House Republicans are determined to stop the Pentagon from working with companies that use left-wing fact-checking groups that blacklist conservatives, according to a report in the Federalist.
Work continues on finalizing the fiscal year 2024 defense spending bill.
The House version prohibits the Defense Department from "contracting with NewsGuard Technologies or similar advertising firms that blacklist conservative news sources."
That's due to an amendment introduced in June by Rep. Richard McCormick, R-Ga. and Rep. Doug Lamborn, R-Colo.
"Political correctness is sabotaging our military from within, even as the Pentagon faces a recruiting shortage," McCormick said in a statement. "My amendment prohibits the Department of Defense from contracting with any so-called 'misinformation' or 'disinformation' monitors that rate news and information sources.
"These media monitors claim to be nonpartisan while almost always serving to censor conservative viewpoints and bury stories that liberals don't like. Suppression of our First Amendment rights has no place in our armed forces, and I look forward to my amendment becoming law."
Under McCormick's amendment, the Pentagon would be prohibited from signing new contracts with organizations known to blacklist conservative news.
Such entities include NewsGuard, the Global Disinformation Index (GDI), Graphika Technologies, or "any other entity the function of which is to advise the censorship or blacklisting of news sources based on subjective criteria or political biases, under the stated function of 'fact checking' or otherwise removing 'misinformation,'" according to The Federalist.
NewsGuard and GDI, so-called media monitors that rank news websites, podcasts, and TV networks, have received millions in grants from the State Department and Pentagon.
NewsGuard's founder is Steven Brill, a well-known Democratic Party activist and donor.
GDI is a British group backed by George Soros that compiles secretive lists of news organizations the group encourages major corporations to boycott.
While GDI works with advertisers to recommend where to spend marketing budgets, NewsGuard supplies software that rates the credibility of news organizations.
In two studies the Media Research Center found that NewsGuard gives liberal news outlets higher rankings than conservative ones.
The software, which The Federalist said is being deployed in schools nationwide, downgrades conservative websites while promoting liberal outlets that sensationalized the Russia-collusion hoax and suppressed the Hunter Biden laptop story.
NewsGuard received a nearly $750,000 contract from the Department of Defense in September, 2021.
According to the Washington Examiner, GDI received "roughly $960,000 combined" from the State Department and the National Endowment for Democracy from 2020 to 2022.
In May, the Biden administration defended its $100,000 grant in 2021 to GDI, which has given conservative website blacklists to advertisers to defund disfavored speech.
Earlier this month, House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, said the federal government, disinformation "experts" at universities, Big Tech, and others worked together through the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP) to monitor and censor Americans' speech during the 2020 election.
Jordan's committee found that Newsmax was among the media companies being monitored.
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