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Soros-backed groups conspired to silence, defund conservative news outlets with government help
photo by Sean Gallup

Soros-backed groups conspired to silence, defund conservative news outlets with government help

Lavishly funded groups purporting to track "disinformation" worked behind the scenes to silence conservative media by sapping advertising revenue, according to a series of investigative reports by the Washington Examiner.

"The radical left knows better than anyone that the best way to upend America and destroy freedom is to muzzle the voices of their opposition,” Vice President of Media Research Center's Free Speech America Dan Schneider said Friday.

“They masquerade as defenders of information, but we all know that they’re just authoritarian thugs."

"It's devastating," Mike Benz, the State Department's ex-deputy assistant for internal communications and information policy, told the Washington Examiner.

"The implementation of ad revenue crushing sentinels like News[G]uard, Global Disinformation Index, and the like has completely crippled the potential of alternative news sources to compete on an even economic playing field with approved media outlets like CNN and the New York Times."

Global Disinformation Index, a British organization, feeds blacklists to ad companies. Ad companies like Xandr, in turn, use GDI's "dynamic exclusion list" to avoid placing ads on websites GDI flags as a disinformation risk, the Washington Times explained in the second installment of its Disinformation, Inc. series.

Microsoft-owned Xandr, notably, has now reversed course by removing the negative flags on conservative outlets, the outlet reported Monday. Those negative flags blocked the right-leaning outlets from receiving advertising revenue, on which some heavily rely for continued operation.

Leftist mega-donor George Soros is among the funders of Global Disinformation Index, as are two State Department-backed entities, the Washington Times reported Monday. In addition, GDI's advisory panel includes a trio of Soros-tied members, according to research conducted by Newsbusters.

A pair of Texas-based nonprofits are affiliated with Global Disinformation Index, the British group with an ostensible mission to "remove the financial incentive" to create "disinformation," the Examiner's report explains. In practical terms, that translates to silencing news outlets the organization disagrees with by starving them of crucial advertising revenue.

TheBlaze is among the ten "riskiest" outlets for "disinformation" the self-described "nonpartisan" GDI identified in a 2022 report. The New York Post, Reason Magazine, RealClearPolitics, the Daily Wire, One America News Network, the American Conservative, the Federalist, Newsmax, and the American Spectator rounded out the organization's target list.

The same list identified BuzzFeed News, HuffPost, the Washington Post, the New York Times, and other left-leaning outlets as "least risky."

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