Almost 100 percent of all political donations made by so-called “fact-checking” organizations go exclusively to Democrats, a bombshell new study has revealed.
If you believe the entire “fact-checking” industry is rigged to silence conservatives and promote the political agenda of the Democratic Party, you’re not wrong.
There’s more evidence in addition to the voluminous amount of biased and even laughable “fact checks” to support that conclusion.
A new study from the Washington Free Beacon analyzing political contributions from U.S. employees who call themselves “fact-checkers” reveals that an astounding 99.5% of their donations went to Democrats. That’s right — nearly 100 percent.
That means that the policing of the Internet for “facts” is being carried out by partisan Democrats who nearly exclusively target conservatives and independents for “fact checks,” thereby doing massive damage to the reputation and financial backing of journalists who seek to hold the powerful and privileged accountable.
The study examined political donations over the past four election cycles and discovered that out of the total $22,683 donated, only $22,580 went to Democrats, while a meager three donations were made to Republicans.
These findings raise major concerns about the supposed neutrality and impartiality of those responsible for “fact-checking” and censorship within our society.
Despite claiming to be unbiased, these individuals showed a clear partisan preference.
The study even revealed that fact-checkers donated ten times more money to socialist Bernie Sanders alone than to all Republican politicians combined.
The study analyzed campaign finance disclosures, including contributions from fact-checkers at prominent organizations such as Reuters, the New York Times, Google, New York Magazine, CBS News, the New Republic, Vox, the New Yorker, and National Geographic, among others, totaling 40 organizations.
These findings shed light on the questionable nature of this industry and the individuals entrusted with ensuring accurate information.
Nearly 100% of political donations from self-identified fact-checkers, including those employed by organizations claiming journalistic neutrality, were directed towards Democrats and liberal groups, as revealed in the analysis of federal campaign finance disclosures by the Washington Free Beacon.
Fact-checkers from the New York Times and Reuters, for instance, made contributions to President Joe Biden, failed Democratic Senate candidate Jaime Harrison from South Carolina, and liberal Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren’s presidential campaign.
It was discovered that a Times fact checker, Cecilia Nowell, made three donations to Warren’s failed presidential bid and continues to accept “fact-checking assignments” from the outlet on a freelance basis.
Similarly, Reuters employed Carrie Monahan, daughter of veteran journalist Katie Couric, as a “fact check producer,” and Monahan made contributions to Biden, Harrison, and Georgia Democratic senator Jon Ossoff during her employment.
While the Times and Reuters claim to approach fact-checking in an “unbiased” and “balanced” manner, their past records have revealed numerous flawed fact-checks targeting high-profile conservatives.
For example, in a 2020 fact check, the Times accused Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton of promoting conspiracy theories when he suggested that COVID-19 may have originated in a Chinese research lab.
Subsequent federal investigations have substantiated Cotton’s claims about the lab leak theory.
Facebook’s fact-checkers have also made erroneous judgments.
Last year, they mislabeled a Free Beacon report on Biden’s Department of Health and Human Services as misinformation. The report revealed that the department was planning to fund the distribution of safe smoking kits, including crack pipes.
Facebook’s fact checker, Lead Stories, maintained the mislabeling even after the Free Beacon provided evidence that federally-funded harm reduction organizations were indeed distributing crack pipes.
Furthermore, fact-checkers have been known to dictate how readers should respond to factual information. When the Free Beacon reported that the Biden administration sold one million Strategic Petroleum Reserve barrels to a Chinese state-controlled gas giant, the Washington Post acknowledged the accuracy of the sale but downplayed any potential concerns, asserting that there was “no reason for outrage” and assigning “Three Pinocchios” to those suggesting wrongdoing by the Biden administration.
The surge in fact-checking organizations since the 2016 presidential election has been driven by claims that the extraordinary dishonesty of President Donald Trump and other Republicans necessitates a robust fact-checking infrastructure.
Tech giants like Facebook and Google have invested significant resources into fact-checking initiatives.
However, despite their claims of neutrality, established fact-checking giants like PolitiFact are more likely to accuse Republicans of engaging in deliberate falsehoods compared to their liberal counterparts.
Aside from the New York Times and Reuters, the review of federal disclosures by the Free Beacon highlights that fact-checkers at Appen Global, a data management firm contracted by Facebook in 2019 to help build its fact-checking infrastructure, exclusively donated to Democrats.
Recipients of these donations included Sanders, Warren, and Progressive Takeover, a group dedicated to mobilizing the Democratic Party.
Attempts to obtain information regarding the vetting process for potential biases of fact-checkers at Appen Global and comments from the New York Times were met with no response.
Reuters declined to comment on current or past newsroom staffers when approached by the Free Beacon.
Interestingly, one fact checker who contributed to Republicans concealed her identity, listing her address as “123 No Name Drive.”
