Poynter teaches journalists to question institutions. Why not question Poynter?

Poynter teaches journalists a lot. Supposedly, anyway. But when it comes to questioning Poynter itself? It’s a different story.

In my previous article, I took issue with Arizona hockey reporter Craig Morgan’s argument that trained journalists possess standards that supposedly separate them from the untrained masses flooding today’s media landscape.

Morgan made some perfectly legitimate points about sourcing, then he wandered into the “we went to school for this” territory and started sounding more like someone protecting a guild than defending good journalism.

But something else jumped out at me:

When explaining where those professional standards come from, Morgan pointed readers toward the Poynter Institute.

And that raises a much more interesting question.

Why Poynter?

More importantly, why do so many journalists invoke organizations like Poynter as though their authority is self-evident while journalism itself supposedly exists to question powerful institutions?

Once I started digging into Poynter, I found an organization that journalists should scrutinize a lot more than they do.

Poynter isn’t journalism scripture handed down from a mountaintop

Poynter has been around for decades. It teaches journalism ethics and best practices, owns PolitiFact, houses the International Fact-Checking Network, and operates inside the center of professional journalism.

That makes it influential, but it doesn’t make it infallible.

Yet watch how organizations like this often function inside the journalism world. A reporter, an editor, and journalism professors appeal to Poynter.

Fact-checkers receive verification through Poynter’s International Fact-Checking Network, major technology companies then recognize those credentials, and eventually, everyone keeps citing everyone else until institutional recognition starts resembling proof of institutional credibility.

That’s a “nice little circle” they’ve built.

But what happens when the institution deciding what credible journalism looks like demonstrates some questionable judgment itself?

We got a fantastic example in 2019, one year before the supposedly “unthinkable” happened.

Remember when Poynter produced an actual list of “unreliable” websites?

In April 2019, 10 months before the world went to hell, Poynter published an index containing 515 websites it classified as unreliable, and this wasn’t merely some columnist publishing his personal list of sites he didn’t like.

Poynter assembled the project from existing databases produced by journalists, fact-checkers, and researchers — and presented the result as something readers could use to evaluate the reliability of news websites.

There was one slight problem, and that’s being generous: the methodology sucked.

Poynter’s list included legitimate conservative publications alongside websites associated with conspiracy theories, hoaxes, and fabricated information. The Washington Examiner initially appeared on the list before Poynter reviewed the decision and admitted it didn’t meet the criteria for inclusion. The Washington Free Beacon and Daily Caller were among other conservative publications included.

But here’s where things get particularly ugly.

The accompanying material went beyond telling people which websites Poynter considered unreliable. It encouraged advertisers to use the index to blacklist those sites and financially punish them.

Think about what that means.

An organization regarded throughout journalism as an authority on ethics created a flawed methodology for labeling hundreds of media organizations unreliable — and then provided a potential roadmap for depriving those organizations of advertising revenue.

Sounds pretty consequential to me.

Within days, the entire thing collapsed.

The so-called credible Poynter pulled the list after receiving complaints and conducting an audit. Managing editor Barbara Allen acknowledged “weaknesses in the methodology,” inconsistencies between the databases Poynter used and the resulting index, and admitted Poynter failed to ensure the data was rigorous before publication.

An independent media-ethics investigation later contacted several outlets that appeared on the list. The outlets that responded said Poynter hadn’t contacted them before labeling them unreliable. The investigation also found that most creators of the databases Poynter combined hadn’t worked with Poynter on the project beforehand.

That’s not some minor typo buried in paragraph 28, but a spectacular failure involving the exact subjects Poynter lectures everybody else about:

Verification, methodology, fairness, accuracy, transparency, and credibility.

Funny how credentials didn’t prevent that one.

Apparently we should follow the money — except when the money funds the fact-checkers

Before somebody starts screaming that I’m claiming George Soros sits inside Poynter headquarters issuing editorial orders, I’m not. I haven’t found evidence proving anything remotely like that, but journalism constantly teaches us that funding relationships are game-changers.

In 2017, Poynter announced $1.3 million in grants to expand its International Fact-Checking Network. One million dollars came from Pierre Omidyar’s Omidyar Network, and another $300,000 came from George Soros’ Open Society Foundations.

