Federal Communications Commissioner and incoming Chair Brendan Carr is offering details on how he will succeed in his pledge to, once and for all, “smash” Big Tech’s censorship regime, including entities like NewsGuard.
Carr came out swinging against what he calls the censorship cartel during a Monday interview on Chris Cuomo’s eponymous NewsNation show. “Anytime you have an increase in government control, you necessarily have a decrease in free speech. It’s fundamentally un-American,” Carr told Cuomo. He said that “diversity of opinion is so important in this country” and that “trying to smash this censorship cartel” is going to be one of his “top priorities.”
Asked what entities are part of the censorship cartel, Carr said it’s “multifaceted,” meaning it involves several aspects: “One, you've got a lot of these platforms are just acting on their own to censor speech; but two, we saw, particularly during the Biden administration, was pressure from government officials to censor speech as well.”
Carr also touched on media ratings and ad agencies targeting news outlets that do not adhere to the leftist agenda. He said, “We also have a cohort of advertising and marketing agencies [that] have been working together in my view to collude to crack down on free speech. That's an issue, I think, in part for the Federal Trade Commission.”
ICYMI! WATCH: Brendan Carr Has His Work Cut Out in the Fight for Free Speech
Carr called out NewsGuard, a left-leaning media ratings firm, which the Media Research Center has frequently exposed for giving generous and highly favorable news ratings to left-wing outlets.
“At the end of the day, trying to draw the lines between disinformation and misinformation is very fraught,” Carr said. “More often than not, people are slapping those labels on political speech they disagree with. I think [what] we should try to protect is: core political speech, religious speech [and] scientific speech. I don’t think we want the FCC or any entity to be sort of superintending a lot of these decisions.”
He continued, “But we have a lot of these fact checkers out there that are really just narrative checkers. I sent a letter recently to a company called NewsGuard that, in my view, has been at the forefront of this censorship cartel.”
Related: EVEN WORSE! MRC Exposes NewsGuard for Leftist Bias Third Year in a Row
On Nov. 13, Carr sent a letter to Meta, Apple, Microsoft and Alphabet requesting information about their controversial work with NewsGuard, which Carr described as “Orwellian.”
“For one, reports indicate that NewsGuard has consistently rated official propaganda from the Communist Party of China as more credible than American publications,” Carr wrote, citing one of MRC's studies. “For another, NewsGuard aggressively fact checked and penalized websites that reported on the COVID-19 lab leak theory.”
He continued, “As exposed by the Twitter Files, NewsGuard is a for-profit company that operates as part of the broader censorship cartel. Indeed, NewsGuard bills itself as the Internet’s arbiter of truth or, as its co-founder put it, a ‘Vaccine Against Misinformation.’ NewsGuard purports to rate the credibility of news and information outlets and tells readers and advertisers which outlets they can trust.”
Brenda Carr Letter on NewsG... by Luis Cornelio
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