Foundation for Freedom Online reports that Publicis Groupe has been awarded government contracts worth more than $500 million.
According to the Foundation’s report, Publicis’s subsidiary, Plowshare Group LLC, holds a contract worth $394.2 million with the Department of Health and Human Services for the CDC’s national tobacco education campaign.
The French advertising conglomerate’s government payout has raised serious concerns about state-sponsored censorship. Publicis is one of the “big five” advertising agencies in the world, with clients such as Disney, Samsung, Pfizer, Toyota, and other companies.
Publicis is an original shareholder of NewsGuard and a founding supporter. This for-profit group claims to rate news agencies on their accuracy and reliability.
Steve King, an executive at Publicis, served as a member of NewsGuard’s board until last year.
Publicis also has ties with the media monitor.
According to the Foundation, NewsGuard also received an investment from Thomas H. Glocer. He is a former Reuters CEO and member of the Council on Foreign Relations, as well as a director with Publicis Groupe.
Publicis’s partnership with NewsGuard has been a boon to the agency in its ability to secure contracts from the Biden Administration.
The Foundation for Freedom claims that NewsGuard “exerts its influence over the media by blacklisting and whitelisting”.
Publicis sells the exclusion lists to the advertising industry who created them, suffocating financially the blacklisted sites. These include Newsmax, Breitbart News, The Federalist, Prager U, One America News, and many more.
The House Committee on Oversight and Accountability opened an investigation last year into NewsGuard’s alleged involvement in a government-funded “censorship campaign”. This was allegedly to discredit and demonetize media outlets by sharing their ratings with advertisers.
The committee discovered that the Pentagon, State Department, and other federal agencies, as well as the European Union, funded the company. The findings of the Foundation for Freedom were similar.
The report stated, “The advertising industry has been the industry of choice for the censorship industries to exert pressure on.”
NewsGuard, a left-wing publication, has faced accusations of bias since its inception and for violating standards of journalism that it purports to adhere to.
In three studies, the Media Research Center found that NewsGuard consistently ranked conservative media lower than leftwing outlets.
NewsGuard, founded by Steven Brill in 2018, was created. Brill has been a Democratic Party activist and donor for many years and has supported both Barack Obama’s and Hillary Clinton’s campaigns. Jonathan Turley, a legal expert, has described Brill as a “diehard liberal.”
Brill was founded by Gordon Crovitz. He is a former Wall Street Journal Publisher whose wife, Minky Worden, is a senior leader at Human Rights Watch. This organization is leading the international effort to have Benjamin Netanyahu, Israeli Prime Minister, arrested by the ICC.
Turley claims that NewsGuard, a sophisticated system of censorship, should not be funded by federal funds. Instead, the money should only go to “groups involved in censoring or rating sites.”
