A pair of left-wing billionaires teamed up to launch a new venture tackling media “disinformation” on Tuesday.
Called “Good Information Inc.,” the latest enterprise backed by LinkedIn Founder Reid Hoffman and left-wing financier George Soros will “fund and scale businesses that cut through echo chambers with fact-based information,” according to Axios.
The new group will be led by Tara McGowan, who previously ran the scandal-plagued non-profit ACRONYM which botched the Iowa Democratic caucuses last year. McGowan was married to a senior aide to then-candidate Pete Buttigieg, who, despite emerging from the caucuses with fewer votes than Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders came out on top with the most delegates.
Both Hoffman and McGowan have their own history of amplifying manipulated narratives some might call “disinformation.”
In December 2018, Hoffman apologized for financing a deception campaign in the 2017 Alabama Senate special election race where fake online accounts were made to appear as Russian bots that operated in support of Republicans. The fake personas fed a news cycle of pro-Republican Kremlin interference to a media susceptible to such storylines.
McGowan’s ACRONYM on the other hand, is the liberal dark money group behind the Courier Newsroom, a left-wing outlet.
According to OpenSecrets, “Courier has faced scrutiny for exploiting the collapse of local journalism to spread ‘hyperlocal partisan propaganda.'”
It claims to operate ‘independent from’ ACRONYM and says ownership is shared with ‘other investors.’ But a new tax return obtained by OpenSecrets lists ACRONYM as the full owner of Courier as of April 30, 2019, the most recent date on record. An ACRONYM spokesperson told OpenSecrets that Courier has attracted multiple private investors since that time. Websites affiliated with Courtier Newsroom that appear to be free-standing local news outlets are actually part of a coordinated effort with deep ties to Democratic political operatives.
Axios reported Tuesday that Good Information Inc. will acquire Courier.
“The information crisis we’re in is so much bigger than politics,” McGowan told Axios. Translation: my grip on the narrative is slipping.
The birth of Good Information Inc. marks a new addition to a growing campaign to instill objectivity in media poisoned by member groups’ ideological roots, where objectivity is a synonym for reporting with a progressive lens, and “disinformation” is the marker of a political dissident worthy of censorship.
First they developed the strategy of “fact-checking” to smear opponents operating outside the Overton Window established by legacy journalists. There are no shortage of erroneous “fact-checks” to highlight the ill-faith tactic of reporting, from “fact-checking” slogans on health care in Democrats’ favor during the 2012 election to “fact-checking” South Carolina Republican Sen. Tim Scott’s blackness.
Over the prior decade, the fact-checking industry has exploded with more than 300 fact-checking groups worldwide, 58 in the United States, according to the Duke University Reporters’ Lab. Some have been coopted by leftist elites at Big Tech empires with control over the digital public square to justify desired actions of censorship, from blockbuster reporting on Hunter Biden amid the 2020 election to studies against the Faucian consensus on COVID-19. Facebook has even censored a fact-check of a fake fact-check to a story that was a real fact-check.
The growth of the fact-checking industry has reflected the left’s desire to capture a monopoly on truth. That pursuit has now escalated to a blitzkrieg to discredit their opponents as champions of fake news with new institutions and demands for heightened censorship.
The introduction of the Hoffman, Soros-funded venture to the cause comes as the Aspen Institute’s “Commission on Information” is expected to unveil a new report on “misinformation.” The commission is co-chaired by Katie Couric, who deliberately omitted criticism of NFL kneeling protests from Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Chris Krebs, a former senior official at the Department of Homeland Security official. In December, Krebs proclaimed the 2020 election “the most secure in American history” that featured record-number voting in the form of mail-in ballots with new procedures implemented to facilitate such a high turn-out at the last minute.
Also on the commission is Prince Harry, the Duke of Sussex, who believes the First Amendment is “bonkers,” and is now co-authoring a report to recommend what government and corporate leaders ought to do to enhance their crusade on political dissidents and serve as noble thought-police.
To compliment efforts from the Aspen Institute and Good Information Inc., which cited funding for the NeverTrump website Bulwark as an example of its bipartisanship, a recent Facebook whistleblower who is also a Democrat activist that helped suppress blockbuster reporting on Hunter Biden, has come forward complaining the tech giant doesn’t do enough to suppress conservative content.
The left-wing obsession with fact-checking and censorship serves as nothing more than a relentless campaign to control the facts. Control the facts and control the narrative. Control the narrative, and control the truth.