{"id":66056,"date":"2023-10-28T09:12:06","date_gmt":"2023-10-28T14:12:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=66056"},"modified":"2023-10-28T09:12:06","modified_gmt":"2023-10-28T14:12:06","slug":"newsguard-case-highlights-the-pentagons-censorship-end-around","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=66056","title":{"rendered":"Newsguard Case Highlights the Pentagon’s Censorship End-Around"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Newsguard Case Highlights the Pentagon’s Censorship End-Around<\/a><\/h3>\n

The Consortium News lawsuit against a private news rating system lays out how the government can suppress speech by proxy<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Monday, the independent website\u00a0Consortium News<\/a>\u00a0<\/em>filed suit\u00a0against the United States of America and Newsguard Technologies<\/a>. The complaint targeting both the government and a private media ratings service is an important one, putting the censorship-by-proxy system on trial.<\/p>\n

On September 7, 2021, the U.S. Department of Defense gave an\u00a0award<\/a>\u00a0of $749,387 to Newsguard Technologies, a private service that scores media outlets on \u201creliability\u201d and \u201ctrust.\u201d According to the suit, roughly 40,000 subscribers buy Newsguard subscriptions, getting in return a system of \u201cNutrition Labels\u201d supposedly emphasizing \u201csafe\u201d content. Importantly, Newsguard\u2019s customers include universities and libraries, whose users are presented with labels warning you that CBS is great and Tucker Carlson is dangerous:<\/p>\n

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Consortium News\u00a0<\/em>was labeled a purveyor of \u201cdisinformation,\u201d \u201cmisinformation,\u201d and \u201cfalse content,\u201d and, worst of all, \u201canti-U.S.\u201d This is despite the fact that, according to the suit, Newsguard only flagged six articles out of the tens of thousands\u00a0Consortium News\u00a0<\/em>has published since the late award-winning reporter Robert Parry founded it in 1995. As\u00a0Consortium News\u00a0<\/em>points out, Newsguard downgrades its entire 20,000+ library of available online articles with these flags based on the handful of edge cases, all of which involve criticism of U.S. foreign policy.<\/p>\n

A particular irony is that Parry, a decorated AP and\u00a0Newsweek\u00a0<\/em>reporter, founded\u00a0Consortium News\u00a0<\/em>specifically to address topics suppressed by mainstream editors. Now Parry\u2019s old site is being downgraded for dissenting reports on subjects like the 2014 Ukrainian coup and neo-Nazism in Ukraine, coincidentally topics that are \u201cthe subject of NewsGuard\u2019s \u2018Misinformation Fingerprints\u2019 project that is under contract with the Cyber Command,\u201d as the suit reads.<\/p>\n

\u2026click on the above link to read the rest\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Newsguard Case Highlights the Pentagon’s Censorship End-Around The Consortium News lawsuit against a private news rating system lays out how the government can suppress speech by proxy Monday, the independent website\u00a0Consortium News\u00a0filed suit\u00a0against the United States of America and Newsguard Technologies. The complaint targeting both the government and a private media ratings service is an […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[120,6963,379,3733,26071,23908,33825,11226],"class_list":["post-66056","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liberty","tag-censorship","tag-consortium-news","tag-government","tag-matt-taibbi","tag-narrative-management","tag-newsguard","tag-racket-news","tag-us-pentagon"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66056","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=66056"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66056\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":66057,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66056\/revisions\/66057"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=66056"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=66056"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=66056"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}