A fact checking site partnered with the Department of Defense, the Department of State, the World Health Organization and a slew of major corporations is taking aim at The Gateway Pundit for leading coverage on the election audits.
The “misinformation site” Gateway Pundit dominates coverage of Maricopa County’s election audit, as its reports comprise at least 12 percent of all audit coverage, News Guard’s warns in its monthly Misinformation Monitor newsletter.
“The Gateway Pundit— Red-rated (meaning generally unreliable) conservative news and commentary website with a history of advancing false claims — has published 263 articles about the audit of Maricopa County election results between when U.S. President Joe Biden took office on Jan. 20, 2021, and June 20, 2021, making it the most prolific online publisher promoting the Arizona audit,” the newsletter states.
TGP’s coverage of the Maricopa audit is not only cited hundreds of times by conservative-leaning or “red-rated” sites, News Guard cautions, but “green-rated” sites are also relying on TGP for updates in their reporting of the audit.
“Other Red-rated sites published an additional 485 articles about the audit from Jan. 20, 2021, to June 20, 2021, that explicitly reference The Gateway Pundit — by attributing information to the outlet or republishing one of its stories, for example. The combination of The Gateway Pundit and other Red sites referencing its coverage represents six percent of all articles about the audit during that time frame, News Guard found,” the newsletter continues. “Green-rated sites have also published articles naming The Gateway Pundit, including fact-checks or other coverage of audit misinformation. Including these stories, articles about the audit either by or naming, The Gateway Pundit make up 12 percent of all audit coverage in the same time frame, demonstrating the outlet’s significant influence.”
Despite being banned on Twitter and shadow-banned on Facebook, The Gateway Pundit also “maintains over five percent of all social media engagement, such as likes, shares, and comments, on articles about the Arizona audit published between Jan. 20, 2021 and June 20, 2021,” according data analysis conducted by News Guard.
After political operatives manipulated the 2020 election by flooding battleground states with a massive amount of uncontrolled and unverified mail-in ballots, it took five days last November for vote-counters to find enough mail-in ballots for Joe Biden. Vote-counters covered windows with cardboard to block outside observation of any kind. Counting paused and restarted in secret.
Trump’s lead in voting precincts where he was ahead vanquished over those days. The mainstream media then declared Biden the winner.
As the completion of the audit in Maricopa county concludes, the Justice Department is warning against audits like the one held in Arizona under the pretense that ensuring election integrity deprives voters of their civil rights.
The government-sponsored fact-checking site concurs with the DOJ’s audit assessment, arguing Americans demanding election audits “sow distrust in the democratic process” and dangerously influence others to pursue audits.
The audit “is widely seen as partisan and aimed at sowing doubts about the election results, echoing former U.S. President Donald Trump’s false claims that the election was marred by massive fraud,” News Guard argues. “Earlier official hand count and electronic equipment audits found no evidence of fraud or vote switching in Maricopa County.
“Misinformation about the Arizona audit, perpetuates the myth that the 2020 election was rigged, can sow distrust in the democratic process and weaken the foundations of government. Plus, all the falsehoods being published about the ‘discoveries’ of fraud in Arizona have now given other states controlled by disappointed followers of President Trump the idea to pursue their own partisan audits.”
News Guard‘s partners include Microsoft, Bing, the U.S. Department of Defense, the U.S. Department of State, Mount Sinai and the World Health Organization.
Last August, News Guard, which gives a green rating to CNN, Rolling Stone, the New York Times, HuffPost, NBC News, MSNBC, PolitiFact, the Washington Post, and BuzzFeed, won a Pentagon-State Department contest for detecting COVID-19 misinformation and disinformation. The company subsequently receive $25,000 from the Pentagon to work with the State Department’s Global Engagement Center to develop the DoD’s Cyber National Mission Force.
Days later, News Guard announced a partnership with the World Health Organization to combat online misinformation about COVID-19 and vaccines.
As a myriad of “fact checking” sites, corporate news propagandists and tech behemoths attempt to disclaim and suppress TGPs real-time reports on the audit, Americans have never been more controlled by government authorities micromanaging fact from fiction. Yet, the common sense of the American people is largely prevailing over the nearly universal narrative drumbeat. A November Rasmussen poll found 75 percent of Republicans believe the election was stolen, along with at least 30 percent of Democrats.
Still, after seven months of the worst gaslighting in America’s history, poll after poll shows at least one third of all of Americans believe the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump.
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