This behavior reflects the sentiment among conservative tech employees who often feel compelled to self-censor their views, even on seemingly innocuous subjects such as the nuclear family.
The campaign finance disclosures reviewed by the Free Beacon unveiled contributions from fact-checkers at Reuters, the New York Times, Google, New York Magazine, CBS News, the New Republic, Vox, the New Yorker, National Geographic, and other organizations.
In total, fact-checkers from 40 different organizations made donations that predominantly favored Democrats.
The United States government has been exposed as running a shadowy censorship operation in contravention of the Constitution of the United States.
The federal government has been contracting with third-party actors to censor the political opinions of U.S. citizens, particularly, conservative Americans, according to research from The Federalist.
The State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC) used a covert corporation led by a former intelligence officer to finance and promote the blacklisting of conservative media outlets and other censorship efforts, according to the report.
This Censorship-Industrial Complex was exposed when Elon Musk granted a group of independent journalists access to internal Twitter communications, resulting in the “Twitter Files.”
Among the federal players identified was the State Department’s GEC, which went beyond influencing tech giants to censor unfavorable viewpoints.
According to the State Department’s website, as this report adds, the U.S. agencies that used the Disinfo Cloud were: The Census Bureau, U.S. Congress, Department of Defense, Department of Energy, Department of Homeland Security, Department of State, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Office of Global Affairs, Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Treasury Department, U.S. Agency for Global Media, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
The foreign governments that used the Disinfo Cloud were: The Australian Government, the Estonian Government, European Union, and the United Kingdom Government.
“One of the winners of this challenge was the irresponsible, reliability-ratings company NewsGuard,” The Federalist states.
“Like GDI, NewsGuard also champions leftist outlets that peddled the Russia-collusion hoax and wrongly framed the Hunter Biden laptop as Russian disinformation, while branding conservative outlets such as The Federalist as unreliable.”
As noted before, Newsguard partners explicitly with the Department of Defense and the U.S. State Department.
It is openly and explicitly acting as an arm of the federal government to unconstitutionally silence dissent, particularly against the Democratic Party’s political enemies.
The federal government has contracted with at least five private companies or public non-profits to ‘flag’ Americans’ views on everything from Covid-19 to the 2020 election.
In an editorial at Just the News, John Solomon and Greg Piper reported on four of these groups, but the report suggests that the radical left’s operation to chill free speech is just the tip of the iceberg.
“A consortium of four private groups worked with the departments of Homeland Security (DHS) and State to censor massive numbers of social media posts they considered misinformation during the 2020 election, and its members then got rewarded with millions of federal dollars from the Biden administration afterward, according to interviews and documents obtained by Just the News.”
“The Election Integrity Partnership is back in action again for the 2022 midterm elections, raising concerns among civil libertarians that a chilling new form of public-private partnership to evade the First Amendment’s prohibition of government censorship may be expanding,” the report states.
“The consortium is comprised of four member organizations: Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO), the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, and social media analytics firm Graphika,” the article adds.
“It set up a concierge-like service in 2020 that allowed federal agencies like Homeland’s Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and State’s Global Engagement Center to file ‘tickets’ requesting that online story links and social media posts be censored or flagged by Big Tech.”
“Three liberal groups — the Democratic National Committee, Common Cause and the NAACP — were also empowered like the federal agencies to file tickets seeking censorship of content,” the article goes on.
“A Homeland-funded collaboration, the Elections Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center, also had access.”
It should be noted that the U.S. Constitution not only guarantees Americans’ right to free speech, but the right to consume information freely in the marketplace of ideas.
As the Liberty Center’s Harmeet Dhillon explains in an op-ed at Fox News, this coordination between the state and private entities to regulate political speech is blatantly unconstitutional.
“As recently as 2019, the Supreme Court reasoned ‘a private entity can qualify as a state actor,’ subject to First Amendment protections, under three circumstances,” Dhillon pointed out, citing three cases.
“When the private entity performs a traditional, exclusive public function,” see Jackson v. Metropolitan Edison Co. (1974); “When the government compels the private entity to take a particular action,” see Blum v. Yaretsky, (1982); or *“When the government acts jointly with the private entity.” See Lugar v. Edmondson Oil Co. (1982).
Dhillon also pointed at the case filed by the Liberty Center, O’Handley v. Padilla, which tackles California’s coordination with Big Tech to censor criticism of the 2020 election.
“In both cases, the government is working with and directing social media platform proxies to remove user expression that clearly would enjoy the protection of the First Amendment if the government tried to censor it directly. Such joint action runs afoul of established SCOTUS precedent,” Dhillon notes.
The U.S. government is violating the Constitutional rights of Americans.
Congress should also pass legislation explicitly banning the federal government’s participation in America’s marketplace of ideas.
No propaganda, no censorship, and no “fact-checking.”
This would go a long way to restoring Americans’ rights in our Constitutional republic.
