NewsGuard welcomes assessments of our work. However, we were disappointed by Jonathan Turley’s recent critique under the provocative headline, “The most chilling words today: I’m from NewsGuard and I am here to rate you.”

I agree that, to rate the reliability of news sources, an organization must meet a high bar to earn the trust that it does so apolitically, treating all news sites equally, whether they’re conservative or liberal, new or old, small or large.

Indeed, when we launched NewsGuard in 2018, my co-CEO Steve Brill and I pledged that our ratings criteria would meet this test, writing in The Hill that our ratings would be designed to “arm readers with the information they might want about who’s feeding them the news and what their standards are. That’s what librarians have been doing since the invention of libraries: banning nothing but giving readers guidance about what they’re reading.”

When we launched NewsGuard it was to create an alternative to the two sources of secretive, unaccountable ratings that were — and are — assigned by others. The algorithms of the Silicon Valley platforms give secret preference to some news sites and ban others. They don’t disclose their criteria, and there’s no way for the people running the websites to find out how they were rated.

The only other entity rating news and information sites at the time we launched was Global Disinformation Index, a left-wing advocacy group which, like the digital platforms, does not disclose its criteria or let publishers know their rating. When GDI’s top 10 list of “risky” sites was made public, it included only conservative and libertarian sites, many of which get high ratings from NewsGuard.

As a long-time conservative editorial writer, columnist and publisher of The Wall Street Journal, I wouldn’t trust the online platforms or a left-wing advocacy group either. We........

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