Thank you, Sec. Rubio! So-called fact checker Newsguard finally cut off from taxpayer funds

Last-minute rebranding wasn’t enough to stop Secretary of State Marco Rubio from cutting off a taxpayer-funded source of income for the “self-anointed arbiters of truth” at Newsguard.

As billionaire Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter had proved pivotal in exposing the suppression of content and shadow banning rampant on Big Tech platforms, so too had the second election of President Donald Trump appeared crucial in the ongoing fight to preserve the First Amendment.

Toward that end, last week, Rubio had announced the shutdown of the State Department’s Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference office (R/FIMI) that had previously been known as the Global Engagement Center (GEG), which, according to the Washington Times’ editorial board, was responsible for funding organizations like Newsguard.

“Taxpayer grant money went to outfits such as NewsGuard, which purports to provide ‘reliability ratings’ for news outlets. These self-anointed arbiters of truth consistently give right-of-center publications lower scores so other members of the censorship cabal can point to that grade and force advertisers to drop their support for ‘low-rated’ media outlets,” detailed the op-ed before slamming then-President Joe Biden’s administration for support of the activist-led effort to direct money to nongovernmental organizations that claimed conservatives were spreading so-called “disinformation.”

In his announcement shutting down the GEC, Rubio had said, “Freedom of speech and expression have been a cornerstone of what it means to be an American citizen. For centuries, the United States served as a beacon of hope for millions of people around the world. Over the last decade though, individuals in America have been slandered, fired, charged, and even jailed for simply voicing their opinions.”

Today, @SecRubio announced how we’re protecting and championing free speech at the State Department. pic.twitter.com/q5v5ZYvdOz

— Department of State (@StateDept) April 16, 2025

“That is not an America our Founding Fathers would recognize,” he added of the center that changed its name near the end of Biden’s term after Congress had pulled its funding.

For as long as Newsguard had been bolstering a preferred narrative as co-founder Steven Brill had down during a 2020 CNBC where he’d said of the Hunter Biden laptop story, “My personal opinion is, there’s a high likelihood that this story is a hoax, maybe even a hoax perpetrated by the Russians,” the team at BizPac Review has been sounding the alarm.

Shortly after the election that year when corporate media had employed a strategy of “clever wordplay … claiming, as NewsGuard does, that ‘there is no evidence that there was substantial voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election,’” polling on non-Republicans who questioned the integrity of the election begged the question, “But who gets to define the meaning of ‘substantial?’”

More recently, journalist Sharyl Attkisson had blasted the “fake factcheck group” after complaints of allegedly “untrue information” on her website.

“No offense, but trying to respond to someone who lacks the knowledge to understand the difference between the true state of informed scientific thought vs the untrue propaganda pushed out by the medical establishment … is like explaining that cigarettes can cause lung cancer to someone still operating off what the govt. and scientific establishment insisted was true through 1963,” she wrote while ripping into the Newsguard rating system.

Sharyl Attkisson rejects ‘fact-checker’ NewsGuard’s support of ‘untrue propaganda’ https://t.co/EWBTwr36V9

— BPR (@BIZPACReview) December 27, 2024

Similarly, well before his enthusiastic endorsement of Trump and his administration involvement as head of the Department of Government Efficiency, free speech absolutist Musk had called for Newsguard to be disbanded after the organization’s involvement in developing the European Union’s disinformation code had been exposed by Foundation for Freedom Online Executive Director Mike Benz.

As some 50 full-time employees were canned while shutting down the center saved roughly $50 million per year, in addition to the priceless value of protecting free speech, Rubio had spoken with Benz and said, “There’s two reasons to do it. I think people were harmed. And the other is to make sure this never happens again … That’s why accountability is important.”

Accountability had also come when British Prime Minister Keir Starmer had visited the White House in February and Vice President J.D. Vance had called him out to his face over “infringements” on free speech that actually affect, not just the British, which, of course, what the British do in their own country is up to them, but has also affected American technology companies and by extension, American citizens.”

Staff Writer

Native of Brooklyn, NY, Kevin Haggerty is a graduate of Hunter College where he studied Cultural Anthropology and Geography. An avid reader and truth seeker, he currently resides in Texas with his wife and their dog and, when he isn’t researching current events and their impacts, you’ll find him spending time with friends and family or working on his next novel.

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