Ad Fontes Is The Left’s Newest Tool To Destroying Conservatives – The Federalist

An in-depth investigation into Ad Fontes Media, a media literacy organization, found that the for-profit company is making money by actively encouraging Big Tech platforms, advertisers, and educators to deplatform, boycott, and exclude conservative commentators and media organizations, including The Federalist.

Masquerading as a media literacy organization, Ad Fontes Media is the lefts newest weapon to erase conservative speech while bolstering legacy media, wrote the investigators at Media Research Center (MRC) Free Speech America.

Ad Fontes, founded in 2018, claims to be impartial. According to its website, it is continuously updating its Media Bias Chart, which includes over 3,000 media sources graded on their own bias and reliability metrics. The organization insists it is objective because its evaluations stem from the consensus of anonymous analysts who are supposedly politically diverse. This couldnt be further from the truth.

Ad Fontes analysts evaluate individual news articles and other forms of media content in groups of three. Even though the three analysts are supposed to include one individual on the left, one on the right, and another in the center, Ad Fontes founder and CEO Vanessa Otero brags that 99% of the time, the three allegedly diverse analysts arrive at a single score.

Purportedly Impartial Ad Fontes promotes indisputably false left-wing narratives, such as the claim that the highly credible Wuhan lab leak theory is a baseless and fringe theory. Indeed, Ad Fontes gave the infamous 2020 Washington Post article debunk[ing] the lab leak theory its highest reliability rating.

Ad Fontes also gave a reliable rating to an article from The Root, which claims that Stacey Abrams won the 2018 Georgia gubernatorial election, which she did not. It gave another reliable score to a story from The New York Times that said, Theres no evidence of a wiretap at Trump Tower. Trump Tower was indeed wiretapped.

Ad Fontes gave a perfectly balanced rating to an article by the CCP propaganda publication, China Daily, which lobbied for a reduction in trade restrictions between the United States and China. Ad Fontes also gave a perfectly balanced score to a New York Times puff piece on former YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki headlined The Most Measured Person in Tech.

By the time the article was published, Wojcickinow infamous for her farreaching censorship policieshad already been caught targeting pro-life groups, demonetizing journalists critical of the left, and systematically removing Republican campaign ads, reported the MRC.

MRC found that Ad Fontes executives rigged a cherry-picked and condensed version of its Media Bias Chart to fool clients into thinking the organization is unbiased. The colorful chart makes it appear like Ad Fontes is critical of just as many left-wing sources as it is critical of right-wing sources.

MRCs analysis, however, shows a completely different story. The majority (64 percent) of media Ad Fontes labeled left was deemed fully reliable. These reliable sources include CNN, The New York Times, ABC, CBS, and NBC. Only one-third of media labeled right was deemed reliable.

Ad Fontes is 10 times more likely to give its lowest rating of unreliable to media on the right as it is to give this badge of shame to media on the left, reported the MRC. According to the MRC, only 2.9 percent of media it considered on the left as unreliable, while it rated 29 percent of media it labeled on the right as unreliable.

For instance, Ad Fontes describes The Federalist as Unreliable, Problematic, whereas CNN is Reliable, Analysis/Fact Reporting.

Ad Fontes cherry-picked Media Bias Chart is described by the MRCs Free Speech America Vice President Dan Schneider as a veneer of objectivity. It draws advertisers in and then persuades them to spend their money on left-wing, predominantly legacy media organizations.

Both Otero and her top lieutenant Brad Berens are documented left-wing political activists, reported the MRC. Both admit to being political ideologues and have consistently contributed to leftist political candidates.

Berens has referred to Tucker Carlson as a sexist pig and called President Trump a white supremacist and the worst president in the history of this great country.

He even wrote an open letter imploring Big Tech platforms to permanently ban then-President Trump, saying in the letter that he has a persistent fantasy of seeing Donald Trumps favorite color on a jumpsuit he is forced to wear.

Berens political views on Trump appear to be shared by Ad Fontes as a whole. After Trump was indicted in Georgia, Ad Fuentes sent out a gleeful email that read, The wheels of justice, however slow, had turned in the general direction that they are supposed to turn.

Ad Fontes has recently added a Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI) media filter. This new feature allow[s] advertisers to segregate media by race and sexual orientation of both ownership and audience, reported the MRC.

To benefit from the DEI filters, sources have to identify the racial composition of its ownership, hosts or target audience, and then champion it so as to ensure Ad Fontess diversity scorers could spot it.

Since emphasizing peoples immutable qualities rather than their merits is generally considered immoral by conservatives, the filter acts as just another way to penalize conservatives voices while elevating leftist ones.

The MRC notes that the DEI filter is also in contradiction to Ad Fontess pledge to focus on analysis of content, rather than preconceptions and prejudices about the medias speaker or viewer.

Ad Fontes is present in public schools, has contracted with major advertisers, and partners with tech giants like Meta and Microsoft. Tragically, concludes the MRC, every firm bamboozled into outsourcing its advertising decisions to Ad Fontes is complicit in the defunding of real journalism and turbocharging the revenue stream for legacy media propaganda.

Evita Duffy-Alfonso is a staff writer to The Federalist and the co-founder of the Chicago Thinker. She loves the Midwest, lumberjack sports, writing, and her family. Follow her on Twitter at @evitaduffy_1 or contact her at evita@thefederalist.com.

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Ad Fontes Is The Left's Newest Tool To Destroying Conservatives - The Federalist