The State Department is funneling taxpayer dollars to a shadowy network of corporate censors to blacklist dissident media, the Washington Examiner’s Gabe Kaminsky reported Thursday night.
On Thursday morning, the Examiner published the paper’s first expose on the Global Disinformation Index (GDI), a British group that compiles secretive lists of news organizations the index encourages major corporations to boycott. Advertisers that seek out online platforms to promote their products contract with such “disinformation” groups and make decisions on which websites to advertise based on their recommendations.
The network of corporate censors disguised as groups on the frontlines countering disinformation, such as GDI and NewsGuard, often label conservative media with low ratings while they offer high scores to legacy outlets that botched major stories. NewsGuard, for example, continues to label major papers at the heart of the Russia hoax with perfect credibility while the Fox News, the New York Post, and The Federalist, which accurately reported on the Hunter Biden laptop, are given failing grades.
Disinformation groups are also used by major tech giants to justify overt censorship. In August, the New York Times cited NewsGuard data to argue President Donald Trump’s Twitter alternative, TruthSocial, be banned from app stores. Google followed suit and nuked the app from its online marketplace.
According to the Washington Examiner on Thursday, the top ten news organizations identified as the “riskiest” or “worst” offenders of spreading disinformation by GDI are each known for conservative news and commentary. Outlets include the American Spectator, Newsmax, The Federalist, the American Conservative, One America News, the Blaze, Daily Wire, RealClearPolitics, Reason, and the New York Post.
According to the Washington Examiner, GDI has even flagged opinion articles for disinformation and condemned Amazon for advertising with the paper.
The Examiner reported Thursday night that GDI is a conduit for government officials to shut down dissident outlets having accepted $330,000 in tax dollars from groups funded by the State Department.
“The Department of State has funded a deep-pocketed ‘disinformation’ tracking group that is secretly blacklisting and trying to defund conservative media, likely costing the news organizations vital advertising dollars,” the Washington Examiner reported. “The first State Department-backed group that has supported GDI is the National Endowment for Democracy, a nonprofit group that receives nearly all of its funding from annual congressional appropriations.”
Board members of the NED dictate how the group spends its congressional appropriations. Membership on the 23-person board include Anne Applebaum, a lead conspirator of the Russia hoax who said the Hunter Biden laptop was not “interesting,” and House Republican Conference Chair Elise Stefanik of New York.
Stefanik told The Federalist, “I agree with my colleagues Jim Banks and Mike McCaul that this is just another chilling example of the government weaponizing resources against their political opponents. The State Department should not be funding woke organizations who seek to censor and demonetize conservative outlets. House Republicans will assert our oversight over the State Departments funding of these type of groups.”
