Probe of anti-Post blacklist
‘Risky’ media flap
WASHINGTON — Congressional Republicans are probing federal funding of a UK-based organization that falsely declared The Post and other major news outlets to be “risky” possible spreaders of false information.
House and Senate sources say investigators are trying to get to the bottom of how the Global Disinformation Index (GDI) secured taxpayer money before creating a December 2022 blacklist of 10 outlets with conservative or libertarianleaning opinion sections.
The GDI, which calls itself “the world’s first rating of the media sites based on the risk of the outlet carrying disinformation,” reportedly secured $100,000 from the State Department’s Global Engagement Center and $545,000 from the government-funded National Endowment for Democracy.
Both entities have said they don’t plan to provide additional funding, but the past spending has raised alarms on Capitol Hill.
“No program or office like this should be receiving any federal funding; I can tell you that much,” said Rep. Dan Bishop (R-NC).
“US taxpayer dollars should never be funneled to left-wing disinformation groups that are trying to blacklist American news outlets like the New York Post,” said House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.).
The GDI’s 25-page report that included a proposed advertising blacklist said it analyzed 20 articles per news source and also reviewed publications’ policies for bylines, corrections and other issues. The analysis also assessed whether outlets engaged in “negative targeting,” including the “use of ridiculing, derogatory or hateful remarks, along with the promotion of unsubstantiated doubts or distrust in a specific actor.”
The report said that advertisers should consider it “lowest-risk” to work with NPR, The New York Times, USA Today, The Washington Post, BuzzFeed and the Huffington Post. The Wall Street Journal, which like The Post is owned by News Corp., also got a green light.
Conservative bias
The report’s list of “the ten riskiest online news outlets” was topped by The Post and included libertarian Reason Magazine, RealClearPolitics, the Federalist, the Daily Wire, the American Conservative magazine and Newsmax.
“The New York Post was rated as high-risk, largely because of its lack of transparency around operational policies and practices,” the report said. “The site published no public guidelines for the use of bylines on its content, the types and number of sources its content relies on, or pre-publication factchecking and post-publication corrections processes.”
The Post publishes bylines on news stories, cites by name or transparently describes sources and publishes corrections when errors are reported, as is common practice for major news organizations.