Dis-information please

By Deacon Mike Manno

(The Wanderer)  --  It seems that every time we turn on television or radio, or check out the news on the internet, we are constantly faced with the claim of dis- or mis-information. It has almost become a national parlor game, and it would be laughable if it was not so serious.

          It has led to calls for more governmental regulations over the internet and cable services, all of which are necessary to protect the citizenry from those great evil misinformers. It’s called many nice names, such as media literacy. But the bottom line is that it is actually censorship

          And, of course, we all remember the real disinformation campaign used by the FBI and other federal agencies working with Big Tech to – in the name of truth – hide, cover-up, and distort information that was harmful to their political friends.

          You might also remember a year or so ago an apparently empty-headed political bureaucrat (who wasn’t that dumb) from the Department of Homeland Security by the name of Nina Jankowicz, Mr. Biden’s disinformation czar. She suddenly appeared singing a song about misinformation to a Mary Poppins melody, chastising the former Trump Administration and other “enemies” of the current administration. Who can forget, “♪Disinformation laundering is quite ferocious♫.”

          Fortunately for the consuming public, the Department of Homeland Security put a nix on the program so all appeared safe. But it did not end there, it only went underground.

          The other week on my radio program we had the managing editor of NewsBusters.org, Curtis Houck. NewsBusters is part of the Media Research Center (MRC), which acts to police the national news media, exposing what it claims to be a leftist bias in media and is a leading conservative voice combatting that bias.

          Mr. Houck reported on the MRC’s recently completed Censorship Investigation Project. That report warned of the danger of a “disinformation project” that operated within the government along with some financial help from some of the usual left wing financiers.

          According to the MRC report, the disinformation project began under the State Department and was eventually transferred to the Department of Homeland Security, the agency Ms. Jankowicz was with when her little “Mary Poppins” ditty blew the whistle on her role as disinformation czar.   

          The report was entitled: How the Biden Administration Pushed German Censorship to American Teachers. Basically the program was used to train U.S. teachers on how to facilitate disinformation and censorship campaigns in U.S. schools. The idea was to train teachers to inoculate students in media literacy and disinformation with the aim of discouraging reliance on legitimate and reputable news sites in favor of those skewered toward sites favoring the progressive left and containing anti-American propaganda.

          Under the program over 1,000 U. S. teachers were invited to seminars where they would be given course outlines they could use in their schools. While the entire operation of the program is too lengthy and involved for a newspaper column, part of what was given to the teachers were two web sites that they should recommend to their schools and students to download.

          One was NewsGuard, and the other was Ad Fontes. Both were search sites that ranked the web sites students might use in doing on-line research. According to MRC’s study, NewsGuard “ranked leftist media 20 percentage points higher, on average, than right leading media.” The same was true for Ad Fontes, which favored leftist sites over conservative sites by a two to one margin. Remember the aim: get schools and students to find the leftist sites before conservative ones.

          [The use of taxpayer funds to back NewsGuard is the subject of a lawsuit by the Federalist Society, The Daily Wire, and the State of Texas.]

          The idea, as you can plainly see, is to get students using the leftist sites in their school and personal use. The teacher seminars taught attendees how to get NewsGuard installed on their school’s computer systems, thus tilting all search results left.

          MRC also noted that in a previous report it had found that both NewsGuard and Ad Fontes had, prior to this effort, worked with “Big Tech” on other projects to drive people away from conservative media.

          Training for the program was done through the University of Rhode Island Media Education Lab in conjunction with the German University of Würzburg’s Media Education & Educational Technology Lab. The use of the terms “media education” and “media training” camouflage their real purpose to mask the fact that it is not an academic study but a left leaning program that encourages disinformation with a leftward bent.

          Besides the use of computer programs, such as NewsGuard, to suppress conservative sites, teachers were taught to use certain games that fostered a leftward viewpoint and to reject conservative influences. It also uses blog posts to spread their ideas. Many of the blog posts attacked Donald Trump and MAGA extremists, including:

          “It won’t be easy but we really have to reduce Trump’s influence,” and “We are all living in darkness, scary [and] angry, less hopeful country thanks to Mr. Trump.” All of this was to be taught to children who were encouraged to chime in and post similar thoughts. And all was done on the taxpayer’s dime, by those who claim to be preserving democracy for future generations.  

          By the way, funding from the Department of Homeland Security came from its program to target violence and prevent terrorism.

          MRC and NewsBusters compiled the report by obtaining documents through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), official government reports, as well as media reports.

          The full report is on the NewsBuster web site. That site gives you an option which allows the report to be read to you, a handy option for someone like me who has problems reading. The radio interview was taped the morning of January 18, and was broadcast on the eight stations of the Iowa Catholic Radio Network twice over the following weekend. It can also be found on the station’s website (below) as a podcast. It is Episode 397.