House Targets ‘Non-Transparent Agent of Censorship Campaigns’

censorship
James Comer announced a fresh probe into a news-rating system that seeks to guard against misinformation.
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The House Oversight Committee is furious over potential tax-payer funded illegal censorship of protected free speech. On Thursday, the panel’s chairman James Comer announced a fresh probe “into a news-rating system that seeks to guard against misinformation.” NewsGuard supposedly does that by “scoring news and information sites based on their reliability, trustworthiness and financial conflict of interest.” As we’ve all painfully learned, “misinformation” is anything which runs contrary to the official progressive narrative.

Agent of censorship

In a June 13 statement announcing his panel’s fresh investigation, Chairman Comer explained they’ll be digging into “the impact of NewsGuard on protected First Amendment speech and its potential to serve as a non-transparent agent of censorship campaigns.

The Kentucky Republican also mentioned that he sent a little note about the investigation to “NewsGuard’s chief executive officers, veteran news executives Steven Brill and Gordon Crovitz.

The committee wants them to cough up everything regarding each and every contract they have with federal agencies. they also want to know all about the company’s “adherence to its own policies intended to guard against appearances of bias.

What Comer and his crew really want them to explain is how NewsGuard avoids “conflicts” between their own interests and their interest in slanted censorship.

The Committee seeks to make an independent determination about whether NewsGuard’s intervention on protected speech has been in any way sponsored by a federal, state, local, or foreign government.” That would be a serious infraction.

As long as their work is legitimate and honest, they should have nothing to fear from this little censorship audit, Comer assures.

Misinformation is anything which runs contrary to the official progressive narrative.

Interfering with free expression

The Committee,” Comer writes, “does not take issue with a business entity providing other businesses and customers with data-based analysis to protect their brands.” Censorship is a different story. “Rather, we are concerned with the potential involvement of government entities in interfering with free expression.” There’s been an awful lot of that in this election cycle.

While that’s been a regular thing every two years since Donald Trump came along, this year borders on panic. In 2018 the great Facebook “purge” put all the conservative media outlets out of business. This year, even the networks are closing their newsrooms and cutting staff to the bone. They’re terrified to print anything which conservative outlets like Quick News Updates can use against them.

Truthfulness and transparency about the purpose and origin of inquiries and managing conflicts of interest that may impact the public good are also relevant,” Comer added.

NewsGuard doesn’t come right out and say they’re the officially in the censorship business. The web extension simply offers to rate “the reliability of news sources.” They have a nifty little format which “appears as a nutrition label.” They’d call us junk food.

The scores apparently come from “a team of ‘expert journalists‘ who rate publishers on a scale of 0-100.” They allegedly calculate that with “a set of apolitical criteria of journalistic practice.” At least, that’s what their website claims. They’ve been taking a whole lot of money from Uncle Sam. The scary part is that it’s coming from the Defense Department budget.

We look forward to clarifying the misunderstanding by the committee about our work for the Defense Department,” Gordon Crovitz noted in a reply statement. “Our work for the Pentagon has been solely related to hostile disinformation efforts by Russian, Chinese and Iranian government-linked operations targeting Americans and our allies.” It will be really interesting to see what other work they did that smells like censorship. Stay tuned for updates as they develop.

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Mark Megahan

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