Conservative media outlets and journalists are fighting against a network of organizations that have worked to kill their advertising revenue by slapping them with misinformation labels.
The World Federation of Advertisers and its subsidiary, the Global Alliance for Responsible Media or GARM, have led the charge in steering blue-chip advertisers away from news outlets whose content it subjectively deems harmful, sensitive or “misinformation.” The U.K.-based Global Disinformation Index and the U.S. company NewsGuard also have developed lists and ratings systems that attack the credibility and scare off advertisers from top conservative news outlets.
It has attracted the attention of House investigators who have questioned Biden administration officials about funding the efforts and subpoenaed two of the organizations in a bid to determine if their practices are violating antitrust laws.
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan subpoenaed top officials from GARM and the World Federation of Advertisers, or WFA seeking documents related to coordinated efforts to “demonetize and censor disfavored speech online.”
The Ohio Republican said he believes GARM is coordinating with WFA to target mostly conservative outlets, which receive unfavorable rankings and subsequently lose critical advertising dollars.
“GARM and the WFA appear to facilitate collusion among their members in a manner that may violate U.S. antitrust law,” Mr. Jordan said when announcing the subpoenas earlier this year.
The two groups are part of a broad network that has sought to create subjective guidelines to govern what is appropriate media content. Often, conservative websites are ranked poorly.
House Oversight and Accountability Committee Chairman James Comer is investigating reports that the State Department provided $330,000 to the Global Disinformation Index, a British firm that provides “risk ratings” to major advertising companies to steer them away from certain news sites.
The index in 2022 identified Newsmax, The New York Post, RealClearPolitics, the Daily Wire, The Blaze, The American Spectator, Newsmax, Reason Magazine and the Federalist as the riskiest sites, encouraging advertisers to avoid them.
The “least risky sites” included NPR, The Washington Post, HuffPost, Insider, ProPublica, Wall Street Journal, USA Today and AP News.
“Taxpayer funds should never be given to third parties with the intent that they are used to censor lawful speech or abridge the freedom of the press,” Mr. Comer, Kentucky Republican, wrote to Secretary of State Antony Blinken.
The network of information censors also includes NewsGuard, an American company that provides clients with “reliability ratings and scores,” for news and information websites. It provides scores ranging from zero to 100 based on nine “apolitical journalistic criteria” that analyze credibility and transparency.
The analysis and rankings are provided by a team of journalists led by Steven Brill and former Wall Street Journal publisher Gordon Crovitz, who is NewsGuard’s CEO.
“We help you decide which news sources to trust — with scores from humans, not algorithms,” the company website states.
The conservative-leaning Media Research Center conducted a study of NewGuard’s rating system in December 2021 and found that out of 55 news sites, right-leaning outlets received an average score of 66% while liberal outlets received an average score of 93%.
NewsGuard gave the now-defunct BuzzFeed News a perfect reliability score, for example, despite the outlet’s decision to publish the Steele Dossier, which included tawdry and unproven claims by a Russian operative about then-President Trump. The initial researcher for the dossier was funded by Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.
The Federalist received a score of 12.5 from NewsGuard, in part because it wrote about the well-documented questions concerning the efficacy of mask mandates.
The Washington Post, New York Times, the New Yorker, and The Guardian, all of which pushed the now-debunked claims that Mr. Trump colluded with the Russians to win the 2016 election, got a perfect 100% rating.
NewsGuard has challenged the Media Research Center’s study as too narrow to represent their overall rating system, which ranks thousands of news and information outlets.
“NewsGuard uses basic, apolitical criteria of journalistic practice to rate news sites,” Mr. Crovitz told The Washington Times. “As a result, many right-wing sites get high scores and many left-wing sites get low scores and vice versa. For example, the conservative Daily Caller gets a higher rating than the liberal Daily Beast, the conservative Daily Wire gets a higher rating than the liberal Daily Kos, and the Fox News website gets a higher rating than the MSNBC website. “
Mr. Crovitz added that the company flags false content, including those by sites that declared Hunter Biden’s discarded laptop computer was Russian disinformation.
The New York Post, which broke the news about the discarded laptop computer and its politically damaging contents in October 2020, is among the right-leaning news outlets that have received an average score of 66% from NewsGuard.
News outlets with a score of 60-74 are ranked “generally” credible “with significant exceptions.”
Politico, which reported the laptop was Russian disinformation based on a letter signed by 50 former intelligence officials and also reported extensively on the debunked Trump-Russia collusion narrative, received a 100% score from NewsGuard for adhering to “all nine standards of credibility and transparency.”
NewGuard was the recipient of a $750,000 grant from the Defense Department in 2021. Officials said the money paid for a licensing agreement for the department to use its artificial intelligence disinformation tracking product and is not funding their rating service.
The WFA is an association for international marketers and national advertiser associations that includes Best Buy, Chobani, Dell Technologies, Exxon Mobile, General Mills, Hilton, Kellogs, Levi’s, MasterCard, Nike, Pepsico and Verizon.
It founded GARM in 2019 to curb “the availability and monetization of harmful content online.”
According to Influence Watch, a project of the conservative Capital Research Center, WFA runs a critical race theory-influenced “diversity and inclusion hub,” produced a guide to “progressive gender portrayals in advertising” and suggests that its members reach out to LGBT advocacy organizations.
The WFA called for firms to stop using the terms “blacklist” and “whitelist” in media and advertising campaigns, for example.
Mr. Jordan first wrote to WFA and GARM in March, expressing concern the two entities were violating antitrust law through their coordination aimed at eliminating certain online content.
Members of GARM include more than 60 leading advertisers and major social media platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, Reddit, Snapchat, TikTok and LinkedIn.
In 2022, GARM boasted it “drove an agreement across advertisers, agencies and platforms to set a framework that limits advertising support” for content it determined did not belong online.
It set the standards with categories of “harmful and sensitive content” that included “misinformation,” “debated sensitive social issues,” “arms and ammunition,” “death, injury, or military conflict,” and “hate speech and acts of aggression.” Each category has a “suitability” level for social media platforms to restrict content or a “safety floor [for] where ads should not appear.”
Dan Schneider, vice president of the Media Research Center’s Free Speech America, said advertisers wanted to eliminate illegal content from the internet, such as child pornography or the advocacy of terrorism, they would have strong allies in the conservative news media.
But Mr. Schneider said their goals go far beyond policing such content and align with the environmental, social and governance investing or ESG that is now experiencing a consumer backlash and legal troubles.
“The WFA is desperately trying to dry up revenue streams of pro-American organizations who oppose this administration’s left-wing agenda,” Mr. Schneider said. “The ESG companies and woke CEOs think that American consumers will lie down for this. They are wrong.”
• Susan Ferrechio can be reached at sferrechio@washingtontimes.com.