source:https://nypost.com/2024/07/11/us-new...isinformation/

A damning new congressional report shows how a little-known advertising cartel that controls 90% of global marketing spending supported efforts to defund news outlets and platforms including The Post — at points urging members to use a blacklist compiled by a shadowy government-funded group that purports to guard news consumers against “misinformation.”

The World Federation of Advertisers (WFA), which reps 150 of the world’s top companies — including ExxonMobil, GM, General Mills, McDonald’s, Visa, SC Johnson and Walmart — and 60 ad associations sought to squelch online free speech through its Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) initiative, the House Judiciary Committee found in an interim report released Wednesday.

Targets:
-The new report establishes links between the WFA’s “responsible media” initiative and the taxpayer-funded Global Disinformation Index (GDI), a London-based group that in 2022 unveiled an ad blacklist of 10 news outlets whose opinion sections tilted conservative or libertarian, including The Post, RealClearPolitics and Reason magazine.

-Billionaire Elon Musk was one of the WFA’s top targets, according to the interim report. “Documents obtained by the Committee show that GARM told its members to boycott advertising on Twitter after Mr. Musk’s purchase of the platform on October 28, 2022,” the report says. A GARM member recommended that companies “stop all paid advertisement” on Twitter after Musk bought the platform, which he renamed X, with vows to respect diverse viewpoints after widespread political censorship under prior management.

-Comedian, UFC commentator and podcaster Joe Rogan was among the top targets of GARM and member ad associations, including GroupM, due to his encouragement to young listeners to rethink getting COVID-19 vaccine shots. “In late-January 2022,” the report says, “Spotify met with Joe Barone, Managing Partner Brand Safety Americas, of GroupM … to discuss so-called misinformation on Spotify.”

-It wasn’t just politics that drew the wrath of the WFA and GARM. In November 2021, after Kyle Rittenhouse was acquitted of homicide and other charges in the deaths of two rioters during violence in Kenosha, Wis. in the summer of 2020, a GARM member attacked Fox News’ coverage of the case. “[W]e can have all the diversity initiatives in the world, but we are fatally undermined if we do not call these narratives on ‘mainstream’ broadcast media as well as on the platforms,” this person wrote. A WFA consultant responded on the same email chain that the cable news giant had been “praising or calling for the murder of protestors.”

There’s this other little thing called common sense.