That’s quite an ironic masthead, as you will soon see.

Reason Magazine reports:

The Global Disinformation Index (GDI) is a British organization that evaluates news outlets’ susceptibility to disinformation. The ultimate aim is to persuade online advertisers to blacklist dangerous publications and websites.

One such publication, according to GDI’s extremely dubious criteria, is Reason.

GDI’s recent report on disinformation notes that the organization exists to help “advertisers and the ad tech industry in assessing the reputational and brand risk when advertising with online media outlets and to help them avoid financially supporting disinformation online.”

The U.S. government evidently values this work; in fact, the State Department subsidizes it. The National Endowment for Democracy—a nonprofit that has received $330 million in taxpayer dollars from the State Department—contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to GDI’s budget, according to an investigation by The Washington Examiner‘s Gabe Kaminsky.

The other publications on the US government supported blacklist, which lists the 10 “riskiest online news outlets,”are the New York Post, Real Clear Politics, The Daily Wire, The Blaze, One America News Network, The Federalist, Newsmax, The American Spectator, and The American Conservative.

No viewpoint discrimination there!

This is an absolute First Amendment breach. Great Britain has no such principle in its unwritten constitution, so the U.S., under Democratic—aka “aspiring totalitarian”—rule, is outsourcing its censorship. The revelation should be front page, “BREAKING!” news. It isn’t—except in the blacklisted publications. See? They really are a threat!

It’s not like Reason is StormFront—indeed, none of the “risky” news sources are any more unreliable than CNN, and most considerably more reliable, especially Reason. I am no libertarian, but I have found its reporting and analysis invaluable and thought-provoking since the time, years ago, when I subscribed to the hard-copy version. Moreover it is the current home of The Volokh Conspiracy, one of the very best legal analysis and legal ethics sites—it even covered my defamation lawsuit from Walt! Prof. Volokh just succeeded in quashing an unconscionable “hate speech” censorship law in New York.

No wonder the State Department considers Reason a threat.

This is mordantly amusing:

It is also worth noting that GDI ranked the 10 so-called “lowest-risk” online news outlets, which include: NPR, The Associated Press, The New York Times, ProPublica, Insider, USA Today, The Washington Post, BuzzFeed News, The Wall Street Journal, and HuffPost. Many of these publications frequently produce admirable journalism. But they are not immune to disinformation—HuffPost, for instance, repeatedly suggested that the New York Post‘s infamous Hunter Biden laptop story was Russian misdirection.

Heck, why not just announce that all left-biased new sources should be believed without hesitation, and anything else is “disinformation”?

After Reason reported on the scandal that the good news sources ignored, Prof. Turley weighed in, properly horrified:

The inclusion of Reason in the listing is absurd and shows an utter lack of objective and reliable criteria….What is more troubling is the funding of the United States government for a group seeking to target conservative sites and deter advertisers from supporting them. I recently testified on the disclosures of the Twitter Files and the confirmation of coordination by the FBI and other federal agencies with social media companies in censoring citizens. I noted that the Administration played the public for chumps. After yielding to an outcry over the creation of the Disinformation Governance Board, the Administration disbanded it. It never mentioned that a far larger censorship effort was being carried out with an estimated 80 federal employees in targeting citizens and others. While the GDI effort is smaller in comparison and effect, it is an additional facet of this effort. It is not known if the Administration has other programs of this kind and the Democrats continue to vehemently oppose any investigation into these free speech concerns.

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Pointer: Steve Witherspoon.