The press is supposed to serve as a watchdog over the government, exposing government abuses of power, not be the government’s lapdog. So the press should criticize the government when it misbehaves. But the government’s allies may label such criticism as “disinformation.” A recent example of this is the government-funded “Global Disinformation Index,” which blacklists news outlets critical of the Biden administration in an effort to starve them of advertising dollars. Meanwhile, it praises progressive pro-Biden “news” outlets such as Huffpost that have lost libel lawsuits after repeatedly making false claims, giving them its highest ratings despite their history of factual errors because of how they gullibly repeat Biden administration talking points praising Biden and attacking his critics.

As Professor Michael Munger notes, “the worrisome thing” about this “is that the U.S. government pays substantial sums to a foreign organization whose literal, self-professed job is to pressure advertisers to boycott publications that….disagree with the U.S. government.” As the New York Sun notes, the London-based “Global Disinformation Index defines ‘disinformation’ as narratives that are ‘adversarial’ to democratic institutions” — that is, the government — “or at-risk groups.”

As a result, GDI views publications that publish criticism of the government to be “misinformation,” even when they make no factual errors. GDI claims that the 10 “riskiest” news outlets for disinformation are the New York Post, Reason, the American Spectator, Newsmax, the Federalist, the American Conservative, One America News, the Blaze, the Daily Wire, and RealClearPolitics. These are all either conservative publications that criticize the Biden administration, except for Reason, a libertarian magazine that criticizes civil-liberties violations by both Democrats and Republicans, and RealClearPolitics, a political news and polling-data aggregator.