Know Your Media

In a Blow to the Censorship-Industrial Complex, the House of Representatives Bans the Pentagon From Funding ‘Disinfo’ Monitors Like NewsGuard

The House of Representatives included a rule in the annual defence bill passed last Thursday banning the Department of Defence from funding organisations that police and rank news sites according to how ‘reliable’ they are. This is particularly good news because the rule singled out the Global Disinformation Index (GDI), Graphika, NewsGuard and other organisations that deliberately try to ‘disrupt’ the funding of news publishing sites on the grounds that they publish ‘misinformation’, ‘disinformation’, ‘malinformation’ and ‘hate speech’ – deliberately vague terms that are often applied to information and opinions that these organisations disapprove of or believe their funders disapprove of….

Publications on the GDI’s list of the 10 ‘riskiest’ news publishing sites in the U.S. include the American Spectator, Breitbart, the Daily Wire, the Federalist, American Conservative, Real Clear Politics, the New York Post and Reason. All the ‘risky’ sites are right-of-centre with the exception of Reason, one of the few prominent press critics of organised censorship, while the New York Post was of course the only mainstream newspaper in the U.S. to publicise the Hunter Biden laptop story ahead of the 2020 U.S. presidential election. Needless to say, the news publishing sites ranked the most reliable by GDI were, with one exception, left-of-centre: NPR, The Associated Press, the New York Times, ProPublica, Insider, USA Today, the Washington Post, BuzzFeed News, the Wall Street Journal, and the Huffington Post.

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