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The House Oversight Committee is probing whether a firm that purports to rate which news outlets are trustworthy is using federal funds to try to put conservative news outlets out of business.

Rep. James Comer (R-KY) said the committee he chairs has opened an investigation into NewsGuard, a for-profit business with multiple ties to the federal government that makes lists of which news outlets it deems trustworthy, then sells those lists to advertisers.

NewsGuard has received nearly a million dollars from the federal government, largely from the Department of Defense. The State Department also co-sponsored a COVID-19 misinformation and disinformation tech challenge that gave a prize to NewsGuard.

Advertisers often use the lists from NewsGuard to avoid doing business with companies that supposedly peddle in misinformation, under the implied threat that liberals will boycott their products if they do.

This appears to be a very biased, very unfair service thats getting federal funds. It could be another backdoor attempt at censoring conservative media outlets, Comer told One America News. Whats their criteria that just happen to give networks like MSNBC and CNN tremendous grades, and then networks like OAN, Newsmax and Fox very poor grades?

We want to know why theyre doing this, what the basis is for the criteria that they use to determine these grades. Because then they turn around and they offer their grades to advertisers, and this is a form of, I believe, trying to discourage advertisers from advertising on conservative networks, he said.

Theres a concerted effort by the federal government to censor conservative media outlets, he added, saying the probe into NewsGuard would determine whether theres been any criminal laws broken.

Gordon Crovitz, the companys co-CEO, told The Daily Wire in an email that the investigation is based on a misunderstanding.

We look forward to clarifying the misunderstanding by the committee about our work for the Defense Department, Crovitz said. 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. We also look forward to explaining that NewsGuard is the apolitical service rating news sources the others are either digital platforms with their secret ratings or a left-wing partisan advocacy group. As a result, the Daily Caller outscores The Daily Beast, the Daily Wire outscores the Daily Kos, Fox News outscores MSNBC and The Wall Street Journal outscores the New York Times.

Despite saying its mission is to provide transparent tools to counter misinformation for readers, the company previously refused to allow The Daily Wire to view the data it sells to advertisers, even for a fee.

NewsGuard said in a press release that it planned to help the State Department by flagging COVID hoaxes. One of the hoaxes flagged by NewsGuard was that COVID might have come from a Chinese lab, a scenario now viewed by U.S. agencies to be likely.

Its mission to have a small staff fact-check independently-reported stories on a wide variety of topics hours after their publication inherently requires essentially enforcing conformity with authorities previous statements, since it is not equipped to re-report every news story or match confidential sourcing.

NewsGuard also has a partnership with a teachers union aimed at getting its public tool onto school computers. That browser plugin annotates search pages to flag news stories which should be avoided.

The Daily Wire and the Federalist are suing the State Department for backing NewsGuard and other similar entities, alleging that it is promoting censorship technology designed to bankrupt domestic media outlets with disfavored political opinions.

The State Department responded by trying to have the federal lawsuit moved from Texas to the District of Columbia. But Judge Jeremy D. Kernodle denied the motion and recalled that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.

The investigation represents mounting danger for the media censorship industry, which has sought captive markets via legislation and through advertising associations like the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM), which forces advertisers to avoid outlets that promote misinformation, creating a demand for someone to make that determination.

The House Judiciary Committee, led by Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), is investigating GARM for potentially violating anti-trust laws. The controversy has led mainstream consumer brands, selling the likes of candies, to second-guess whether their advertising departments roped them into divisive conduct, with one insider squirming that the companies want to avoid any kind of public qualm that has a partisan signature like the plague.

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Congress To Probe Media Rating Firm NewsGuard For Possible Taxpayer-Funded Censorship - The Daily Wire

Today's guest isJay Bhattacharya, a co-author of theGreat Barrington Declarationand one of the plaintiffs inMurthy v. Missouri, the Supreme Court case charging that the Biden administration and other parts of the federal government illegally colluded "with social media companies to suppress disfavored speakers, viewpoints, and content." A decision in that case is imminent, and a victory for Bhattacharya's side would make it impossible for the government to pressure X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, and other platforms to ban or squelch legal speech. A professor of medicine at Stanford University and a Ph.D. economist, Bhattacharya talks about his experience being blacklisted online because of his criticisms of lockdowns and other COVID policies, the ways in which both Donald Trump and Joe Biden fumbled their responses to the pandemic, and what the public health establishment must do to regain the trust and confidence of the Americanpublic.

