NBC Said Google Is Demonetizing The Federalist for Spreading Fake News; Google Says the NBC Report Is Fake News

On Tuesday, NBC claimed that Google had made the decision to demonetize The Federalist after NBC's own News Verification Unit presented the search engine with evidence the conservative website was spreading misinformation related to recent anti-police brutality protests.

But it turned out that the news outlet spreading misinformation was actually NBC. In a statement, Google denied that it had stripped The Federalist of the ability to generate money from ads. "The Federalist was never demonetized," wrote Google Communications. "We worked with them to address issues on their site related to the comments section."

This directly contradicted the NBC story, which initially suggested that Google had found fault with The Federalist's articles. The actual problem, according to Google, was comments on the articles, not the articles themselves. The Federalist temporarily deleted its comments section, resolving the issue. (Disclaimer: I am friends with Ben Domenech, publisher of The Federalist, and have appeared on his radio show.)

The NBC story—penned by Adele-Momoko Fraser, a producer with the ironically named News Verification Unit—is a perfect example of activist journalism getting the facts wrong and obscuring the truth in order to arrive at an agenda-driven conclusion. Fraser wrote that Google had punished The Federalist "after the company was notified of research conducted by the Center for Countering Digital Hate, a British nonprofit that combats online hate and misinformation." Fraser further noted that "Google blocked The Federalist from its advertising platform after the NBC News Verification Unit brought the project to its attention."