The State Department is steering over $37,000 to a Bolivian nonprofit group to launch a “campaign against disinformation” training program for journalists in the South American country, funding documents show.
Thwarting alleged “disinformation” has remained a top priority of the Biden administration, which has come under fire from Republicans for bankrolling left-leaning entities taking aim at conservative websites over their advertising revenue. President Joe Biden’s State Department is now in the process of granting taxpayer dollars until April 2024 to Fundacion para el Periodismo, which translates to Foundation for Journalism, so the Bolivian entity can create a “network of 150 journalists and mass communicators specialized in combating disinformation,” according to grant records reviewed by the Washington Examiner.
TAX PREPARATION INDUSTRY PUSHES BACK AGAINST IRS PILOT PROGRAM
“This is a boondoggle of a junket that taxpayers are having to pay for,” Rep. Ralph Norman (R-SC), who sits on the House Budget Committee, told the Washington Examiner. “Why Bolivia? We’ve got enough disinformation in this country that this administration has done.”
The grant is a window into how the Biden administration has continually sought to make fighting purported “disinformation” a global effort. The State Department, for instance, is currently fielding applications for an award that will see one U.S. group take home $1.9 million to craft a sweeping media education program that will train people in at least 16 European and Central Asian countries on how to counter “disinformation,” documents show.
But GOP lawmakers and conservative watchdog groups have held little regard for the State Department’s decisions in connection to disinformation programs. The agency and its leader, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, have been sharply criticized following multiple Washington Examiner reports earlier this year on how it gave hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Global Disinformation Index, a British group that alleged this outlet and others, such as the New York Post, the Federalist, and RealClearPolitics, have peddled falsehoods about COVID-19 and other topics.
Andres Albarran, a spokesman for the State Department, said in a statement to the Washington Examiner that the agency “regularly supports training for foreign journalists on fact-checking and information literacy.” The spokesman confirmed that “a portion of the grant funding” has already been disbursed in connection to the Bolivian program — which will purportedly only be for journalists in the country.
Fundacion para el Periodismo, which has released government audit documents since 2010 on its website, hosts postgraduate courses and journalism workshops, including a January 2023 program dubbed, “HATE speech strategies and tools to counter it.” Alongside an Argentinian group, the International Fact-Checking Network of the Poynter Institute, and a project under Fundacion para el Periodismo called Bolivia Verifica, it launched a February 2023 project “that seeks to counter disinformation and hate speech.”
Bolivia Verifica, or Bolivia verifies, said that some of its “allies” are Politifact, a nonprofit group under Poynter, and the Thomson Foundation, a London-based media group that has pocketed over $860,000 from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, according to public grant records. Bolivia Verifica, which aims to “fight misinformation and improve democratic participation,” maintains extensive coronavirus-related records on its website, including a January 2022 piece called “The anti-vaccine network that managed to suspend the requirement of vaccination card in Bolivia,” which slammed activists for pressuring Bolivia’s government to pause vaccine card mandates.
The foundation’s verification project also promoted a study in February in Health Feedback titled “Misinformation superspreaders are thriving on Musk-owned Twitter.” The study blasted Twitter CEO Elon Musk for his “personal track record of making unsupported statements” and discussed the idea of the European Union regulating the social media company.
Moreover, the study identified the top “superspreader” accounts as those managed by actor Kevin Sorbo, conservative commentator Liz Wheeler, author Dinesh D’Souza, and 2024 Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Another account called “Catturd” was singled out as a “superspreader.” For instance, the study took aim at Wheeler for a January tweet that “1 in 5,000 young men have heart issues from [the] COVID vax.”
1 in 5,000 young men have heart issues from COVID vax.
Yearly commotia cordis cases? ~15. (RARELY over age 20).
1,598 athlete cardiac arrests since Jan 2021. 69% fatal.
(Average athlete cardiacs before vax was 29/yr).
“Science” ignores this.
That’s why people ask questions.
— Liz Wheeler (@Liz_Wheeler) January 3, 2023
The Bolivian grant is part of the State Department’s broader “public diplomacy program” that aims to “enhance national security by informing and influencing foreign publics.” Fundacion para el Periodismo did not return a Washington Examiner request for comment on how it intends to use the federal dollars.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
“The problem here is that the State Department engaged in ‘censorship laundering,'” Mike Benz, ex-Trump State Department deputy assistant secretary of international communications and information technology, told the Washington Examiner.
“Programs designed to target disinformation abroad end up beefing up programs and partnerships targeting U.S. citizen discourse at home,” added Benz, now head of Foundation for Freedom Online, a free speech watchdog.
