By now we've all seen them, so-called fact checkers have popped up over the internet like the plague. This article was almost written 6 months earlier when I became aware that OYE NEWS had made an appearance on mediafactcheckbias.com[1], but potential war followed by a Global attack on the freedoms of humanity got in the way of me completing it.
Then just yesterday, it came to my attention that we had made it to Newguard[2], a relatively new $6 million start-up venture which claims to have one goal - battle 'Fake News'. Newsguard require users to install a browser extension in order to use their service, once installed any website you are currently browsing will be flagged for your convenience.
These saviours of the internet are here to help you differentiate fact from fiction. So lets see how their expert researchers and analysts faired in their inspection of OYE.NEWS.
Ownership & Financing
They start with a look at the ownership and financing of the website. They state:
OYE News does not disclose its ownership. Website registration records indicate that the site was registered in April 2016 by someone called "Ceribalius Bassi". It is unclear whether the name is a pseudonym. Articles on OYE.NEWS are generally published under the byline "Ceribalius". A Facebook profile registered to Ceribalius Bassi often reposts OYE NEWS content.
The website domain was registered in 2016, however if they'd done a little more research they would have discovered that prior to the .news domain we were using the .global domain. Oh and yes, Ceribalius is a pseudonym.
They continue:
A man named James Allard identifies himself as OYE News' editor on his twitter profile. The profile says Allard is from England and is also a "coder, trader, candlestick maker". Allard also works at LBRY, an online publishing platform.
This highly secret operation has been busted, never did I think someone was capable of typing in OYE NEWS to twitter search and locating my profiles which lists the web address for this site on my profile. However, I am surprised they didn't narrow my location down a little better. Yes, i'm from England - but its really not hard to find me, i've operated multiple limited companies in the UK and there are only about half a dozen people sharing my name in the UK.
Alternatively, they could've just taken a look through my Facebook profile. Most of what I do is public - you can even work out what school I went to and who my friends are.
Also, I do not work at LBRY and never have, well not unless using a platform and supporting it classes as working for the company behind it, if so i'd like to disclose I also work for Google, Facebook and Twitter.
That is quite an irresponsible claim to make, maybe LBRY inc would be slightly upset about being falsely associated with me (if their little fake fake media checking report is to be believed)
They finish this section by stating that 'OYE.NEWS runs advertisements'
Content
Nothing particularly interesting stated in this section, they state that OYE stands for 'Open Your Eyes' and make reference to a statement on our 'About Us' page which says:
'Our voice often opposed much of what the mainstream news publishes'
They finish this section by identifying our frequent subject coverage which they state as being 'alternative medicine, cryptocurrencies, politics and purported plots by corporations'
I Would argue that actually what they identify as Alternative medicine is actually traditional medicine, but maybe i'm just being picky. I'd also like to ask what these 'purported plots by corporations' is all about. While i'm quite aware of actual plots, coverups and acts of fraud within large corporations that we've reported on, i'm not so aware of the frequently posted purported plots by corporations.
They then go on to state a few of our article headlines as examples, interestingly they pick three headlines which are not particularly outrageous:
Typical headlines include "The Complete Clinton Mysterious Death List", "'Vaccines are Safe & Effective' - A Cult Driven by Blind Faith", and "Big Pharma's Cash Cow".
Credibility
This is where it gets a little more interesting and fun for me. They begin this section with:
OYE News frequently publishes false or unsubstantiated information, including claims that vaccines cause autism and stories that promote unproven treatments for autism and cancer.
The best example of this they could find it seems would be from a mirrored article we shared by Robert F Kennedy, Jr entitled "Fully Vaccinated vs. Unvaccinated"[3].
The article about the suppression of a study between vaccinated and unvaccinated children, Kennedy claims that the original study showed increased risk in vaccinated children of various chronic illnesses, including Autism.
Newsguard however refer to the statement made from those allegedly involved in the suppression, which of course was denial of any such suppression.
However, what Newguard fail to discuss is the fact that the original results presented by Kennedy did exist, we retrieved through a FOI and did show the increase in chronic childhood illnesses. We can debate over whether this these results were suppressed all we want, but the crucial part of the article is the fact that they exist at all.
