Rep. James Comer, who chairs the House Oversight Committee, has told de facto censorship outfit NewsGuard it's got some 'splainin' to do.

He sent a letter to the company, which claims it only rates the reliability of news outlets for disinformation, (the better to demonetize them to advertisers), asking them how much government funding, (read: involvement) they take. Up until now, they've insisted it was minimal, insignificant.

According to the New York Post, citing this House letter:

A House committee revealed Friday that the Pentagon, other US agencies and the European Union — in addition to the State Department — have funded a for-profit “fact-checking” firm accused of suppressing The Post.

House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) wrote a letter to the firm, NewsGuard, demanding more details about the public-private collaboration that led last year to the State Department being sued by conservative outlets that were labeled more “risky” than their liberal counterparts.

NewsGuard has briefed committee staff on contracts it had with the Defense Department in 2021, including the Cyber National Mission Force within US Cyber Command; the State Department and its Global Engagement Center; and the EU’s Joint Research Centre.

“The Committee writes today to seek additional documents and communications from NewsGuard related to all past and present contracts with or grants administered by federal government agencies or any other government entity, including foreign governments,” Comer informed NewsGuard CEOs Steven Brill and Gordon Crovitz.

While they don't seem to be covering anything up for Comer so far as I can tell, that claim of minimal involvement doesn't square well with the admissions they have made of taking contracts from numerous government agencies at the State Department, the European Union, and others, all of which have been involved in crude censorship in recent years.

Taking a lot of government money, after all, might just color one's news judgment about what's legitimate news and what isn't, which in the end may be at odds with the freedom of the press and the First Amendment.

Social media outlets in hock with the government, recall, famously censored the New York Post's massive scoop about Hunter Biden's abandoned laptop as disinformation and to discourage advertisers from taking out ads with the newspaper. There wouldn't be any deep-state government interest in getting that party line out, would there? That would be the deep state of the 51 former intelligence officials who made the phony statement about the laptop as "having all the earmarks" of a Russian disinformation operation?

You decide.

According to Lee Fang, writing in the New York Post in December 2023, NewsGuard has been pretty cozy with these social media outlets involved with the government that had worked together to censor legitimate news, meaning, NewsGuard could have a role, too:

But perhaps the greatest danger is posed by NewsGuard’s extensive ties to the government. Internal documents I obtained through the “Twitter Files” show that the founders of NewsGuard privately pitched the firm to clients as a tool to engage in content moderation on an industrial scale, applying artificial intelligence to take down certain forms of speech.

The proposal noted that the service is already used by “intelligence and national security officials,” “reputation management providers” and “government agencies.”

Here's a gander at the size of the government contracts known so far from Fang:

Earlier this year, Consortium News, a left-leaning site, charged in a lawsuit that NewsGuard’s serves as a proxy for the military to engage in censorship.

The lawsuit brings attention to the Pentagon’s $749,387 contract with NewsGuard to identify “false narratives” regarding the war between Ukraine and Russia, among other forms of foreign influence.

The outrage of it all is that social media (and the 51 intel officials) all lied about the laptop story being fake for the express purpose of influencing the 2020 election, which they may have succeeded at doing.

This is far from the only time NewsGuard could have been involved in trying to shut down news that doesn't make their government paymasters happy.

Comer specifically cited retweets by NewsGuard employees that sought to debunk legitimate news.

Exhibit A is the famous study of studies by respected Johns Hopkins University professor Steve Hanke who with leading academics in Sweden who found that COVID-19 lockdowns in the past few years were counterproductive.

According to the Post:

Comer also expressed concern about NewsGuard employees sharing social media posts exhibiting left-wing bias, in violation of the company’s policies, and the firm throttling disfavored outlets’ “misinformation” — which in at least one case included a published academic study on the failure of lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic.

I looked up which academic study that was, found Comer's earlier letter from the summer when he first made that complaint that identified it, found the media outlet NewsGuard held up to scorn as disinformation on Twitter, (The Daily Sceptic which is in the U.K., see footnote 14) and sure enough, that's what NewsGuard did, effectively spreading disinformation by falsely debunking the legitimate but politically inconvenient study of studies by condemning the press outlet that covered it. Presumably that would serve the interests of their government clients under the NewsGuard label on Twitter. (I covered it, too, here and here, which is why I recognized it in the New York Post report.)

Some of the retweets can be seen here, albeit not the one I am looking for.

Anybody notice how much the anglosphere is involved in all of these social media censorship efforts?

In fact, the censors of social media and beyond have tried to shut down and discredit this study and other COVID-19 related studies through multiple means, which Comer seems to be looking into. The debunking of Daily Sceptic's writeup of the matter led to the expected publishing platform for the piece, the Social Sciences Research Network (SSRN) not putting it onto their site.

Was NewsGuard's discrediting tweet or other government shenanigans the reason why the SSRN, which publishes reputable academic papers, mysteriously censored this one, refusing to publish it, despite Hanke's reputable academic record and longstanding history of publishing papers, all of which appeared on that platform?

Is Reed Elsevier, the Dutch giant publishing house, which owns SSRN, a client of NewsGuard's? Did NewsGuard, acting on behalf of its government masters, advise Reed ElSevier, that Daily Sceptic's report was disinformation?

Maybe Rep. Comer will find that out, once NewsGuard's depth of government involvement is revealed.

Right now, the suppression of that report alone stinks of censorship, and NewsGuard could very well have been the government-paid instrument for it. That's why it needs to explain just how much government cash it's taking and how that affects what they do. When you take the king's penny, you are always going to be doing the king's bidding. Comer is right to be looking for some transparency here.

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