00:00 Introduction 01:12 Murthy vs. Missouri 17:05 Politicization of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) 20:45 Loss of trust in public health 25:45 Biden vs. Trump on COVID 27:49 What Bhattacharya got wrong 29:35 COVID-19 vaccines mistakes 34:53 RFK Jr. and other vaccine skeptics 39:44 What would Bhattacharya revise? 42:17 How Bhattacharya's politics changed 44:20 How do we restore trust in public health?

Previous appearance:

Excerpt from:
Jay Bhattacharya: 'I Sued the Biden Administration for COVID Censorship' - Reason

Rocky Mountain PBS: You have extensive experience fielding book challenges, which is when library patrons ask for materials to be removed or restricted, can you situate for us the state of book banning in the US at the moment?

James LaRue: Well, we have seen the largest rise in attempts to remove or restrict library resources, not just books. So it's digital resources, it's programs, it's exhibits, it's speakers. It's almost everything a library does.

We've seen the greatest increase in challenges across the country since the founding of the American Library Association in 1876. So it's, Surf's up.

RMPBS: Over the course of your career, you mentioned in the book, how [censorship] accelerated. What are those changes that you've seen in the types of people challenging library materials and the tactics that they use?

JL: So I think there are four reasons that people censor books. The first one is just personal prejudice. Somebody walks into the library, they see something that triggers them for whatever reason could be childhood trauma, could just be a cranky day and they say, I don't like this. Get rid of it.

And then the second one that I really encountered when I was in Douglas County, and this was 1990 through 2014, there was a big shift in America that went from, let's say, fair parenting, like the latchkey children to a suddenly very protective, and then maybe too overprotective from what I call the, you know, the helicopter parent to the Velcro parent. They're just stuck right on their head, and they follow their kids everywhere.

And then, the third one that I saw when I was at the office for Intellectual Freedom from about 2016 through the end of 2018, was what I would call a demographic panic. And this was where suddenly it was almost as if America looked around and said, As of 2014, under the age of five, America is majority nonwhite.

That's not going to change. And all of a sudden, the people that said, The national narrative is all about me, became aware that all these books were finally showing up in the library that reflected these perspectives of previously marginalized people. And so they were like, now 97% of the collection about me is not enough, and it needs to be 100%.

And then from the Left, we began to see challenges as well, where it's like, Well, 3% of these new voices is not enough. Let's expand the number of those offerings. And while we're about it, let's go back and take a look at those books that have bigotry or homophobia in them and clean those up, too. And so that was that demographic panic.

And then the fourth phase happening very much in 2021. The surge, I'm sure, was very directed at trying to win the midterm elections. And so the idea is, let's flip America's outrage switch, make everybody very, very angry, and they'll send in money and they'll vote for me. So I think that's how it's changed.

That, and also the difference of tactics, fascinates me.

Back in the day, at Douglas County, somebody would fill out a form. I'm upset about this. I read the book and here's what I object to, and here's what I think you should get instead. Now, what happens is 15 to 20 people show up unannounced at a public comment session at a school board or a public board meeting, and they have 25 or 30 books that they want to get rid of all at once.

And their tactic is, I'm going to find the naughtiest bit in this book, and I'm going to read it out loud to make everybody squirm and say how uncomfortable they are, and then say, I demand that you remove this. And if they don't, then immediately it's political threats. You're on the school board you should be recalled. You're a superintendent, principal you should be fired.

You're a librarian and what we're seeing now is legislation across the country to say not only criminalize the book, but criminalize the people who provide access to them.

RMPBS: Do you feel that that constitutes the kind of panic? You also said [in the book] that sometimes these types of moral outrages or these types of tactics are cyclical. How do you perceive this particular moment?

JL: I ran across something I read back when I was in high school, and it's a 1951 book that came out, by Eric Hoffer called The True Believer. And at that time, like many of the best minds of his generation, he said, We just got through this WWII. How did it happen that the world went crazy? You know, I mean, all of a sudden you had Mussolini and you had Stalin and you had Hitler.

And, as he talked about that, he says, well, there are a number of things that seem to have to be in place before the world goes crazy. And one of them is there's a loss of national narrative.

There's a frustration and victimization.