Of course these damning results have been downplayed by the media, with most so-called journalists homing in on the in-fighting between 'anti-vaxxers' surrounding the mercury-link and who actually got these results first. Apparently it was phase one of a much larger study, the second phase, which is the results that were finally made public and showed no increase in childhood chronic illnesses.
But it's ok, we won't question why phase one concluded with polar opposite results to phase two. Minor detail, huh?
Anyway, on with the show. Next up they point to an article written by myself entitled "Media Calls for Further Book Burning"[4]. They claim that I 'advocate for a dangerous procedure called chelation'. This is simply false, at no point did I advocate chelation, I personally know little about the process. I did however point out the reasoning behind the ban of a book entitled 'Autism Cure' was not even relevant to the book. Intravenous Chelation has resulted in the death of an autistic child, this is why the ban on such treatments and now books on such practices was introduced.
But the book in question actually warned against this method, as Newsguard pointed out, I wrote:
However, what the article failed to point out, is that this book specifically educates people not to do intravenous chelation as its highly dangerous. The book offers a more subtle, gentle approach to the chelation and also goes into dietary changes which can help the healing process.
Newguard state that I defended the book, well yes your right on that - I did and I still do.. The banning of any book is inexcusable and if you [newsguard] support such practices than your credibility is already worthless.
Next up we have "The Truth About GcMAF, David Noakes and Lyn Thyer"[5]. Newsguard say:
In July 2019, OYE News published "The Truth About GcMAF, David Noakes and Lyn Thyer", that falsely claimed that a protein called Gc-MAF "has huge potential in the fight against Cancer, Autism, Allergies and a host of other immune disorders". The article continued, "there is plenty of peer-reviewed scientific evidence to support the health benefits of GcMAF".
They then refer to a statement from Cancer Research UK who said "there is no scientific evidence to show that the treatment is safe or effective" . But once again they fail to mention the references made to multiple studies saying the complete opposite.
For example this study from 'The International Journal of Cancer Research and Treatment'[6] concluded that:
We have used this multimodality integrative immunotherapy-based approach in nearly 400 patients with cancer. The results of this integrative immunotherapy look hopeful.
We also plan to conduct a comparative clinical study to clarify its efficacy compared to that of several other integrative immunotherapies using different Gc protein subtypes, different concentrations of GcMAF, and different macrophage statuses to find the relationship between each therapy and the curative effect of GcMAF-containing human serum.
We aim to determine the optimal combination of the integrative immunotherapy from the results of these clinical and analytical studies.
This type of integrative immunotherapy can be of benefit to patients and is a promising treatment. We expect that the described immunotherapy using second-generation GcMAF will play a central role in future treatments against human cancer, both alone and in combination with other therapies, such as sonodynamic and photodynamic therapy.
I refer to multiple other studies all showing promising results, but I guess they must have missed them......
They then dribble on about my failure to mention Noakes' retraction of his original claims. Well, I didn't - Noakes retracted them after the article was written, at the time of writing time travel had not yet been invented. But regardless, of course he retracted his original claims in regards to Gc-MAF. Do you honestly believe he had a choice?
The moral of the story really was, which they didn't touch on at all over at Newsguard was this:
The crimes of David Noakes and his colleagues was simply not asking for permission to compete in the Cancer business, of course if they had of asked for permission they would of been denied. There is no room for competition in medicine, it is a monopolised market where only a few may walk.
The final article they reference is "Exit From Brexit - The Jo Cox Departure by Richard D Hall"[7]. There is very little point going over there ramblings on this one as they simply reiterate the mainstream narrative and use this as the reasoning behind why Halls Documentary is false. They never even watched the documentary, that you can be sure of.
Our next offence is not clearly stating whether an article is news or opinion. They apparently struggle to identify which of these the following statement is, taken from "How did 274,000 babies end up on psychiatric meds?"[8]:
If you, your child, or another family member is on a psychiatric drug, I urge you to educate yourself about the true risks, and to consider switching to safer alternatives. When it comes to children, I cannot fathom a situation in which a toddler would need a psychiatric drug and I find it shocking that there are so many doctors out there that, based on a subjective evaluation, would deem a psychiatric drug necessary.
