State Department Office that Secretly Tried to Kill U.S. Publications Gets Defunded

​The State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC) that steered advertisers away from conservative American publications has shuttered after being stripped of its funds by Congress.
 
In its heyday, with a $61 million budget and 120 employees, GEC oversaw a $330,000 grant from affiliated entities to the UK-based Global Disinformation Index (GDI). It also made direct grants to GDI. This organization then distributed blacklists to ad companies with the intent of defunding websites that put out what it regards as “disinformation.” GDI also identified the ten “riskiest” news outlets – The American Spectator, Newsmax, the Federalist, the American Conservative, One America News, the Blaze, the Daily Wire, RealClearPolitics, Reason, and the New York Post.
 
A GDI insider told The Washington Examiner that publications on the “riskiest” list were probably also on an “exclusion” list sent to corporate advertisers.
 
GEC’s determinations were a black box. All we know is that a host of federal agencies – from the CIA to the FBI, DHS, and the Pentagon – through GEC provided Twitter, Facebook, and Google with guidance on what content they should depost or hide. The requests were so frequent, The New York Post reports, social media companies developed systems to respond to these content moderation requests, often by complying.
 
The idea of a government agency secretly sanctioning U.S. journalism outlets on the basis of their coverage makes President Nixon’s “enemies list” seem benign by comparison. Beyond setting the First Amendment on fire, this effort also betrays the conceit that only a precious set of intelligence analysts can discern the truth. Thus, the GEC suppressed speakers who held that the COVID-19 virus had leaked from a lab in Wuhan, China, only to have the director of the FBI affirm in Congressional testimony that the bureau now believes that this was the likeliest cause of the pandemic.
 
Investigative journalists, foremost among them Matt Taibbi, reported many similar instances of the federal government’s efforts to censor news outlets.
 
Protect The 1st has no problem with an official effort to identify the propaganda of foreign terrorists and hostile regimes so long as officials are willing to make their case publicly. But secret efforts to kill U.S. publications, whether they are as careful and buttoned-down as Reason, as wide-ranging and balanced as RealClearPolitics, or unashamedly right-leaning as Newsmax, is not the business of our government. Protect The 1st would be just as alarmed if the State Department tried to shut down Mother Jones, the Nation, or the Daily Kos.
 
The Global Engagement Center was un-American in conception and operation. Nothing like this should be allowed to happen again.

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