I know the “saying the quiet part out loud” trope has become rather hackneyed in American politics. But some stories exemplify this saying to the point that it must be mentioned.
Enter Dr. Daniel Rogers, co-founder and executive director of the Global Disinformation Index (GDI). You might remember GDI from such smash hits as “let’s attack conservative/libertarian news sites by going after their advertising revenue.”
RedState’s Brandon Morse reported on this latest attempt to suppress viewpoints that contradict the progressive agenda. He noted that a Washington Examiner report detailed a “low-profile attempt to target conservative sites by blacklisting them for various ‘safety’ reasons” on the part of GDI. The organization works with companies that provide advertising services for various brands who might want to advertise their products and services on certain websites.
GDI compiled a list for these advertising companies of websites on which they should not place ads because they supposedly publish “misinformation” and “disinformation.” It does not take a genius to figure out that each of the news sites on GDI’s list were right-leaning, does it? The move was widely panned as blatantly biased in favor of progressive news organizations. Even Mr. Magoo can see that this is just an effort to attack conservative/libertarian views on the internet, especially since more Americans are consuming alternative media instead of the usual establishment activist media outlets.
Here comes the good part.
During a February 2022 presentation at Princeton University’s Center for Information Technology Policy, Dr. Rogers exposed what his understanding of the terms “misinformation” and “disinformation” mean when he claimed those who support former President Donald Trump are incapable of being deprogrammed from supposed disinformation. He said:
Obviously, there’s the category of people who are going to put hashtag ‘MAGA’ on their headstones, and we’re not ever going to reach them but there’s a whole category of people kind of in the middle coming to the fact that these attention driven news feeds naturally serve as more adversarial and angry content and having to fight back with buying up that space to counteract that tailwind and the opposition.
So basically, information favored by the MAGA movement is disinformation in Rogers’ eyes. The GDI co-founder also acknowledged that it is a “data-driven advocacy organization” even though it claims to be politically neutral.
Dr. Rogers also maintains an “extensive relationship” with the intelligence community according to Breitbart News:
Before GDI, he founded and led Terbium Labs, an information security and dark web intelligence startup, and worked in the American intelligence community. He also serves as an adjunct professor at New York University and is a fellow at the Truman National Security project where Biden National Security Advisor, Jake Sullivan, is a Board Member. Sullivan was one of the ringleaders of the Trump/Russia disinformation narrative.
Rogers referred to Breitbart News as one of his “favorites” when discussing outlets that supposedly promote adversarial narratives. He slammed the news site for its reportage on crimes committed by illegal aliens. The GDI co-founder acknowledged that the site’s reporting on illegal immigrant crime “would fact check to be correct,” but that it still serves as an “example around which we can build a useful definition of disinformation that goes beyond the simple true/false dichotomy.”
So basically, Breitbart News’ reporting on illegal immigrant crime is true, but it’s also disinformation because progressives don’t like it.
None of this is surprising, is it?
The fact that Rogers’ admitted that he and his ilk view opinions coming from news sites with which they disagree are automatically disinformation is the only part of the story that might come as a mild shock. But perhaps he believed that because he was in friendly territory, he didn’t have to worry about his words coming back to haunt him.
But the bottom line is that the “misinformation/disinformation” industry is nothing more than a gargantuan grift designed to make money while also attacking political opponents. It makes sense considering that the advent of alternative media has given non-progressives more of a voice and a better way to reach a wider audience.
Folks on the right are no longer limited only to talk radio as a means of subverting the leftist gatekeeping that goes on in major activist media companies. Rogers and his goons seem to believe they can put a stop to this by attacking the revenue of conservative sites. But so far, this appears to be yet another failed strategy to silence dissent.