They must believe readers are stupid, who said News cannot be weaved with opinion?
It should be noted in regards to the above post, it wasn't ours - this was another mirrored post, this time from Mercola.
They mention another mirrored article from Global Research, and last of all one about Greta Thunberg entitled "Greta Thunberg - If we can save the banks, then we can save the World" - Yes she did say this, yes it was taken out of context(maybe) and yes (although Newsguard failed to mention it) we did say this in the article:
One would assume Greta’s comments are meant to imply that if we have the ability to save the banks, as we did in 2008 in the bankers bailout then surely we have the ability to save the Worlds climate problems – the statement however could be taken as ‘we need to save the banks to save the planet’.
Newsguard claim to have sent two emails to Ceribalius Bassi, seeking comment on the sites publication of false[yawn] content and lack of corrections. No emails were received.
Advertising
According to Newsguard we 'publish sponsered articles from content sharing firms that are not identified as such' - We'd love to know about these, please enlighten us Newsguard, a little extra cash to get the servers paid would be great. Unlike Newsguard, we didn't have a $6 million startup fund.
We actually recently dropped any adverts from the site, simply because they make the page messy, but also because they just are not generating any significant funding, anyway.
Everything at OYE.NEWS has been self funded by myself and one other. We will have a section for donations setup soon and we do now generate crypto-currencies from various content sharing platforms such as Steemit, Hive and LBRY.
So, enough about me, what about Newsguard?
Final Word
What Newsguard and other fact-checkers and media credibility reviewers are doing is counter productive to freedom of press. They are judging sites like this one based on what they believe validates media. While they are critical that opinion and news is mixed together, the reality is that any opinion we do make is quite clearly an opinion. Is it better to hide opinion under the guise of news, much like BBC NEWS do, or include both together, surely this is a far more transparent approach.
Opinion driven bias is far easier to identify when the writer states their personal opinion within the context of the News. However, when News is delivered purely as News, without any obvious opinion attached it is far harder to identify the potential for bias in how the News is presented.
If we are all being honest, News is rarely presented without an opinion underlying the narrative. Little of what we know is actual fact, it is more often than not information passed through several hands - how this information is interpreted is up for debate.
This also applies to scientific data, while Newsguard say that it has be proven time and time again that there is no link between Vaccines and Autism, I would personally argue that is a totally false statement. There is no evidence whatsoever that proves this. 'Vaccines' is a very broad term, which ones? All of them?
The truth is, out of the apparent 20 or so studies which the CDC refers to in order to back up this claim, none of them actually prove this at all. There are no double blind placebo trials involved in the studies and more importantly only a small number of vaccines are involved in the studies.
So while there is no study that proves there is a link either, to say there is without doubt no link between Vaccines and Autism is an outright lie based on 'opinion'. At least we are honest, I've never personally claimed there is a link between the two, I merely question this desperate need to dismiss the concept and yet refuse to do the sufficient studies to back up the claims.
There is also a massive failure to address the rise in Autism and the thousands of parents who report the onset of their child's sudden onset of Autism like behaviour following immunisation. These parents are dismissed as 'desperate for blame' and their stories are typically referred to as just anecdotal stories with no scientific basis. Yet these parents are never given a voice within the mainstream media.
So, thank you for the review Newsguard, it's been fun. I actually don't think Newguard is by any means the worst of these types of services, the founder Steve Brill is actually very good at being critical towards just about all media, including the establishment media, but I did find this review a little lazy and hypocritical.
In regards to transparency, this was tackled to some degree in a recent website upgrade.
Sources:
[3] oye.news
[4] oye.news
[5] oye.news
[6] iiarjournals.org
[7] oye.news
[8] oye.news
Originally published on our website over at OYE NEWS : https://oye.news/news/internet/newsguard-fact-checking-the-fact-checkers/