(Patriot Insider) – The House Judiciary Committee is now conducting an investigation to determine if major advertisers violated antitrust laws by colluding together to decide which news outlets they should blackball. When progressivism infects an area of our culture, one of the biggest symptoms is censorship. It seems the hive minded left wants to ensure there are no alternative opinions being offered to the masses, no challenge to their “status quo.” After all, the only way to build their dystopia is if everyone believes the same set of dogma.
The committee, currently chaired by Ohio Republican Rep. Jim Jordan, has gotten their hands on a series of documents from the World Federation of Advertisers, which demonstrates that the organization implemented a strategy designed to keep major advertisers from doing any sort of business with news outlets it disagreed with. The highly coordinated effort could potentially bankrupt these publications and broadcast networks if they don’t tow the progressive line.
“The World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) through its Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) initiative may be acting inconsistent with U.S. antitrust laws and congressional intent by coordinating GARM members’ efforts to demonetize and eliminate disfavored content online,” Jordan stated in a March 27th letter demanding additional documents from advertisers.
“Evidence the Committee has obtained suggests that GARM members, led by Steer Team members, are colluding to demonetize conservative platforms and voices. Further, this coordination does not always revolve around ‘brand safety’ and ‘harmful’ content as GARM publicly claims, but instead the desire to censor conservative and other views that GARM members disfavor,” Jordan’s letter continued.
“The letters indicate that documents obtained by the committee suggest that the group tried to blackball mainstream conservative news organizations, specifically asking for ‘communications referring or relating to conservative news outlets, including Fox News, Daily Wire, and Breitbart,'” the Daily Wire reported.
The letters were sent out to big time corporations on GARM’s “steering committee” — including well known companies like Unilever, Procter & Gamble, GroupM, Diageo, and Mars — stating that the documents they requested “directly connect” the corporations mentioned with these efforts. As of this writing, the documents have not been released to the general public.
The letters are looking for communications sent from the companies “relating to the categorization, demonetization, or elimination of online speech.” They’re also asking for any communications that talk about “changes to X following Elon Musk’s acquisition of the company,” which is when a number of advertisers left the social media platform as a means of protesting leftist Jack Dorsey being replaced by Musk, who is a big, big supporter of free speech and the marketplace of ideas.
“The probe suggests that the companies could be held individually responsible for the actions of the group they created, and that GARM may act in a cartel-like manner, even though many of its members are nominally competitors,” the DW article divulged.
“WFA announced the GARM’s creation at the 2019 Cannes festival, a gathering of global elites, amidst complaints about ‘disinformation” and ‘fake news,’ but later that year said it would become a flagship project of the World Economic Forum (WEF)’s ‘Platform for Shaping the Future of Media, Entertainment and Culture,'” the piece continued.
An announcement was released from the World Economic Forum that read, “The Global Alliance is creating a safe media ecosystem.” That doesn’t sound ominous or anything, right? It reminds me of something the Galactic Empire from ‘Star Wars’ would say about their oppressive rule and silencing of the Rebel Alliance.
“GARM focuses on viewer safety for consumers, reducing risks for advertisers, developing credibility for digital platforms and, more broadly, ensuring a sustainable online ecosystem,” the statement declared. “Partners involved in the Global Alliance for Responsible Media through the Forum’s Platform for Shaping the Future of Media, Entertainment and Sport include companies such as LEGO Group, Procter & Gamble, Unilever, NBC Universal – MSNBC, Dentsu Group, WPP (through GroupM), Interpublic Group, Publicis Groupe, Omnicom Group, Facebook and Google.”
Back in 2022, GARM added the term “misinformation” to the types of online content deemed to be unethical. The organization went on to say that companies need to start taking cues from NewsGuard, the Journalism Trust Initiative, and the Disinformation Index, in order to choose which news outlets to conduct business with, going on to add that these groups “can help ensure that ad buyers and users looking for news can be in safe and suitable places.”
“GARM says it provides members with ‘Brand Safety.’ For-profit firms like Newsguard have shown what that means in practice: Companies that might buy ads are given lists of what TV programs, channels, podcasts, or newspapers are either safe to advertise on or should be avoided. This is billed as avoiding risks to their reputation or boycotts—essentially saying that if a company wants to avoid boycotts from the Left or smear campaigns, they should not do business with certain media outlets,” the report revealed. “In a progress report in 2022, GARM boasted of qualities that, viewed in another light, could show anti-competitive practices.”
“GARM’s launch was propelled forward by uncommon collaboration, a unique way of working recognizing that all sectors of the advertising industry and companies benefit from partnering to create new brand safety standards and solutions that could be accepted industry-wide, where there had been no established protocols,” it explained.
“The challenge of meaningfully steering the entire media ecosystem was ‘big,’ it said, yet GARM included 61 major companies that buy a large portion of the advertising in the world, as well as 35 separate industry associations that represent many more advertisers,” the Daily Wire disclosed. “The WFA, along with the Global Disinformation Index, Newsguard, and other firms that would profit from ‘disinformation” crackdowns, lobbied the European Union for a “Strengthened Code of Practice on Disinformation’ in 2022.”
Many companies who want to advertise products and services are going to take the so-called “experts” word for which news outlets are credible. This will inevitably lead to blacklists. However, the issue is that these experts have even labeled well established outlets like the New York Post and Reason Magazine as being risky, simply because they lean conservative.
“Such news outlet raters often assign credibility ratings based on how closely news outlets hew to official government lines, dinging outlets for questioning, for example, whether COVID could have come from a lab — a theory discouraged by the government at the time, but now largely supported by the government,” the report noted.
And the bias is very, very real. For example, NewsGuard worked directly with the U.S. government, resulting in a lawsuit being filed by both the Daily Wire and The Federalist, suing the pants off the State Department, alleging it to be “one of the most audacious, manipulative, secretive, and gravest abuses of power and infringements of First Amendment rights by the federal government in American history.”
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