Germany, between WWI and WWII is still paying reparations. And it's like, well, we have this, you know, terrible problem. We don't feel like we're on top of the world anymore, who do we blame? So the scapegoating and then the targeting of many institutions, like fake news, like higher education, like libraries, famously book burning in Nazi Germany.

So you can't help but say, 1938 looks a lot like today. Where before they had Stalin, now we have [Vladimir] Putin, and we have [Recep Tayip] Erdogan and Xi [Jinping] and a rising tide of authoritarians across the world. And so I think it's not so much panic anymore now. I think it's flat out authoritarianism. That's very, very sobering.

RMPBS: It is. I think that you provide a framework in the book for understanding what's going on and coping with it. One of the ideas that I really thought was interesting, that I would love for you to expand on, is the idea of books as inoculation. And that response, in terms of when parents feel that a book is not appropriate for their child or for a particular age group, that, in fact, the book and whatever it contains can act as a sort of vaccination.

JL: Well, my favorite one was when I was at Douglas County. All of a sudden, fairy tales were what everybody was coming after. I said, fairy tales? What's that about? And my favorite one was the little Red Riding Hood, where, you know, she's going through the woods and she meets the wolf, and she's got a bag that has a bottle of wine and a baguette in it, and the wolf runs ahead and eats Granny and is about to eat Little Red when the Woodsman shows up, conks the Wolf, slices him open and Granny steps out whole.

And at the very end, Granny and the Woodsman are having a glass of wine and the complaint was, Granny is a drunk, you know, you're promoting senior citizen alcoholism! I wrote back to say that, Well, if I had just been eaten by a wolf and sliced open, Id want a drink, you know, and I don't think that's out of line.

That doesn't seem outrageous to me.

But the more I started looking at fairy tales, it was like fairy tales have been around for a long time. And the Grimm Brothers fairy tales are very Grimm indeed. A man by the name of Bruno Bettelheim, an Austrian psychologist, he said that the purpose of fairy tales is to help children name their fears and work out strategies to deal with them, because, in fact, the world is sometimes a scary place.

I learned from parents that over-protectiveness, it's like they understand that all these dark and interesting stories are very attractive to children. The woods are lovely, dark and deep, and they understand that children are drawn to the woods, but they don't want wolves in the woods. And the problem, of course, is that children need to know how to deal with wolves.

RMPBS: I find that to be a very useful framework for understanding both the parental psychology and the fascination that children may have. Because the flip side of the book banning and the censorship is that then these books go on to become bestsellers and sought after by a lot of the library patrons. So can you speak a little bit to that?

JL: Well, there's so much to talk about there. I just read a Washington Post article that went back and said, of the 1000 challenges that were made to school libraries across the country, they were all filed by 11 people.

The American Library Association did a study and found that, regardless of political party, about 70% of Americans say, We are opposed to censorship.

One of my favorite stories, and I know this sometimes embarrasses my friend who's the director there in Wellington, Colorado. There was a woman who showed up, she was the pastor's wife and said, Here's 15 books that are obscene bestsellersThey need to be removed. And the, the next month, a bunch more people came inlike three times as manyand said, Well, wait a minute, is this how we want to be known? Is this how we want people to think of our community as a place where we censor? We don't.

Then the following month, the board decided to ban banning. And so I feel like at this moment of rising authoritarianism, it's very, very few voices. They're very persistent. They're very loud, and they make all kinds of claims.

This is a moment where I think we need to have civic courage, both for library administrators and for a citizen governing bodies to say, We hear what you're saying. We'll certainly pay attention to that. But we don't write the books, right? The library doesn't.

We buy the books that are produced by our culture.

There was a study done in Wisconsin, probably 30 years ago, about what percentage of children's books featured people of color. And at that time, the population was somewhere around 28% Black.

And it was like less than 0.2% black characters in children's literature. And so as those demographics have shifted and the publishing has tried to say, Well, we need to reflect the base of our potential customers. So we're beginning to see more of these books showing up, and then we get back into that demographic panic.

RMPBS: When you talk about civic courage, I understood from the book that there is a process involved when there's a book challenge and there's a feedback mechanism. So it's designed to have engagement, engaging with both good faith and bad faith arguments and getting to what the core of the complaint is.

JL: That's correct.

