We don’t often make pleas for donations on the Daily Sceptic, but I thought I’d ask readers to dip into their pockets this Christmas.
Donations from readers are more or less our only source of revenue. Thanks to the machinations of companies like NewsGuard, which rank news publishing sites according to how ‘safe’ they are for companies to advertise on, the Daily Sceptic struggles to attract any advertising. This is a prime example of the censorship-industrial complex at work, as described by Lee Fang in a recent article in the New York Post:
There’s no official ban on discussing the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines or criticising American involvement in the Ukraine-Russia war, but editors and journalists have realised that writing on such topics can come at a cost.
News publishers have been demonetised and shadow-banned for reporting dissenting views and the bureaucratic means for enforcing this form of control are under increasing scrutiny.
NewsGuard, a for-profit company that scores news websites on trust and works closely with Government agencies and major corporate advertisers, exemplifies the problem.
In that article, which is well worth reading, Fang documented my unsuccessful attempt to get Newsguard to upgrade its ranking of the Daily Sceptic last year in the hope of attracting some advertising:
NewsGuard’s core business is a misinformation metre, in which websites are rated on a scale of 0 to 100 on a variety of factors, including headline choice and whether a site publishes “false or egregiously misleading content”.
Such an endeavour might appear as an objective public service, but the devil is in the details.
Editors who have engaged with NewsGuard have found that the company has made bizarre demands that unfairly tarnish an entire site as untrustworthy for straying from the official narrative.
The Daily Sceptic, a libertarian-leaning British site, is one such example. In a series of emails over the last two years, editor Toby Young reached out to NewsGuard, hoping to improve the Daily Sceptic’s 74.5 rating.
NewsGuard took issue with the website’s criticism of lockdowns – it called them “unnecessary, ineffective and harmful” – and cited academic literature on the topic.
Young went so far as to add postscripts to his articles, relaying the issues raised by the fact-checkers and providing additional information.
For his good-faith interactions, Young was rewarded with a downgrade. NewsGuard updated his rating to 37.5 on its scale.
NewsGuard wanted nothing other than a retraction of the articles it objected to, despite the fact that further research has documented the harmful effects of lockdowns.
We’ve suffered from similar efforts to shadowban our content on social media (although thankfully not on X now that it’s owned by Elon Musk). Facebook frequently restricts the content we post, claiming it is “false or misleading” and redirecting readers to ‘fact-checking’ sites that in reality are fountains of Covid and climate-related misinformation, often funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
As Michael Shellenberger and others have pointed out, one of the reasons there’s such a concerted effort to demonetise sites like ours is because we’re stealing readers away from the mainstream media. Paul Farhi, who writes about the news media for the Washington Post, recently published a table on X that revealed the extent to which legacy media sites are hemorrhaging readers:
Meanwhile, the Daily Sceptic is now averaging 1.8 million page views per month. Given that it’s produced on a shoestring from my garden shed, that’s pretty remarkable and shows just how much appetite there is for the kinds of stories we publish.
I thought about introducing a paywall earlier this year. After all, if we cannot monetise the huge traffic the site is getting via advertising, why not stick some of the content behind a paywall, even though it will significantly reduce our traffic? But I don’t want to do that because I think it’s important our content reaches as wide an audience as possible.
So, if you value what we do, please think about making a donation this Christmas. We’re only able to continue producing such high-quality journalism because Will Jones, Richard Eldred, Chris Morrison, Ian Rons, Noah Carl, J Sorel, Robert Kogon, Jonathan Barr and Steven Turner – all of whom are paid to either work on the site or produce regular content – devote so much time to it. And we can’t continue doing that without the generous support of our readers. Remember, you only have to donate £5 a month to be able to comment (or £50 to comment for a year).
A big thank you to all those people who’ve donated in 2023, particularly those who’ve set up recurring monthly donations – and a thank you to those people who regularly post below the line. It’s hugely appreciated.
Merry Christmas.
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