The Global Disinformation Index’s report blacklisting conservative outlets, such as The Federalist, New York Post, Daily Caller, and Washington Examiner, as the “riskiest” disinformation media companies was researched and written by students at the University of Texas at Austin’s Global Disinformation Lab, according to documents obtained by The Federalist.
The academics running the lab held an anti-conservative bias, internal communications show. Those details are among several troubling revelations contained in the 1,000-plus pages of documents reviewed by The Federalist.
Here’s the backdrop and the findings of that review.
Blacklisting of Conservatives Revealed
In early February, the Washington Examiner’s Gabe Kaminsky authored an exclusive titled “Disinformation Inc.” In his first installment of the multi-part series “about self-styled ‘disinformation’ tracking organizations,” Kaminsky reported the Global Disinformation Index’s rating of American news outlets was skewed, with the top 10 supposed “riskiest” outlets being conservative, including American Spectator, Newsmax, The Federalist, American Conservative, One America News, The Blaze, Daily Wire, RealClearPolitics, Reason, and the New York Post. In contrast, the top 10 “least risky” outlets leaned nearly entirely left of center.
Kaminsky stressed that the Global Disinformation Index, or GDI, says its mission is to “remove the financial incentive” to create “disinformation,” with its “core output” being the “dynamic exclusion list” that ranks news outlets based on their supposed disinformation “risk.” GDI then sells subscriptions to its lists to marketing organizations, which pull advertising dollars from the outlets, starving them of funding.
At the time of the Washington Examiner’s report, Xandr, which is owned by Microsoft, used GDI’s exclusion list to
