Less than two months after the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) imploded amid allegations that it amounted to major corporations colluding to censor political opponents, a congressman warned that a new group may be picking up the mantle, a letter exclusively obtained by The Daily Wire shows.
Dentsu, a Japanese public relations company that was a founding member of GARM, has created the “Dentsu Coalition,” which says it wants to boost “credible news.” The 614 Group, an advertising consulting firm, is co-leading the coalition, which it said aims to “ensure that journalism … thrives by leveraging the collective power of the [ad] industry’s foremost players.”
Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, said in a letter Thursday to Dentsu Americas CEO Michael Komasinski that “The Dentsu Coalition appears to be pursuing objectives similar to GARM’s. Before dissolving, GARM routinely attempted to delineate which news outlets were credible enough to receive” advertising dollars. At its founding, GARM said it was led by “Experts at Dentsu, GroupM, IPG, Publicis Media, and Omnicom Media Group, representing media agencies.”
GARM pushed members — including some of America’s largest companies and major advertisers — to defer to third-party media-rating organizations to evaluate which news sources were “credible.” Those organizations, in turn, often had left-wing biases and connections to the government. One listed mainstream papers like the New York Post and the Washington Examiner as not “credible” enough to be advertised on.
In early August, GARM announced that it was disbanding, crippled by legal fees, and having attracted the very controversy it said it would avoid for its clients by keeping them unassociated with conservative-leaning media.
“Under the Sherman Act, Dentsu’s coordinated actions may be illegal, regardless of ‘[t]he social justifications proffered for [the] restraint of trade.’ As outlined in the Committee’s report, the anticompetitive effects of GARM’s actions were severe,” Jordan wrote in the letter. “Initiatives like GARM starve disfavored news outlets of crucial funding. News Corp. CEO Robert Thomson highlighted this anticompetitive conduct when he stated on a recent company earnings call, ‘GARM[’s] harm is real’ thanks to ‘coordinated boycott[s] of media platforms perceived to be unfashionable by illiberal liberals.’”
The letter demands that Dentsu produce any documents related to it taking over GARM activities. Dentsu will be responding to the Committee imminently and will not be commenting prior to such a response.
GARM emails obtained by Jordan’s committee revealed that its leader consulted with advertising mega-firm and GARM member GroupM about The Daily Wire. A GroupM “brand safety” executive, Joe Barone — in an email replete with a rainbow and the phrase “black lives matter” — said, “Fyi we have Daily Wire on our Global High Risk exclusion list, categorized as Conspiracy Theories …”
Another GroupM “brand safety” executive, John Montgomery, said there was “an interesting parallel here with Breitbart,” in which purported “misinformation” rules could be used as a pretext for ideologically-motivated censorship.
“As much as we hated their ideology and bulls***, we couldn’t really justify blocking them for misguided opinion. We watched them very carefully and it didn’t take long for them to cross the line — but it was a useful academic lesson,” he wrote. GroupM CEO Christian Juhl was replaced after he struggled to explain the emails to Congress while testifying opposite Daily Wire editor emeritus Ben Shapiro.
The emails also showed a GARM member was upset that X owner Elon Musk did not think the New York Post’s story on Hunter Biden’s laptop should have been censored before the 2020 election. The Department of Justice later acknowledged that the Post’s story was true.
Musk shared Shapiro’s congressional testimony on his platform and encouraged states to seek criminal charges for the “advertising boycott racket.” In July, X and video platform Rumble sued the World Federation of Advertisers, GARM’s parent group. Rumble called it an “advertising cartel,” and X alleged that “GARM celebrated—and took responsibility for—the massive economic harm imposed on Twitter by the boycott, boasting within just a few months of the start of the boycott that ‘they [Twitter] are 80% below revenue forecasts,’” the X lawsuit reads.
The Daily Wire and The Federalist are suing the State Department, for allegedly backing private firms such as Newsguard and the Global Disinformation Index, some of the purported credibility raters that also sought to financially harm conservative news outlets. All three lawsuits are filed in federal court in Texas.
