Media

Academia

A battle over religion and schools in Oklahoma could decide the future of the First Amendment

April 4, 2025 Lawrence Hurley via NBC News 4
Under Walters’ watch, the state approved the first ever religious virtual public charter school, a provocative move that is now before the Supreme Court, which will hear oral arguments on the constitutionality of the move next month. He has also proposed placing Bibles in schools, a move that was recently blocked by the state Supreme Court, and is seeking to add more Christian-related themes to the curriculum, including information about the Ten Commandments.

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Censorship

How Big Pharma’s Favorite Ad Agency Helped Create NewsGuard

April 1, 2025 FFO Staff via Foundation for Freedom Online 1
Studies show NewsGuard’s ratings are heavily skewed against anti-establishment media sources. Its advertiser exclusion lists include some of the most prominent destinations for non-mainstream news, including Newsmax, Breitbart News, The Federalist, and One America News. While conservative websites bear the brunt, left-wing websites with an anti-establishment, anti-war tendency, like Consortium News, have also found themselves on NewsGuard’s blacklists.

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Censorship

Biden admin’s ‘vast censorship enterprise’ with help of NGOs slated for key hearing, lawmaker says

March 25, 2025 Julia Johnson via Fox News 1
“The Biden Administration created a vast censorship enterprise, comprised of a sprawling network of federal agencies and NGOs that have been working overtime to censor Americans’ speech. From special reporting portals to the White House press secretary admitting at the podium that they were flagging posts to be taken down, the level of coordination to subvert the First Amendment and remove disfavored speech was beyond what most imagined,” the Missouri senator told Fox News Digital in an exclusive statement previewing the hearing. 

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Politics

Trump Guts International Propaganda Agencies

March 19, 2025 Paul Dragu via The New American 1
Perhaps Connor O’Keeffe of the Mises Institute said it best:

Voice of America absolutely should go away. Employees and supporters of VOA like to describe the outlet’s purpose as providing “objective” and “balanced” reporting on current events. But dig a little deeper and you’ll find out that what VOA staffers are really passionate about is “promoting democracy” abroad and helping in a global fight against authoritarianism. … It’s a propaganda outlet that we’re all forced to fund. It is one part of the broader regime change apparatus that got a lot of exposure earlier in the year with the gutting of USAID. Funding foreign propaganda campaigns is not our responsibility. Your average American family does not have a moral obligation to send part of their paycheck to try and turn people in Belarus against their government.

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Propaganda

An Ex-Jihadist Working for the Government is Smearing Trump

March 10, 2025 Daniel Greenfield via Jihad Watch 1
The VOA, an arm of the government, was promoting Russiagate and unsubtly nudging voters to turn against Trump during three presidential elections in violation of its charter and mission. And the man behind some of these articles had been recruited by a related arm of the government back in the 1980s during his days as a Jihadist to engage in a war of propaganda. Now that propaganda was being aimed within the United States against the president.

And it’s still going on.

A propaganda machine once aimed at America’s enemies is now run by our enemies and aimed at us. The story of Masood Farivar shows why the Voice of America needs urgent reform.

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Politics

WHCA Cared More About Protecting Biden Than Defending The First Amendment

March 3, 2025 Brianna Lyman via The Federalist 2
The WHCA was notably silent when The Federalist, along with The Daily Wire, sued the State Department for blacklisting conservative media outlets. And as The Federalist co-founder and CEO Sean Davis pointed out, “When the Biden White House demanded that big tech companies like Facebook and Google censor conservative media outlets for the crime of critically reporting on the Biden White House, the WHCA didn’t object.”

When former President Joe Biden was caught relying on a cheat sheet with pre-arranged questions, the WHCA stayed silent about the lack of “free” press happening. Ironically, one of the reporters on the cheat sheet, the Los Angeles Times’ Courtney Subramanian, was later elected to the WHCA Board in 2023.

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Legal

FCC to Brief House Republicans on ‘Unprecedented’ George Soros Scheme to Control 200 Radio Stations

February 28, 2025 Sean Moran via Breitbart News 1
Federal law requires applicants with excessive foreign ownership to file a petition for declaratory ruling at the same time that they seek FCC approval for the relevant license transfers, they must then complete that process before the FCC can approve the assignment of licenses, and that process must enable Executive Branch agencies with national security and specific policy expertise to weigh in.

Carr continued, “Did they obtain approval from the FCC for their excessive foreign ownership? No, they did not. Did the Applicants afford the Executive Branch agencies with national security and relevant policy expertise an opportunity to consider their application as well as the source and amount of foreign investment? No, they did not.

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Free Speech

The Department of Defense has allocated millions of dollars to create phony social media profiles the government could turn against Americans.

February 25, 2025 Logan Washburn via The Federalist 4
While this may appear benign, it is a shocking admission — the government sponsored a massive network of fake social media accounts that it could manipulate, capable of capturing users’ data.

“This DARPA contract involved the development and deployment of technology to create and manage fake social media accounts at scale,” The Federalist’s CEO Sean Davis posted on X. “This is far more insidious than a simple government payment to a news agency.”

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