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Pentagon, other agencies funded potential ‘agent of censorship campaigns,’ House committee reveals
Key Excerpts from Article on Website of New York Post
Posted: December 12th, 2024
https://nypost.com/2024/10/25/us-news/pentagon-other-agencie...
A House committee revealed Friday that the Pentagon, other US agencies and the European Union — in addition to the State Department — have funded a for-profit “fact-checking” firm that allegedly served “as a nontransparent agent of censorship campaigns.” House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) wrote a letter to the firm, NewsGuard, demanding more details about the public-private collaboration that led last year to the State Department being sued by conservative outlets that were labeled more “risky” than their liberal counterparts. NewsGuard has briefed committee staff on contracts it had with the Defense Department in 2021, including the Cyber National Mission Force within US Cyber Command; the State Department and its Global Engagement Center; and the EU’s Joint Research Centre. The Oversight panel in June opened its investigation into NewsGuard’s apparent participation in a government-funded “censorship campaign” to allegedly discredit and even demonetize news outlets by sharing its ratings of their reliability with advertisers. “These wide-ranging connections with various government agencies are taking place as the government is rapidly expanding into the censorship sphere,” the chairman wrote. “One search of government grants and contracts from 2016 through 2023 revealed that there were 538 separate grants and 36 different government contracts specifically to address ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation.’”
Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on censorship and intelligence agency corruption.