That same year, Poynter’s own list of organizations contributing more than $50,000 included Open Society Foundations, Omidyar Network, Google News Lab, the National Endowment for Democracy, and—because reality occasionally enjoys screwing up everyone’s tidy partisan narrative—the Charles Koch Foundation.

And the network extends much further.

Poynter’s current IFCN transparency statement says the organization received funding since 2015 from entities including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Google, Facebook/Meta, the U.S. State Department, National Endowment for Democracy, Omidyar Network/Luminate, Open Society Foundations, Craig Newmark Philanthropies, and others.

Funding relationships are relevant when an organization presents itself as an arbiter of credibility. If Exxon funded an organization evaluating climate reporting, there’s no doubt that journalists would mention it. The same goes if Pfizer funded an organization rating pharmaceutical coverage, or if the Koch network funded an organization grading economic journalism.

Yet apparently I’m supposed to see enormous philanthropic foundations, Big Tech corporations, government-linked organizations, and ideological nonprofits financing parts of the fact-checking ecosystem and respond with:

Nothing to see here. The professionals handled it.

I remember sitting in a meeting during my staff writing days, and the founder was talking more about Poynter in a positive light. If the hackles weren’t raised yet, they certainly came up then.

Poynter isn’t merely offering friendly advice anymore

This gets especially important because Poynter’s influence doesn’t stop at publishing articles explaining how journalists should behave. Its International Fact-Checking Network verifies fact-checking organizations according to its Code of Principles, and IFCN openly acknowledges something significant:

Technology platforms including Meta, Google, and TikTok have made IFCN signatory status a condition for participating in some fact-checking programs and policies.

IFCN describes itself as the “verification authority” for organizations achieving signatory status. Poynter can correctly say it isn’t a government regulator. Nobody needs a Poynter license before starting a Substack or reporting NHL rumors — yet, anyway, and I hope I didn’t just give it a “bright” idea.

But when an organization creates standards, verifies fact-checkers according to those standards, and massive technology platforms use that verification when determining participation in their own information systems, we’re talking about institutional gatekeeping.

Private gatekeeping, sure, but it’s still gatekeeping — and that makes Poynter’s own track record exceptionally relevant.

The institution gets grace that outsiders rarely receive

Imagine an independent conservative media organization publishing a list of 515 supposedly unreliable outlets, and it incorrectly included legitimate publications, encouraged advertisers to blacklist those publications, then discovered serious methodological problems days later, and retracted the entire project.

How many journalism professors would shrug and say:

Hey, mistakes happen. They corrected it.

How many fact-checkers would preserve that organization’s reputation as a trusted authority on media reliability? And how many mainstream reporters would cite its ethics guidelines years later without mentioning the incident?

Maybe some, but I doubt many.

Yet Poynter survived precisely because institutional credibility works differently once you’ve been welcomed inside the exclusive club.

An outsider’s mistake turns into evidence that the outsider was never credible, but an insider’s mistake is an opportunity to demonstrate accountability. That’s one heck of a convenient arrangement, and you see it way too often in the media landscape.

Journalism should question Poynter precisely because Poynter matters to them

None of this means every Poynter guideline is garbage, every IFCN fact-checker is dishonest, or that Soros or Bill Gates control Poynter, and it certainly doesn’t mean journalists should stop verifying information.

I’m arguing that journalists should practice their own standards consistently:

Follow the money, question concentrated power, examine conflicts of interest, interrogate methodology, be skeptical of institutions claiming authority, and demand transparency from people deciding who and what deserves credibility.

Those are fantastic principles, and journalists inherently honor them. But they need to apply those same principles to Poynter, and even to institutions they worship. From my personal observation, it’s often a one-way street.

Journalism becomes something very different when professional institutions are no longer tools and transform into dogma. Craig Morgan argued that trained journalists operate according to standards that outsiders often lack, yet he directly contradicted himself when he mentioned Poynter.

I’ll happily judge journalism according to rigorous standards, and most of us will. But I’m not outsourcing my judgment to Poynter simply because other journalists told me Poynter deserves my trust.

Credibility isn’t inherited through institutional pedigree. It has to be earned, and if Poynter wants to help decide who deserves that credibility, then Poynter should expect the same scrutiny it demands journalists apply to everybody else.

Anything less isn’t journalism ethics. It’s institutional self-preservation, and journalists need to remember that.