Key group in government censorship project boasted of suppressing Trump message, defunding newsrooms

Key group in government censorship project boasted of suppressing Trump message, defunding newsrooms

  • May 18, 2025

 Steven Richards, Just the News 

A nonprofit that received federal funding to develop censorship strategies boasted in progress reports to the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) that early tactics had suppressed the reach of Donald Trump’s messaging and reduced advertising by $100 million to news outlets it deemed to be “disinformation” spreaders, according to newly disclosed memos.

The Global Disinformation Index (GDI) was awarded grants through its U.S.-based affiliate, AN Foundation, from NED, a congressionally chartered and taxpayer-funded agency in Washington. The grants were paid to develop strategies on how to fight perceived disinformation in foreign countries.

But GDI’s quarterly progress reports often explicitly boasted about the impact of censorship efforts on American targets and audiences.

GDI’s own index identified 10 American news media outlets as superspreaders of disinformation, almost all of them conservative voices, like The New York Post, The Daily Wire, Newsmax, The Federalist, and The Blaze, among others. The memos mentioned that, combined, the outlets identified by the index lost advertising, but did not identify them by name.

Michael Chamberlain, head of the nonprofit watchdog Protect the Public’s Trust, which obtained the documents under the Freedom of Information Act, said the memos proved that while NED’s effort was billed as targeting overseas propaganda, it ended up routinely focusing on suppressing American speech, mostly right-leaning or conservative in nature.

“The Censorship Industrial Complex was hard at work early in this decade, and they were using taxpayer dollars to do so,” Chamberlain told Just the News in an interview. “They effectively gave funding to GDI to look at disinformation, misinformation in foreign countries, such as countries in Africa, Asia, Latin America—Nigeria, India, Malaysia, Mexico are mentioned specifically in the grant application.”

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