Faced with mounting criticism, a U.S. State Department-backed organization slashed its ties with a disinformation group also supported by radical leftist megadonor George Soros. The Global Disinformation Index (GDI) sought to suppress conservative media voices through blacklisting.
The organization targeted companies doing business with websites it opposed for the purpose of defunding and ultimately shutting them down.
The Washington Times reported that the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a congressionally-created private foundation, will cease providing grants to the U.K.-based GDI.
The NED told the outlet that it recently became aware that the GDI was involved in an initiative targeting certain U.S. media outlets.
Officials recognized what they termed “important work” the group did through their funding in other countries. However, NED seeks to “avoid the perception” that it is active in working domestically. Thus, no more support for the GDI.
A State Department-backed group is severing ties with the Soros-funded Global Disinformation Index following reports about its efforts to muzzle conservative media outlets by blacklisting them with advertisers. https://t.co/LL7W0BfiTG
— The Washington Times (@WashTimes) February 21, 2023
Grants totalling $250,000 were given to the risk-ratings group to counteract disinformation in global authoritarian regimes, including China. GDI purports to quantify “disinformation risk in media markets.” Apparently those markets included the U.S. for a time.
Last year, the group rated their top 10 “riskiest online news outlets,” and it was a who’s who of conservative and right-leaning mouthpieces.
The list included the New York Post, Reason, RealClearPolitics, Daily Wire, the Blaze, the Media Research Center, One America News Network, the American Conservative, the Federalist, Newsmax, and Spectator.
Not a leftist voice to be found on the list.
The Post is an interesting choice at number one considering it broke the Hunter Biden laptop story just prior to the 2020 presidential election. Much of the media falsely labeled it as Russian “disinformation,” and social media platforms even blocked the Post articles from being shared.
Only, they turned out to be quite accurate and the leftist media had no choice but to admit to their validity.
GDI assembled a “dynamic exclusion list” to distribute to large companies. The goal was for those companies to refuse to put ads on the websites targeted for supposedly spreading “disinformation.”
Furthermore, the organization bears echoes of President Joe Biden’s ill-fated Disinformation Governance Board. That infamous effort was mothballed last May after coming under an avalanche of backlash over its obvious mission to censor speech.
