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Riddle Us This: Why Did NewsGuard Hire A Senior Editor Accused of Gross ‘Misconduct?’
A tipster brought MRC Business’s attention to some damning information about one of website traffic cop NewsGuard’s senior editors, which begs the question of why she was even hired in the first place.
Dinah Contini, who had previously served in various editorial roles at liberal outlet Reuters, currently serves as the senior managing editor of NewsGuard. However, it appears that Contini has a sordid history of being accused of creating hostile work environments and engaging in harassment.
“In a ‘Management Conduct Notice’ that the journalists’ union sent on Sept. 21 [to Reuters’s top brass], it claimed Dina Kyriakidou Contini, the US general news editor, had engaged in ‘bullying, belittling and berating of subordinates for alleged shortcomings,” according to the New York Post on February 7, 2019. In addition, the notice also reportedly stipulated that Contini had “engaged in ‘inappropriate, unsolicited hugging and touching, and the use of patronizing, unprofessional language such as ‘darling,’ ‘sexy,’ and ‘baby’ with subordinates.”
But it gets worse. As The Post reported, the notice “claimed she showed ‘a lack of editorial judgment or indifference to the facts of a story in process if those facts are at odds with a preconceived notion of a story.” The Daily Beast also reported around the same time that Reuters’ editorial union said the “company management as a whole has failed to respond to multiple complaints" about her alleged "misconduct."
How in the world does that fly for a company like NewsGuard whose entire modus operandi is based on legitimizing itself as the saintly truth gatekeepers of the internet? It almost sounds like a bad joke. According to what appears to be Contini’s LinkedIn profile, she had been working at NewsGuard since 2022, just a few years after the allegations surfaced.
MRC Business reached out to NewsGuard asking if leadership was aware of the allegations against Contini before hiring her for a senior position and if they had reached out to any of the Reuters staff affected by her alleged misconduct. NewsGuard General Manager Matt Skibinski, in response, avoided directly answering MRC’s questions and instead just generically propped up Contini’s bona fides:
NewsGuard's editorial leadership is comprised of skilled editors known for their rigorous, apolitical and nonpartisan work. Dina Contini is a widely respected journalist with an outstanding reputation among her peers and colleagues. Before joining NewsGuard, she continued to excel in her senior role at Reuters in good standing for years after the story you're referring to was resolved.
The irony is that NewsGuard wants its ability to vet media outlets' credibility to be taken seriously while it simultaneously has no issues making excuses for the soiled credibility of its own editorial staff. Go figure.
The MRC has shown repeatedly over the years how skewed to favor the left NewsGuard’s ratings system has been. Using the media list provided by AllSides that classifies publications based on their “right” to “left” bias, MRC researchers determined in a study that NewsGuard provided a stellar average “credibility” rating of 91/100 for “left” and “lean left” outlets (e.g. The New York Times, The Washington Post, TIME, Vox).
At the same time, it dinged “right” and “lean right” outlets like Fox News, the New York Post and The Daily Wire with an outrageously abysmal average score of 65/100.The latest analysis denotes a 26-point disparity. NewsGuard’s rating for right-leaning outlets in particular was worse than the still-low 66/100 average rating it slapped on right-leaning media across the prior two MRC studies released Jan. 6, 2023 and Dec. 13, 2021.
MRC Business also just recently released an analysis showing that NewsGuard maintained high marks for leftist media outlets that were actively engaged in covering up President Joe Biden’s mental decline over the past four years. With explicitly controversial editorial leadership like Contini at the wheel, is it any surprise NewsGuard’s supposed standards for rating media outlets was steered into the credibility toilet?
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