It began with Rush Limbaugh and moved to Fox News, and then Big Censorship began going after the rest of conservative talk radio. Democrat and leftist pressure campaigns called for advertising boycotts of PJ Media and other alternative conservative media. And eventually, the U.S. government joined in the efforts to shut down conservative thought. This is the story of what a "formal U.S. government program dedicated to killing news websites to kill their advertiser revenue" looks like.
We know about the pressure campaigns by the left. They're why it's not Merck but My Pillow that fills Fox News ad slots and appears in alternative conservative media. These organized programs are why it's Balance of Nature and not Pfizer doing major ad buys on Fox and conservative talk radio. This pressure campaign and censorship are why there aren't A-list advertisers in conservative online publications, but there are photos of somebody's gross teeth in the middle of a serious story about censorship.
When the big-boy advertisers were pressured into ditching conservative media, conservative media had to make up the difference with online or 1-800-fill-in-the-blank advertisers. Boll and Branch, Optima Tax Relief, Lifelock, Snapple — advertisers you know now but that became known only because they were among the few advertisers out there with the guts to buy ads in conservative media. We survive despite the onslaught. But it's rough out there.
This story is about how the government is working to silence the voice of conservative media by conspiring to starve them of crucial ad dollars. The current iteration of the media censorship that reveals the story starts with ol' Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook (Meta).
Mike Benz explains:
The full force of the U.S. government either directly or through these cloak and dagger back channels that they represented would would make it economically impossible for them to avoid falling under the government boot heel and lo and behold in 2019 Mark Zuckerberg tried to reverse a lot of this he was Facebook did a lot of censorship in [2017 and 2018] when Mark starts giving public speeches that he thought censorship on Facebook was going too far.
And who is PJ Media's and Townhall's biggest censor? Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook/Meta.
The government was behind this effort to starve us out for having wrongthink. Some of that you know already from the Twitter Files and Facebook Files, but here's what you may not know. Benz says the U.S. government spreads its contracts with large media outlets and four big advertising firms to keep them strung up like puppets to do its bidding:
In 2021...February 2021, about a month into Biden's term I mean literally a brand new seat— barely warm— the state department USAID put out this 97 page disinformation primer about how to coordinate their whole-of-society counter disinformation assets— their censorship tentacles— into the whole of society and the government tentacles into their private tech platform personnel [and] their tentacles into the Civil Society organizations [and] their tentacles into the media.
Thirty-times in this 97 page document they site advertisers and external engagement to advertising companies in advertiser revenue spend pools and advertising exchanges in order to cut off the money flow to social media platforms and independent websites who don't take the 'best practices counter disinformation codes' that they lay out. [emphasis added]
"That's a formal U.S. government program dedicated to killing news websites to killing their advertiser revenue and it's all there in black and white," an alarmed Benz reports. Emphasis added, because if that's not highlighted and italicized, then I don't know what qualifies to be highlighted and italicized.
Here's how Benz says this censorship program works:
You have the U.S. government contorting the private sector flow of dollars between independent arms length parties news websites and tech platforms and advertisers— and by the way all these advertisers...that are...hugely dependent on US Government contracts.
There are four major advertising agency conglomerates; these are places like Publicis and Omnicron and and they all have billions of dollars in government contracts for for their for their advertising spend—one of them has a $4 billion Pentagon contract to spend for U.S. Army recruiting. Billions of dollars in contracts for HHS...the Department of Education.
He says advertisers are told to play ball with the government because they could lose the government contracts to another ad agency.
Sort of like how the owner of the Washington Post and Amazon plays ball with the CIA. When Jeff Bezos bought the democracy-died-in-darkness Washington Post, the CIA and other government entities bought oodles of server space on AWS for their cloud activity. Seen any nasty stories on CIA misinformation on say, "Russia! Russia! Russia!" lately? No? The Washington Post has been tight with the CIA and intelligence disinformers for decades — just look at the Watergate coverage if you don't believe it, and now it's even worse.
Benz says we only know about this government censorship program because of discovery in a lawsuit that Steven Miller's America First Legal brought. Indeed, this week in a follow-up lawsuit, American First Legal filed another action against multiple U.S. government agencies for hiding documents and other evidence showing the extent of the censorship against news agencies as well as the U.S. government's complicity in censorship in Brazil of the people and former leader Jair Bolsonaro and the arrest of the co-founder of the Telegram social platform.
The U.S. government put on a full-court press, whole-of-government kibosh on the Brazilian leader to defeat him in his re-election and then followed it up with a censorship campaign to silence his supporters from re-forming his political movement. Benz says Bolsonaro was then hit with a phalanx of indictments. He lost the election and is now fighting to stay out of prison. Hey, wait a minute, that sounds familiar.
Worse, like the supplicants they are, the American corporate media joined with the government to begin a complete overhaul of legal First Amendment activity, rebranding differences of opinion as threats to democracy and shape-shifting them into national security threats. It is why questioning election outcomes is now quickly slapped down and prosecuted because election information is now considered a national security issue. These new rules were begun under the Obama administration.
At Wednesday's pressers by Joe Biden and Karine Jean-Pierre, for example, they claimed Trump had committed an act of misinformation when he opined that the Biden administration's response to Hurricane Helene was horrible. By any reasonable measure, it was. But Biden called Trump's response "un-American" and "misinformation." And when Biden was called on to cite particulars, he misquoted the former president — just like the "fact checkers" do at Politifact, which should be Politifarce.
We're in real trouble here, folks.
Recently, I've been breaking down into important stories for PJ Media VIP Members from the wide-ranging interview that former State Department cyber expert, Benz, gave to podcaster Shawn Ryan (See it below). You'll want to read my pieces about Hunter Biden's Secret Job and There Are a Trillion Reasons Why They Want Trump Dead.
Don't miss them. They offer answers to some basic and crucial questions I had about these issues. Why did Hunter Biden get government cover for his obvious illegalities, anyway? Is it because he's a nepo baby, or is it because of something else? There's a real reason why Bush, Cheney, and the left want Trump, shall we say, out of the way. Go read about these.
If you've gotten this far in the story, you know how important alternative media voices are in the public space. That's why we constantly ask you to support PJ Media (sorry). Because of this censorship campaign by our own government and the complicity of the media and advertising industry in censoring us and other conservative outlets, we've taken a colossal fiscal hit in the past few years.
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