Conservatives are up in arms because the compromise CR continues funding the GEC for another year. “Bad,” said Chip Roy. “Brazen,” said Dan Bishop. “Unbelievable,” said Andrew Clyde.
Eh? This would be the State Department's Global Engagement Center, an agency originally dedicated to fighting overseas terrorism. It started up under the Obama administration and was expanded twice during the Trump administration to include efforts against foreign propaganda from the likes of Russia, China, and Iran. It's staffed mostly by the Pentagon and currently has a budget of about $60 million.
Sounds reasonable enough. But then Joe Biden got elected and it suddenly became a conservative censorship operation. This is based on the fact that in 2018 GEC began funding an outfit called Disinfo Cloud, and in 2021 its grant was shared with GDI, the Global Disinformation Index. GDI apparently received $100,000, but of course it does lots of stuff and GEC doesn't control all of it. To wit: Among its many and widespread reports on foreign disinformation it released a report ranking the riskiness of 61 US online news operations. Here it is:
And that was that. One report that rated a bunch of ordinary news outlets as pretty reliable and a bunch of bomb-throwing conservative outlets as kinda risky. This was indirectly funded for one year by a minuscule portion of GEC's budget, so GEC had to go.
Thus are right-wing conspiracy theories born. But even Mike Johnson couldn't bring himself to kill off GEC just to provide some red meat to a few lunatics. So for now GEC continues. In the future the State Department apparently plans to spread its functions around to make it less of a target.
“Bad,” said Chip Roy. “Brazen,” said Dan Bishop. “Unbelievable,” said Andrew Clyde.
Indeed. How dare they rate NPR less risky than OANN!
These three guys all voted against the certification of the 2020 presidential election results. It's easy to get quotes from the Trump Coalition Of Dumb Stooges.
Your link is currently broken.
But when a government funded study claims that all the right wing media sources are "risky" (what does that even mean?) and the left wing ones are not you have to expect that when the right gets back into power it is going to have some serious WTF questions.
Yes, this is obviously correct: any entity that thinks the Associated Press is more accurate than Newsmax plainly has a partisan axe to grind.
As everybody knows, there is no truth, just two camps of news sources, all members of which are equally accurate. Anybody who says otherwise obviously deserves "some serious WTF questions."