Op-ed: Sen. Azinger’s favor to a billionaire could send your tax dollars to China and Iran
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Sen. Michael Azinger has written a passionate op-ed in these pages about protecting West Virginia taxpayers from wasteful government spending on advertising. It's a worthy goal. There's just one problem: The supposed villain of his story -- NewsGuard, where I work -- has received precisely $0 from the state of West Virginia. Not a penny. Ever.
So what is SB 531 actually solving? And for whom?
Those are questions West Virginians deserve honest answers to -- because while Sen. Azinger wraps his argument in the language of free speech and fiscal responsibility, the real story is simpler and older: a politician doing a favor for a wealthy donor.
Let's start with the facts. NewsGuard rates news websites for reliability based on journalistic criteria. Some advertisers use our ratings to decide which sites to advertise on. But NewsGuard has no contracts with West Virginia state agencies. We receive no state funds. If Sen. Azinger is concerned about taxpayer dollars flowing to media-rating companies, he can rest easy: None is flowing to us from his state.
Yet his bill would prohibit state agencies from working with advertising firms that use services like NewsGuard. That's a strange way to protect taxpayers -- by restricting the tools that actually help protect them.
Here is something Sen. Azinger's op-ed didn't mention: Hostile foreign governments operate extensive networks of websites -- sometimes hundreds or thousands of them -- designed to look like ordinary American local news outlets. Names like "The Miami Chronicle" or "The Georgia Gazette." These sites target U.S. audiences with propaganda and disinformation, and they run advertisements to fund those campaigns.
Today, most advertising campaigns are done by computer. It's called programmatic advertising, and the typical campaign places ads on approximately 40,000 websites. No state government has the staff to vet 40,000 sites manually. That's a service NewsGuard performs for some agencies. Without that protection, West Virginia's tourism campaigns, public health announcements, and economic development ads could end up funding Kremlin, Chinese Communist and mullah propaganda.
This is not hypothetical. NewsGuard documented hundreds of major brand advertisements appearing on Russian state media outlets pushing disinformation about the war in Ukraine. In one particularly striking case, fabled investor and iconic capitalist Warren Buffett's GEICO was the top advertiser on Russia's Sputnik News -- not because Buffett or GEICO intended to fund Russian propaganda, but because programmatic advertising placed the ads there automatically, without any human review.
One of the primary uses of NewsGuard is to prevent this kind of accidental funding of hostile foreign actors. Sen. Azinger's bill would bar West Virginia from dealing with an ad agency that uses those services -- meaning your tax dollars could more easily end up in the pockets of foreign adversaries.
Sen. Azinger claims NewsGuard is biased against conservative outlets. But the facts say otherwise: Many top conservative outlets outscore similar left-leaning sites: Fox News outscores MSNBC, the Tucker Carlson-founded Daily Caller outscores CNN, and the conservative National Review outscores liberal Mother Jones--to name a few.
So if NewsGuard isn't biased and protects tax dollars rather than wasting them, what is this bill really about?
The principal beneficiary of laws like SB 531 isn't West Virginia -- it's Florida's Chris Ruddy, the billionaire CEO of Newsmax, who has been lobbying for legislation like this across the country.
Newsmax receives a lower NewsGuard score for its credibility than its closest competitor, Fox News, with whom Newsmax competes for eyeballs and advertising. Ruddy doesn't want advertisers to choose Fox News over Newsmax, so he and his allies have pushed state legislators to interfere with the free market.
West Virginians do have every reason to care about where their tax dollars go in advertising. A state that values its outdoor economy, its local newspapers, and its communities deserves an advertising ecosystem that puts money into trustworthy outlets -- quality local newspaper outlets like the News and Sentinel and reliable American outlets across the political spectrum. That is exactly what tools like NewsGuard are designed to support.
Passing SB 531 wouldn't protect West Virginia taxpayers. It would leave them more exposed to foreign disinformation networks. And it would do so to benefit a billionaire in Florida who doesn't like his report card.
West Virginians deserve better than that.
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Matt Skibinski is Chief Operating Officer of NewsGuard, a news credibility rating service.