A House committee revealed Friday that the Pentagon, other US agencies and the European Union — in addition to the State Department — have funded a for-profit “fact-checking” firm accused of suppressing The Post.
House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) wrote a letter to the firm, NewsGuard, demanding more details about the public-private collaboration that led last year to the State Department being sued by conservative outlets that were labeled more “risky” than their liberal counterparts.
NewsGuard has briefed committee staff on contracts it had with the Defense Department in 2021, including the Cyber National Mission Force within US Cyber Command; the State Department and its Global Engagement Center; and the EU’s Joint Research Centre.
“The Committee writes today to seek additional documents and communications from NewsGuard related to all past and present contracts with or grants administered by federal government agencies or any other government entity, including foreign governments,” Comer informed NewsGuard CEOs Steven Brill and Gordon Crovitz.
“The protection of First Amendment rights of American citizens is paramount and attempts by government actors to infringe on those rights is dangerous and misguided,” the chairman warned.
NewsGuard won a $25,000 joint Pentagon-State Department contract in August 2020 to run a pilot program countering “disinformation” about the COVID-19 pandemic.
In February 2022, the firm announced another collaboration that would flag “misinformation” to the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre.
Oversight Committee staffers were recently briefed on the contracts, though they were already public, but were also “led to believe that the creation of a NewsGuard product was close in time to a request for a similar product made to NewsGuard by the Defense Innovation Unit of the Department of Defense,” the letter shows.
The Oversight panel in June opened its investigation into NewsGuard’s apparent participation in a government-funded “censorship campaign” to allegedly discredit and even demonetize news outlets by sharing its ratings of their reliability with advertisers.
Comer also expressed concern about NewsGuard employees sharing social media posts exhibiting left-wing bias, in violation of the company’s policies, and the firm throttling disfavored outlets’ “misinformation” — which in at least one case included a published academic study on the failure of lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“These wide-ranging connections with various government agencies are taking place as the government is rapidly expanding into the censorship sphere,” the chairman wrote. “For example, one search of government grants and contracts from 2016 through 2023 revealed that there were 538 separate grants and 36 different government contracts specifically to address ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation.’”
The right-leaning websites the Daily Wire and the Federalist filed a civil complaint against the State Department in December 2023 for allegedly using taxpayer dollars to fund firms like NewsGuard and the Global Disinformation Index (GDI), which smeared the outlets as “purveyors of ‘disinformation.’”
Both firms have relationships with social media platforms such as Facebook, YouTube and TikTok, as well as commercial conglomerate the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA).
Through a “responsible media” initiative, the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM), WFA tried “to steer blue-chip advertisers away from” the Federalist and Daily Wire, according to its complaint.
WFA reps some of globe’s top companies, including Dell Technologies, ExxonMobil, General Mills and Nike, among others, prompting concerns about how their “disinformation” ratings would affect business.
An email obtained by the House Judiciary Committee in August also showed that GARM head Rob Rakowitz asked members of the WFA initiative to “ensure you’re working with an inclusion and exclusion list that is informed by trusted partners such as NewsGuard and GDI — both partners to GARM and many of our members.”
Another released by the committee earlier this year includes a comment from Rakowitz saying: “[W]e do advise that platforms, ad-tech, agencies, use independent fact checkers to weed out mis-and-disinfo from supply chain and ad buys. GDI is one of many — NewsGuard, IFCN, etc.”
In 2022, GDI distributed a “Disinformation Risk Assessment” that rated the “riskiest” sites for factual news as the Federalist, the Daily Wire, Newsmax, the American Conservative, Reason Magazine and the New York Post, among others.
The New York Times and the Washington Post were ranked as among the “least risky.”
NewsGuard gives the New York Times, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times 100% credibility ratings, but The Post a 75% credibility rating, according to figures compiled in 2021 by the Capital Research Center.
The Post, Fox News, and the Washington Times earned an average of 66% credibility, a 2022 report from the Media Research Center also showed.
In a statement Friday, Crovitz said: “When the Trump administration first asked us for our data and insights about disinformation campaigns from hostile foreign governments in 2020, we contracted with them on the condition that such work be strictly limited to disinformation from hostile governments, not US publishers. We’re proud that NewsGuard’s data and analysis has helped defend Western democracies against Russian, Chinese and Iranian disinformation. NewsGuard was created as a transparent alternative to censorship by governments or big tech companies, and we do not censor any content.”
The 2020 and 2024 elections have brought so-called “anti-misinformation” and “anti-disinformation” efforts to the fore — with The Post’s bombshell scoop on Hunter Biden’s laptop being falsely labeled a Russian plant by then-candidate Joe Biden.
Some Democrats have since been suggesting that the only way to defeat pushback to their policies is by crushing the First Amendment.
President Biden’s ex-climate envoy John Kerry even called the constitutional freedom “a major block” to keeping people from believing the “wrong” kinds of things.
“You know, there’s a lot of discussion now about how you curb those entities in order to guarantee that you’re going to have some accountability on facts,” Kerry told an audience at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
“But look, if people only go to one source, and the source they go to is sick, and, you know, has an agenda, and they’re putting out disinformation, our First Amendment stands as a major block to be able to just, you know, hammer it out of existence,” he said.
Vice President Kamala Harris’ running mate, Tim Walz, also downplayed free speech protections during a 2022 appearance on MSNBC’s “The Reid Out.”
“I think we need to push back on this. There’s no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech, and especially around our democracy,” the Minnesota governor inaccurately stated.
Comer has asked for NewsGuard to provide by Nov. 8 all records of its contracts, grants or other work with the Pentagon, the State Department and any other federal agencies or departments.
