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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.
