by Steven Richards and John Solomon at Just the News
Democracy Dies in Darkness? A new memo from the taxpayer-funded National Endowment for Democracy shows grantee Global Disinformation Index viewed silencing Trump and toxifying certain news outlets to reduce their revenues as a win. The policy spread to other federal programs.
A nonprofit that received federal funding to develop censorship strategies boasted in progress reports to the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) that early tactics had suppressed the reach of Donald Trump’s messaging and reduced advertising by $100 million to news outlets it deemed to be “disinformation” spreaders, according to newly disclosed memos.
The Global Disinformation Index (GDI) was awarded grants through its U.S.-based affiliate, AN Foundation, from NED, a congressionally chartered and taxpayer-funded agency in Washington. The grants were paid to develop strategies on how to fight perceived disinformation in foreign countries.
But GDI’s quarterly progress reports often explicitly boasted about the impact of censorship efforts on American targets and audiences.
For instance, it touted to the NED that it had created a report called “Bankrolling Bigotry: An Overview of the Online Funding Strategies of American Hate Groups” that relied heavily on research from the far-left Southern Poverty Law Center to warn that “hatred is surging across the United States, threatening the safety, security and wellbeing of minority communities.”
You can read that report here:
Similarly, it boasted about its recommended tactics. Specifically, urging advertisers to choke revenue to news outlets that the index deemed to spread disinformation had an enormous early impact, it wrote.
“This period,…