[ Sound Effects ] Stand by, while NCLA cuts through the noise [ Sound Effects ] to signal abuse of administrative power. [ Sound Effects ] This is Administrative Static with Mark Chenoweth and John Vecchione. [ Sound Effects ] [ Sound Effects ] Welcome back to Administrative Static. Mark Chenoweth here with John Vecchione. There is yet another effort by the federal government to try to stifle conservative views in violation of the First Amendment. It's just amazing. Every time you turn around, this administration is bound and determined to bind and gag people who have a view different from what this administration's view is, and it's utterly maddening to see this. Credit here goes to Gabe Kaminsky and Washington Examiner who has been leading this effort to expose what they're calling disinformation ink. The group's calling in cash to secretly blacklist conservative news. This article ran back on February 9th in the Washington Examiner. There have been a series of articles written by other folks, including Robbie Swab at Reason Magazine and Margot Cleveland at the Federalist. What these folks are exposing and reporting is that the US government apparently through the State Department and particular offices within the State Department is funding a company in Great Britain. That company in Great Britain in turn comes up with a list of media sites that are a black list, a black list of media sites that are allegedly untrustworthy or have some indicia of untrustworthiness and because of this, it wards away advertisers from supporting those websites. This is a very deliberate effort, and if you look at the list of websites that, you know, that this company has decided to say are untrustworthy, it's a very one-sided list. So the 10 so-called riskiest or worst offenders for peddling misinformation include, as I mentioned, Reason Magazine, the Federalist, the New York Post, Real Clear Politics, which I find to be particularly odd because they're just an aggregator of links from both sides. It's very weird. The Daily Wire, the Blaze, One America News, and the American Conservative, the American Spectator, and Newsmax. So those are, if you were to take a list, John, of the top 10 conservative websites that people go to, and you were set against that list, there'd be a lot of overlap. How do Wall Street Journal keep up with it? Well, I'd be read the news section of Wall Street Journal, John. But yeah, look, this exclusion list appears to be something that has been put together with a biased "I." And whether this is being done, oh, and by the way, if you look at the websites that it says are fine, you get things like NPR and Huffington Post and BuzzFeed and so forth, which happened to be sites, John, that were peddling the Russian hoax conspiracy that were saying that the Hunter Biden laptop wasn't legit when it was, and yet these ones that are supposedly unreliable were the ones that were exposing the truth behind those topics. Particularly both reason and the New York Post. I mean, reason, there's nothing that's not factual on that website. I mean, it's even a little dry because of it sometimes, you know? And they make a huge effort to be accurate of the ones I know, right? Sure. And so what the heck could reason be put in? It doesn't do election deniers stuff. It doesn't, it does do. You know what it does? I bet you that got it on there. It says that the health measures can't be dictatorial. Yeah, that's probably it. That's probably it. But the National Endowment for Democracy is a nonprofit that has received 330 million taxpayer dollars from the State Department. They contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to GDI's budget, this British entity, according to the Washington Examiner's investigation. The Washington Examiner wasn't on that top 10 list, but it will be soon, John. Well, and actually they were singled out as untrustworthy. They just make the top 10 of, you know, the sort of... We got to try harder. Like Davis, yeah. Try harder Washington Examiner here. And, you know, I think the question that we have gotten, and you and Janine have gotten, John, in the case that you've been bringing involving Twitter and Facebook and some of the social media entities as well. Isn't this just private conduct? I mean, this is this British company that's doing this. It's not even an American company. They can't be found by the First Amendment. And they're a private organization. John, they certainly can do whatever they want to do. But I think where that theory stumbles is that if the State Department is giving money to this entity because it knows that this entity is using it to punish US media companies. Cut off funds from people who are criticizing them. It is using the funds specifically for an anti-First Amendment purpose. It's just using a private... It's like a contractor. It's a conduit. Yeah, they're using... It's just like, you know, the private enforcement of BlackRock and people like that. So I think that is true. And the thing that is, the National Endowment for Democracy, if I'm not mistaken, originally had done a number of things to open up Eastern Europe when the Soviet Union fell. I think what it was was like, here's how we have civil society, right? And there were a lot of efforts about setting up magazines, setting up... Here's how you