Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, the Daily Wire, and the Federalist filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of State for using taxpayer funds to back censorship firms that target conservative-leaning media outlets. The lawsuit also named Secretary of State Anthony Blinken and several other federal government officials.
Paxton and the media outlets accused the State Department of committing “one of the most egregious government operations to censor the American press in the history of the nation.”
Through the State Department’s Global Engagement Center, the federal government is “actively intervening in the news-media market to render disfavored press outlets unprofitable by funding the infrastructure, development, and marketing and promotion of censorship technology and private censorship enterprises to covertly suppress speech of a segment of the American press,” the complaint claimed.
The lawsuit accused Biden’s State Department of violating First Amendment rights and “tarring disfavored domestic news organizations as purveyors of ‘disinformation.’”
The department used taxpayer funds to back NewsGuard and the Global Disinformation Index, which have used their “fact-checking” platforms to starve right-leaning media outlets “of advertising revenue and reducing the circulation of their reporting and speech,” the lawsuit claimed.
In 2022, the GDI published the “Disinformation Risk Assessment,” which ranked conservative outlets as unreliable. The top 10 “riskiest” outlets included the American Spectator, Newsmax, the Federalist, the American Conservative, OAN, Blaze Media, the Daily Wire, RealClearPolitics, Reason, and the New York Post.
The top ten “least risky” list favored left-leaning media outlets such as NPR, the Associated Press, the New York Times, ProPublica, Insider, USA Today, the Washington Post, HuffPost, BuzzFeed News, and the Wall Street Journal.
The lawsuit stated that NewsGuard and the GDI “generate blacklists of ostensibly risky or unreliable American news outlets for the purpose of discrediting and demonetizing the disfavored press and redirecting money and audiences to news organization that publish favored viewpoints.”
A NewsGuard spokesperson told the New York Post that several conservative-leaning outlets are ranked as more reliable than their left-leaning counterparts. The spokesperson noted that Reason has “perfect 100/100 scores from NewsGuard.”
The lawsuit “inaccurately portrays” NewsGuard’s relationship with the State Department, the spokesperson told the Post.
“NewsGuard does not offer any technology that censors or blocks any content, or that blocks ads on content,” the spokesperson continued. “Instead, we provide information — our assessments of sites — so that our clients can decide for themselves where to place their ads or which content to amplify, and each client decides for themselves how to use that data.”
The State Department stated that it cannot comment on pending litigation, the Post reported.
The Federalist’s editor in chief, Mollie Hemingway, told Fox News, “What the suit shows is that the State Department was engaged in setting up, funding, marketing, promoting, and continuing to work with these private companies that are engaged in censorship of speech.”
“They privilege left-wing media outlets like the New York Times and the Washington Post; they helped advertisers meet those people.
The Federalist told the Post that its “lawsuit seeks to halt the State Department’s ultra vires and unconstitutional censorship scheme.”
“The State Department lacks any authority to operate domestically, as it is doing currently with its Global Engagement Center. Unfortunately, though, our federal government’s efforts to censor the disfavored media, such as the New Civil Liberties Alliance’s clients, extends much beyond the State Department,” the Federalist added.
The Daily Wire stated, “The Biden administration is illegally funding organizations with the stated goal of financially crippling media outlets whose coverage does not walk in lockstep with the government’s ideological agenda.”
Paxton accused the State Department of attempting to “obliterate the First Amendment.”
“This agency will not get away with their illegal campaign to silence citizens and publications they disagree with,” Paxton said.
The GDI did not respond to a request for comment from the Post.
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