The State Department Is Funding an Organization Waging a Censorship Campaign Against Conservative Media

Secretary of State Antony Blinken. AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin.

A Washington Examiner report revealing the State Department has been funding an organization working to deprive conservative media of advertisers has sparked outrage on the right.

According to the Examiner, the department, through various grants, has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on subsidiaries of the Global Disinformation Index (GDI), a British organization that has urged companies to refrain from advertising on numerous right-leaning websites, including the New York Post, the Daily Wire, Reason Magazine, and the Examiner itself.

In one example brought to light by the Examiner, not only was a column from its own Quin Hillyer labeled “anti-LGBTQ+” disinformation in an internal memo because the author took issue with the excesses of transgender activism, but Amazon was identified as being at fault for an ad that appeared on the article’s webpage.

GDI CEO Clare Melford has bragged that an outlet being on the list “had a significant [negative] impact” on advertising revenue.

While conservative outlets have been targeted, left-leaning sites such as BuzzFeed News and HuffPost boast gold stars from GDI, which deems them among the “least risky” sites for so-called disinformation.

The outcry from journalists has been swift and meritorious. Hillyer called the whole imbroglio “nasty,” “nefarious,” and potentially illegal.

Reason’s Robby Soave — whose employer was dinged by GDI for supposedly including “no information regarding authorship attribution” despite the fact that all Reason articles are attached to bylines — expanded on the legal perils of the government’s relationship with the organization, opining that  “government actors should not seek to evade the First Amendment’s protections in order to censor indirectly.”

Walter Olson, also of Reason, blasted the State Department’s funding decisions as “outrageous,” drawing an important distinction between advertisers’ right to make decisions for themselves and state action aimed at “pressuring” those advertisers.

This is just outrageous. The U.S. State Department has funded “disinformation index” @DisinfoIndex, which feeds a blacklist to advertisers to keep ads off sites like @Reason magazine (at which I’m a contributing editor). /1 https://t.co/hAn09jPbZm

— Walter Olson (@walterolson) February 12, 2023

Even some observers on the left, such as Damon Linker of the Niskanen Center, recognized the inherent issues with and danger of a an ideologically-driven, government-subsidized pressure campaign against conservative platforms.

“Purveyors of ‘disinformation’ are sometimes guilty of nothing more than disagreeing [with] progressives,” tweeted Linker. “It’s illiberal for the gov’t to penalize libertarians & conservatives.”

Indeed, it is illiberal as well as potentially unconstitutional, yet it’s unclear whether this investment was the result of malice or incompetence. The fact that the State Department funding flowed through intermediaries would suggest the latter.

Regardless of intent or the practical effects of the money that flowed from taxpayers to the GDI’s subsidiaries, this incident shines a much-needed spotlight on the corruption of the “disinformation” industry. While Melford and others would no doubt like to think of themselves as neutral referees enforcing the rules, they’re closer to a child making up the rules as they go along in an effort to make victory certain.

Similarly, some in the media have concealed their partisan aims under the banner of fighting disinformation

In the heat of the 2020 presidential election, much of the media banded together to collectively declare the Hunter Biden laptop story, broke by the aforementioned Post, was not only disinformation, but that its source was a hostile foreign power.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat, an MSNBC expert on “authoritarianism and propaganda” has used her perch to accuse Florida governor Ron DeSantis of seeking to disenfranchise “tens of millions” of Americans.

And in another example of questionable government collusion on this issue, the Biden administration worked with social media companies to identify and combat Covid-related disinformation on their platforms.

In a still more overt foray into the information game, Biden attempted to found a new Disinformation Governance Board inside of the Department of Homeland Security headed by the cartoonish “expert” Nina Jankowicz last year, only for it to be rightfully pilloried out of existence.

The very public humiliation of those who sought to bring such a ghastly thing into the fold of the American body politic was as healthy as the attempts to label alternative perspectives “disinformation” are poisonous. But the Board’s failure does not mean that the government actors will be dissuaded from supporting similar ventures in the future. The Examiner‘s reporting shows how government can put its thumb on the scale in less conspicuous ways.

That’s why even private actors such as GDI and charlatans like Ben-Ghiat should face the skepticism, disdain, and mockery they deserve. Americans should repudiate the disinformation industry. It’s a threat to — not a guardian of — our democracy.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.