In late October, the liberal anti-establishment investigative site Consortium News filed a historic suit against the United States of America and Newsguard Industries, describing a state-funded effort to label, defame, and stigmatize “media organizations that oppose or dissent from American foreign and defense policy.”

Now, a pair of conservative media outlets, The Federalist and The Daily Wire, have filed a bookend suit to match the Consortium News action. This time the defendant is the Global Engagement Center, the State Department organization ostensibly dedicated to countering “foreign state and non-state propaganda.” Much as Consortium News alleged the Pentagon funded Newsguard to censor its critics, the Federalist/Daily Wire action alleges the State Department sponsored Newsguard and the U.K.-based Global Disinformation Index as “censorship enterprises” targeting domestic speech, in direct violation of its charter. …

That this is necessary speaks to something inherently malodorous about these efforts, and is a reason we should all be looking forward to the discovery process in this case, and in the Consortium News proceedings. These suits are for all of us, and we all have an interest in how they turn out.

[You’d better believe we have an interest in these cases. Taibbi has a lot more to say, very specifically, about how the State Department used GDI and Newsguard to incentivize market punishment for sites critical of the Biden administration and the Left in general. — Ed]