have run a newspaper. But now it's been completely warped, it looks like to me, to here's how we shut stuff down. Really incredible. And, you know, what I don't know yet, and maybe this is in part two or three of the Washington Examiner's Report, because they say in their article that this is just part one of a multi-part investigation, is when did this start at the State Department or at the National Endowment for Democracy? Is this something that came around with this administration? Is this something that was happening under the previous administration, which would be surprising? But you know what? Someone has to write a grant. So to get money from the government, you normally have to write a grant proposal, or there has to be a contract, right? But it strikes me that these are grants. And so the National Endowment of Democracy has to have a sheet where they submitted it to the State Department, here's what we're going to do. And then someone at the State Department had to say, "Hey, that sounds great. Who do you after?" And then they have to get a list of who, you know, what type of sites they're getting advertised and pushed away from. And the State Department says, "Yes, this is what we want. I mean, there's an awful lot of government action there." There is. And you were asking about, you know, why reason was on the list. And what it said is, "Reason magazine's high risk rating can be attributed to scores of zero on three operations pillar indicators." This thing is written, John, in such sort of dry, like, you know, like this is really official review. The site publishes no information regarding authorship attribution. That is not true. I've read reason. They give author attribution information. Robby Show. All the time. A pre-publication fact-checking or post-publication corrections processes or policies to prevent disinformation in its comments section. Well, in terms of its content, Reason Magazine did largely refrain from perpetuating in-group out-group narratives or unfairly targeting certain actors via its reporting. But as articles were often biased in their construction and relied on sensationalized emotional language, you know, unlike HuffPost or BuzzFeed, you know, John, they never have a-- No, it's like being there. --it's a state-alized emotional language on those sites. So, you know, this is--we make light of it because it's so outrageous. But the idea that you would tell an advertiser that they should disfavor a site that doesn't moderate its comments section, for example, you know, Reason is free minds and free markets. I think it would be a little odd if they didn't apply the free minds sort of motto to their comments section. Yeah, I do think that that is kind of odd. And, you know, as they always say, don't read the comments section. But there's never anything good there. And don't read it if you don't want to read it. Exactly. Right? And for that matter, I would be surprised if the advertisers are advertising on the comments section. I just proved doubt that that. I mean, I don't find me the advertisers says, "Put my stuff in the comments section." That's where I really--that's where my buyers are. So, but exact. And then also, the other thing is the New York Post is the oldest newspaper in this country. You might--is it tabloid? Sure. But it has a lot of big stories that--it's broken a lot of big stories over the years. Now, there's an aller x different halter, right? So, yeah, it's over 200--200 some odd years old. And it would-- It was 220 because Hamilton died in LA. He didn't know something. Yes, exactly. So, the fact is, it's a very old newspaper. It's read by everybody in New York at some point. So, to put it on a band list is absolutely insane. It's crazy. And the article--Robby's was article in reason. And sorry if I'm butchering your name, Robbie. It cites another evaluator called NewsGuard that was co-founded by Gordon Croweitt's former publisher of the Wall Street Journal. And it gives reason a perfect score of 100 out of 100 in terms of misinformation. Do they get state department funds? I don't think they get state department funds. You know, I don't--I don't think so. But Croweitt's had an op-ed explaining how NewsGuard's process differs from--differs from GDIs, opaque, blacklisting system. And he says, "Unlike the ratings of news sites done by the entities cited in the Washington Examiner series, NewsGuard ratings are done with full transparency and disclosure using only a political criteria. And everything is done by humans, including the ratings by our analysts, of all the news and information sites that account for 95% of engagement in the United States and the other countries where we operate." So, in other words, they're not just using some sort of algorithm to identify alleged misinformation. They're actually looking at stories, making judgments and giving evaluations. You know, so they don't think reason is an unsafe website. John and I have read reason. We don't think it's an unsafe website. I'd say that about all or almost all of the sites on that list. Certainly the ones that we've been talking about specifically. And the fact that the fact that the--the department has been in the state department is funding this story. It is very interesting to see something that I think it was a little bit. [Music]