The State Department is financing a foreign advocacy group that aims to cut off funding to American journalists.
That’s one of the blockbuster revelations in “Disinformation Inc.,” a series of reports by Gabe Kaminsky in the Washington Examiner.
The “Global Disinformation Index,” or GDI, is a British organization with a pair of US nonprofit affiliates. It receives hundreds of thousands of dollars from the State Department’s Global Engagement Center and the taxpayer-funded National Endowment for Democracy.
But GDI is in the business of doing what the First Amendment doesn’t allow our government to do. It blacklists news organizations to deny them advertiser dollars.
Major advertisers like the Microsoft-owned Xandr have used GDI’s “dynamic exclusion list” to decide which websites will or won’t get ads.
Clare Melford, GDI’s executive director, says it has had “a significant impact on the advertising revenue” of sites branded as purveyors of disinformation.
Who is on this self-appointed censor’s proscription list?
All 10 of the news organizations GDI classifies as “riskiest” or “worst” are outside of the left-liberal media club.
They include right-of-center outlets like The Daily Wire and The American Conservative alongside the libertarian magazine Reason and the news aggregator RealClearPolitics.
The New York Post, whose accurate coverage of Hunter Biden’s laptop in the runup to the 2020 election infuriated liberals and was squelched by Twitter, makes GDI’s “riskiest” top 10.
Yet none of the outlets that misled readers for years about “Russian collusion” involving Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign appears on the list.
Disinformation, where organizations like Melford’s are concerned, has to be understood as information that does not conform to a liberal view of the world.
Government agencies in this country have few powers to suppress journalism and political speech. But the First Amendment becomes moot when censorship is outsourced to foreign actors and a small body of politically motivated (or intimidated) firms that control the infrastructure of mass communications.
Imagine if phone companies behaved like Facebook, Amazon or Google. They might refuse to connect calls to sources accused of “disinformation,” whether that means a state Republican Party or the newsroom of the New York Post.
Imagine if printers and newspaper vendors were as consolidated as the tech companies are. Such a cartel could suppress a story by refusing to put it on paper, just as the social networks refused to put the Hunter Biden story on readers’ screens.
Because GDI receives government money, even pure free-market libertarians can recognize the danger it poses to free speech. But GDI would be no less dangerous if its funding were entirely private.
Government’s formal power is coercive but restricted by the Bill of Rights and the vigilance of voters.
Unlike government, the tech companies cannot force anyone to use or pay for their services. But also unlike government, they are free to behave as arbitrarily and partially as they like, without a Bill of Rights to restrain them.
Liberals today recognize no wall of separation between the aims of private organizations and the aims of government. They are different means, subject to different limitations, but the goal is the same: the eradication of all wrongthink, nowadays termed “disinformation.”
And as the GDI example shows, even the separation of means can be overcome.
Government agencies can collude with social-media companies like Twitter to enforce prohibitions on speech. Or the State Department can bankroll the censorship activities of foreign nationals, who then lobby American companies to adopt their blacklists.
(Of course, State Department funds are not directly earmarked for blacklisting American journalists. But money is fungible, and what supports GDI supports its work.)
A free, competitive press is still potent, as Kaminsky’s reporting shows. After his coverage began, Microsoft severed its relationship with GDI.
The fact that The American Conservative, The Federalist, The Daily Wire, The American Spectator, Newsmax, One America News, the Blaze, Reason, RealClearPolitics and the New York Post made GDI’s “forbidden 10” testifies to their significance, too.
But the tech companies have the power to deprive them all of the advertisers and readers they need to survive.
Freedom of the press is at risk as never before in this environment. Elon Musk brings some intellectual diversity to the ownership of social media. But Twitter remains troubled. And if other tech companies don’t adopt a new respect for readers’ freedom to make up their own minds, they may soon find that the government they collaborate with today becomes the instrument of a popular backlash against them tomorrow.
Daniel McCarthy is the editor of Modern Age: A Conservative Review.