A damning new congressional report shows how a little-known advertising cartel that controls 90% of global marketing spending supported efforts to defund news outlets and platforms at points urging members to use a blacklist compiled by a shadowy government-funded group that purports to guard news consumers against “misinformation.”
The NY Post reports the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA), which reps 150 of the world’s top companies — including ExxonMobil, GM, General Mills, McDonald’s, Visa, SC Johnson and Walmart — and 60 ad associations sought to squelch online free speech through its Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) initiative, the House Judiciary Committee found in an interim report released Wednesday.
“The extent to which GARM has organized its trade association and coordinates actions that rob consumers of choices is likely illegal under the antitrust laws and threatens fundamental American freedoms,” the Republican-led panel said in its 39-page report based on internal organizational records.
House Republicans previously studied the extent to which the US government flouted free speech norms by leaning directly on platforms to censor content — through both the Biden White House and Department of Homeland Security — or by funding outside groups that compiled blacklists of outlets for advertisers to avoid.
In the name of the Constitution and in the name of democracy, GARM was just blasted, in front of God and Congress, and confirmed to be the biggest piece of shit organization that has ever been created - by the left 😲
— Todd With Trump (@THeinrich22) July 11, 2024
PROVE US WRONG 😤 pic.twitter.com/wJAW0Z3Cmn
The committee’s allegation of possible antitrust violations suggests a potential avenue for Justice Department action, especially if Donald Trump wins back the White House on Nov. 5.
The new report establishes links between the WFA’s “responsible media” initiative and the taxpayer-funded Global Disinformation Index (GDI), a London-based group that in 2022 unveiled an ad blacklist of 10 news outlets whose opinion sections tilted conservative or libertarian, including The Post, RealClearPolitics and Reason magazine.
The GARM initiative was established in 2019 and undertook some of its most controversial efforts as claims of “disinformation” were being applied without evidence to reporting and hypotheses that later gained broad acceptance — such as The Post’s articles on abandoned laptop documents that link President Biden to his son Hunter and brother James’ foreign dealings and the “lab leak” theory of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Internal communications suggest that rather than using an objective rubric to guide decisions, GARM members simply monitored disfavored outlets closely to be able to find justification to demonetize them.
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