CV NEWS FEED // The Federalist and The Daily Wire have joined forces with the state of Texas to sue the Biden administration over what they claim to be a mechanism to censor criticism of the president.
In the complaint, Texas and the two conservative media outlets stated that they are bringing the civil suit against Biden’s State Department “to halt one of the most egregious government operations to censor the American press in the history of the nation.”
The lawsuit specifically singles out the Global Engagement Center (GEC), an agency of the State Department that was founded during the Obama administration as a counterterrorism initiative.
The plaintiffs held that the GEC
is actively intervening in the news-media market to render disfavored press outlets unprofitable by funding the infrastructure, development, and marketing and promotion of censorship technology and private censorship enterprises to covertly suppress speech of a segment of the American press.
“The full breadth of Defendant GEC’s censorship scheme is currently unknown,” the complaint continued:
At a minimum, Defendant GEC has funded, promoted, and/or marketed two American censorship enterprises: the Disinformation Index Inc., operating under the name Global Disinformation Index (“GDI”), and NewsGuard Technologies, Inc. (“NewsGuard”).
These entities generate blacklists of ostensibly risky or unreliable American news outlets for the purpose of discrediting and demonetizing the disfavored press and redirecting money and audiences to news organizations that publish favored viewpoints.
The suit indicated that GDI and NewsGuard branded both The Federalist and The Daily Wire “unreliable” or “risky.” This purportedly “[starved] them of advertising revenue and [reduced] the circulation of their reporting and speech.”
Both media sites are mainstream conservative outlets.
The lawsuit also claimed that the GEC’s alleged censorship initiatives undermine Texas law, “which requires social media companies with market power to act as common carriers.”
“Thus,” GEC’s activity “interferes with the State of Texas’s sovereign interest in creating and enforcing a legal code.”
>> HOUSE REPORT: AGENCIES HELPED CENSOR CONSERVATIVES, BOOST DEMS IN 2020 <<
The Federalist Executive Editor Joy Pullmann reported Wednesday that Newsguard and GDI based their decision to label conservative publications as “risky” at “least in part on politically charged ‘fact checks’ of a tiny percentage of the outlets’ articles.”
“While these companies’ full ratings criteria are secret, in December 2022 GDI published a top 10 list of its most favored and most disfavored news outlets,” Pullman continued. “The Federalist and Daily Wire appear on GDI’s 10 ‘riskiest’ list.”
Other entries on the “riskiest list” include the center-right The New York Post, the libertarian magazine Reason, and the centrist RealClearPolitics.
In contrast, the GDI’s list of “least risky sites” is dominated by left-wing and far-left sources, including NPR, The New York Times, ProPublica, The Washington Post, and HuffPost (formerly The Huffington Post).
ProPublica is notable for being the primary source of several baseless corruption allegations against Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. It was later revealed that “experts” cited in the ProPublica’s claims against the jurist overwhelmingly donated to Democratic candidates and causes.
Again from Pullmann:
All of the outlets on GDI’s “least risky” list have helped spread some of the government’s biggest disinformation operations in the last decade. Those include the Russia-collusion hoax and Hunter Biden laptop stories, which influenced national elections in favor of Democrats. The 10 “least risky” outlets have also widely published notable misinformation such as claims that Covid vaccines prevent disease transmission, the Covington student insult hoax, and evidence-free claims that Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh is a serial gang rapist.
The Daily Wire’s Luke Rosiak added that GDI licenses the “risky” list “to advertisers, who adopt it as a convenient way to avoid boycotts from the Left.”
Rosiak added:
That playbook was deployed last month against Elon Musk, when blue-chip advertisers were persuaded to stop advertising on the platform because the left-wing Media Matters group claimed that big companies’ ads occasionally appeared near objectionable content.
>> REPORTS: LEFT-WING GROUP GAMED ALGORITHIMS ON X <<
A bombshell House Judiciary Committee report recently confirmed that the GEC and other government agencies censored conservative content and boosted leftist content in the run-up to the 2020 election.
“True information posted by Republicans and conservatives was labeled as ‘misinformation’ while false information posted by Democrats and liberals was largely unreported and untouched by the censors,” the report stated:
The pseudoscience of disinformation is now—and has always been—nothing more than a political ruse most frequently targeted at communities and individuals holding views contrary to the prevailing narratives.
Earlier this week, a federal court temporarily stayed the seven-month prison sentence of Douglass Mackey, a conservative social media user who was convicted of “election interference” for making a satirical meme poking fun at failed 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.
Mackey was arrested shortly after President Joe Biden took office in 2021 – more than four years after he had posted the meme in question.
Also during the 2016 election, far-left activist Kristina Wong made a satirical social media post mocking eventual President Donald Trump, nearly identical in nature to Mackey’s meme. She was never arrested or prosecuted for her actions.
