weingarten called NewsGuard a "great tool" and a "beacon of clarity."
She did not mention what the tool actually does to conservative news sources.
NewsGuard rates websites on a 0–100 credibility scale. Score below 60 and students are warned to "proceed with caution."
In October 2020, the New York Post broke the story of Hunter Biden's laptop – emails, documents, and photos documenting the Biden family's corrupt foreign business dealings, weeks before a presidential election.
The New York Times called it Russian disinformation.
NewsGuard gave the Times a 100 out of 100 for credibility.
The Post, which had the story right, received a 69.5.
NPR, which refused to cover the laptop story at all, received the same perfect score.
The Federalist received a 12.5.
The AFT renewed the partnership in 2023 and has never apologized for it.
NewsGuard AI Is Now Free in Schools and Calling Conservative Media Misinformation
On June 23, 2026, NewsGuard launched a free AI chatbot for students at partnered schools.
The chatbot delivers what NewsGuard calls "reliable responses to prompts" using information from "rigorously vetted" journalists.
PragerU CEO Marissa Streit said this week that the tool is designed to do one thing: control what children believe.
"They are asking teachers to use the NewsGuard tool to filter what kind of information should go into our children's brains, into our children's classrooms," Streit said.
She continued: "They are going to be told that when they see content coming out of the Daily Wire, or of PragerU, it is labeled as misinformation."
House Republicans saw this coming.
In June 2022, Reps. Jim Banks, Virginia Foxx, and Burgess Owens sent letters to both the AFT and NewsGuard demanding answers.
Foxx was direct: "I'm not surprised that AFT is teaming up with an organization that ranks Chinese state-run media sites higher than American conservative sites, but I refuse to let it happen without a fight."
Owens called the AFT-NewsGuard collaboration "not an honest attempt to separate fact from fiction" but "yet another coordinated effort to politicize our academic institutions."
The AFT proceeded anyway.
The Pentagon Funded NewsGuard While AFT Put It in Classrooms
NewsGuard presents itself as a private, independent organization funded by nobody in particular.
In 2021, the Department of Defense paid NewsGuard $750,000 for a project tracking what it called "misinformation fingerprints." NewsGuard called it a "grant" in its own Social Impact Report – then told reporters it was merely a "licensing fee."
Contracts also came from the State Department's Global Engagement Center and the Cyber National Mission Force within U.S. Cyber Command.
The European Union's Joint Research Centre was also a client.
House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer launched an investigation and demanded NewsGuard disclose every government contract it has ever held. Those connections to federal agencies, Comer wrote, amounted to "abuse of government authority to censor American citizens."
Republicans in Congress took the fight to the defense budget. Both the 2024 and 2025 National Defense Authorization Acts included provisions barring the Pentagon from doing business with ad agencies that rely on NewsGuard to blacklist conservative outlets.
Sen. Ted Cruz sent a letter to Microsoft – which embedded NewsGuard ratings directly into its school search tool – calling the program an "Orwellian censorship project" targeting children.
Mike Benz, former State Department official and executive director of the Foundation for Freedom Online, warned that NewsGuard's push into AI-powered tools means the same ideological pressure it applied to media advertising will now shape what students are told is true.
"The obvious danger," Benz told the Washington Free Beacon, "is that it induces the same censorious changes to AI that it did to media and social media."
Streit said PragerU will "continue telling the truth regardless of who tries to silence" them.
But the child at a partnered school who opens the NewsGuard AI to research Fauci, or the border, or the 2020 election will not have PragerU standing next to her.
She will have Randi Weingarten's approved sources.
Weingarten built the system, the unions handed it to teachers, and nobody asked American parents.
Sources:
- Karly Tucker, "Is NewsGuard Censoring Children's Education? New AI Tool Raises Concerns," The Daily Signal, August 6, 2026.
- "Report: Newsguard Wants to Empower AI Censorship, Rates Chinese Propaganda as More Reliable than Conservative Media," Breitbart, June 22, 2026.
- Alec Dent, "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.
- Joseph Wulfsohn, "Republican Lawmakers Demand Answers About Controversial AFT-NewsGuard Anti-Misinformation Pact," Fox News, June 2022.
- "Cruz Calls Out Microsoft for Bankrolling Indoctrination Tool NewsGuard in Schools," Senate Commerce Committee, December 23, 2024.
- "Comer Demands NewsGuard Disclose All Government Contracts Amid Censorship Concerns," House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, October 25, 2024.
- Tristan Justice, "NewsGuard Claims It's Not Government-Funded, $750K Grant Suggests Otherwise," The Federalist, March 13, 2023.
