A Federal Lawsuit Accuses the Government of Helping Suppress ‘Anti-U.S.’ News Under the Guise of ‘Misinformation’

“Anti-U.S.” is how Washington describes news that goes against its foreign and defense policies, according to a federal lawsuit claiming that the American government colluded with the media watchdog NewsGuard in violation of the First Amendment. The publisher of the foreign policy news website, Consortium News, is accusing NewsGuard and the government of violating its free speech rights and of defamation for their alleged suppression on its platform of “false content.” Filed in the Southern District of New York last week, the suit points to “a pattern and practice of labeling, stigmatizing and defaming American media organizations that oppose or dissent from American foreign and defense policy.”The claims of wrongdoing involving the government “have no basis in fact,” NewsGuard’s co-chief executive, Gordon Crovitz, a former publisher of the Wall Street Journal, tells the Sun. “We expect the lawsuit would be summarily dismissed,” he says. “In terms of the libel claim, our ratings of now more than 30,000 news sources are fully protected as our opinions under the First Amendment.”The case marks the latest attempt to unravel what a federal judge in another case, Missouri v. Biden, called President Biden’s “Ministry of Truth.” As the Sun has reported, that case alleges that the federal government has been attempting to suppress political speech online. The case has shed light on a vast censorship campaign coordinated by social media companies and the executive branch. Political speech is also in question in the Consortium case — particularly concerning American policies toward Russia, Ukraine, and Syria in recent years. The suit claims that NewsGuard labeled several of its articles as “misinformation” — one such story was on the influence of neo-Nazism in Ukraine — and then expanded the warnings to its entire online archive. The claim that there is a threat of “stigmatization,” unless targeted content is removed or rectified, underlies the defamation charge in the suit. “What is true is that our team rated this site based on our apolitical journalistic criteria,” Mr. Crovitz says, “and the site did score poorly on those criteria.” NewsGuard rated Consortium News a 47.5 out of 100 on its “reliability” score, telling readers to “proceed with caution: This website generally fails to maintain basic standards of accuracy and accountability.” The warning cites false claims about the Russia-Ukraine war. Not unlike the alleged collusion in Missouri, this suit points to a partnership between NewsGuard’s “Misinformation Fingerprints” program and the Department of Defense Cyber Command, which calls itself “the nation’s first line of defense in cyberspace.” NewsGuard reports media outlets whose commentaries challenge Washington’s foreign policies, Consortium’s publisher, the Consortium for Independent Journalism, claims.Conservative commentators have previously scrutinized NewsGuard for punishing publishers for issuing news articles that challenge what media outlet PragerU called the “approved narrative.” Last week, Tesla’s chief executive, Elon Musk, called the rating company a “scam,” urging that it be “disbanded immediately.” Now, NewsGuard is facing a claim of more than $13 million in damages for allegedly applying such “misinformation” practices to other media companies in violation of free speech rights. If the suit is successful, a permanent injunction could ban future operations of the so-called joint program between NewsGuard and the government.Mr. Crovitz, though, asserts that the company “does not work with the U.S. government in any way on our ratings of news sources.” He says that “our Department of Defense contracts have been focused entirely on detecting hostile information operations by Russia, China and Iran targeting the U.S. and our allies — work that is unrelated to our ratings of news sources and has nothing to do with Consortium News or any other domestic publisher.”The Pentagon has lauded the NewsGuard’s “Misinformation Fingerprints” project. It granted it a $750,000 contract in September 2021 for cataloging “known hoaxes, falsehoods and misinformation narratives that are spreading online” by Russian propaganda outlets, according to the lawsuit. NewGuard has also monitored the rise in disinformation from Russia, Communist China, and Iran grew after X removed labels indicating state-operated sources. It recently launched a tracking center to expose “myths” relating to the Israel-Hamas war. “We are proud of our work,” Mr. Crovitz says, “identifying and analyzing new disinformation claims from these regimes as part of our mission countering misinformation on behalf of democracies.”

A Federal Lawsuit Accuses the Government of Helping Suppress ‘Anti-U.S.’ News Under the Guise of ‘Misinformation’

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