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Book bans have become a powerful censorship tool in Colorado. Libraries and patrons hold the line. - Rocky Mountain PBS

Thirty-five years ago, in June 1989, the Chinese government launched a brutal crackdown on peaceful protesters in Tiananmen Square, Beijing, where students, workers, and others had been amassed in non-violent collective action for political and economic reform across China. To this day, no one knows how many were killed, but estimates are in the thousands. China continues to censor all memory of those events from national history both within the country and beyond its borders.

On the 35th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, Boundaries of Expression explores the legacy of the crackdown and the impact of a generation of censorship in a conversation with human rights activist Fengsuo Zhou, a former Tiananmen student leader, and Michael Caster, Asia Digital Programme Manager, ARTICLE 19.

Presenter: Jo Glanville

Producers: Michael Caster and Jo Glanville

Studio manager: Aamir Yaqub

Mixed by Julian Wharton and recorded at Bison Studios, London

Archive: CNN

Listen on Apple podcasts

Listen on Spotify

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Boundaries of Expression podcast: Tiananmen Square and 35 years of censorship - ARTICLE 19 - ARTICLE 19

Banned Book Club, a fictionalized account of Hyun Sook Kims experiences growing up in South Korea and becoming radicalized after forming a club to read forbidden literature, rendered as a graphic novel with art by Hyung-Ju Ko, struck a chord when it was released in 2020. Per PWs starred review, its messages of hope are universal, as are the poignant reminders that change can happen when people are willing to speak up. The title has also, ironically enough, been challenged in several U.S. school districts, accused of anti-police sentiment and creating dangerous anarchists in our schools (per a challenge filed in Clay County Schools in North Carolina).

We didnt intend for Banned Book Club to be a metaphor for what was happening to the U.S., but it accidentally became that, says Ryan Estrada, Kims coauthor (and spouse). Estrada has become an outspoken advocate for libraries, in one case flying 7,000 miles from South Korea to Kentucky to address a challenge. (He was successful.)

A follow-up, No Rules Tonight, is due from Penguin Workshop in October (this time drawn by Estrada). PW talked with the married coauthors about their advocacy and what fans can look forward to with No Rules Tonight, which returns to 1980s South Korea and joins the high schoolers on a getaway field tripwhere romance blossoms away from constant adult (and government) oversight.

Hyun Sook, how did it feel to be a student living in a repressive society?

Kim: If you criticized the president, they put you in jail. In my university, there were undercover policemen, so we always had to be careful if we discussed the books that we read. They tortured people, and many of my friends were beaten or taken away to the army and then disappeared. I realized the world that I knew was a lie, and I wanted to learn the truth about the history of our country and the outside world.

Why did you seek out these banned books?

Kim: I thought, okay, why are those books banned? Its just that the books talk about the world, about society, about justice. But South Koreas leader at that time, the dictator Chun Doo-Hwan, didnt want the people to know the truth.

Has Banned Book Club been banned in South Korea?

Estrada: No. Korea learned so much from what they went through. Theres a lot of movies on the same types of topics as Banned Book Club, and former president Park Geun-hye, whose father was the one that started all the censorship, tried to blacklist any filmmakers or authors that were writing about that kind of thing. But the people were like, oh no, weve seen what happens, youre not doing this, and they rose up and removed her from power and put her in jail.

How did you feel when Banned Book Club was challenged in the U.S.?

Kim: Shocked. How can it be happening in America?

How does No Rules Tonight relate to Banned Book Club?

Estrada: When your life is controlled so much and you have one night of freedom, what do you do with it? After we wrote Banned Book Club, we had a lot of stories left over. We set them all during one night, Christmas Eve, and show that one of the best things you can do to make the future world a better place is to be your real, true authentic self and lead by example.

Did your editors try to tone down the book to hold off possible challenges?

Estrada: No. All the editing was feedback that made the story better. No one was saying, This is going to offend people. They encouraged us to explore diverse stories. In Banned Book Club theres a queer character, Suji, but because everythings so repressed, shes afraid to talk about it. So, in No Rules Tonight, we got deeper into her story. Theres also a trans character. We wanted to reflect on the parts of society that are affected by these bans, so we had these characters learning about Korean history and famous Korean folk heroes that were trans.

Return to the main feature.

A version of this article appeared in the 06/10/2024 issue of Publishers Weekly under the headline: It Cant Happen Here

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Why Would a Comic About Censorship Get Banned? - Publishers Weekly