In 2021 we were contacted by NewsGuard with a set of emailed questions about Power Line. NewsGuard is a brick in the wall meant to protect us from “misinformation.” According to a 2019 New York Times story, NewsGuard has given its stamp of approval to outlets including the Times itself. NewsGuard’s site lists scores of prominent institutional clients and explains:
NewsGuard deploys a team of expert journalists to rate and review the reliability of news sources across the open web, social media, and content platforms based on a set of apolitical criteria of journalistic practice.
Accessible via web dashboard, API or cloud datastream, our ratings have become the trusted source for understanding media reliability for research institutions, technology platforms, news aggregators, artificial intelligence providers, advertising companies, and news consumers worldwide.
This was Question 3 submitted to us by NewsGuard deputy editor John Gregory:
We’ve noticed that the site has repeatedly stated as fact in its article[s] that Joe Biden has dementia, both during the 2020 election cycle and since he became president. Why does the site make this claim without providing credible evidence that he has dementia?
Gregory cited John’s post “Are Biden’s aides afraid of him?” (August 22, 2021), in which John observed: “Is it plausible that White House aides are afraid of Joe Biden? Like many elderly people suffering from dementia, he can be querulous in public. We can imagine what he must be like behind closed doors.” In July 2023, Alex Thompson vindicated John’s imagination precisely in his Axios story “Old yeller: Biden’s private fury.”
Gregory also cited “Biden’s decline continues apace” (July 8, 2021). Here John made this observation:
Joe Biden’s downhill slide into dementia continues. What is remarkable is not so much that Biden has lost most of the modest faculties he once possessed, although he is rather young to be so badly impaired. What is remarkable is that we have a press determined not to notice that our president lacks normal–let alone outstanding!–mental function.
I’m calling a bingo, although NewsGuard — and the New York Times, for that matter — didn’t see it that way. Let’s just say it has nevertheless stood the test of time.
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