“GARM” Is New Version Of Old Tactic To Starve Conservative Media of Revenue To Silence Dissent

“GARM” Is New Version Of Old Tactic To Starve Conservative Media of Revenue To Silence Dissent

You probably never heard of GARM. It’s the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, which describes its mission as “a cross-industry initiative established by the World Federation of Advertisers to address the challenge of harmful content on digital media platforms and its monetization via advertising.” WFA members include global brands such as McDonald’s, Exxon, Visa, Adidas and dozens more.

What could be wrong with preventing “harmful” digital content? You and I may have been born at night, but we weren’t born last night. We are so old we remember how various “anti-disinformation” entities actually served to silence online speech with which they disagreed.

The hook with GARM is that it does so by wielding the power of the largest advertisers on the planet to deprive unapproved content and platforms of advertising revenue.

The House Judiciary Committee investigated anti-competitive behavior by GARM, and issued a report setting forth findings that GARM colluded “to suppress voices and views disfavored by the leading marketers at the world’s largest companies and advertising agencies,” with conservative media a target, as was X (Twitter) due to it’s free speech policies.

The NY Post covered the story because it was among the media targeted:

The new report establishes links between the WFA’s “responsible media” initiative and the taxpayer-funded Global Disinformation Index (GDI), a London-based group that in 2022 unveiled an ad blacklist of 10 news outlets whose opinion sections tilted conservative or libertarian, including The Post, RealClearPolitics and Reason magazine.

Documents acquired by Congress show that some GARM members thought the GDI’s blacklist was bogus — with one employee writing that it was “bewildering” that the group “somehow placed the NYPost as ‘at most risk’ paper in the USA for disinformation.”

But additional documents show that the GDI’s blacklist was nonetheless promoted to WFA members as a tool to gauge misinformation and demonize disfavored outlets.

“[W]e do advise that platforms, ad-tech, agencies, use independent fact checkers to weed out mis-and-disinfo from supply chain and ad buys. GDI is one of many — NewsGuard, IFCN, etc,” Rob Rakowitz, WFA’s initiative lead for the GARM program, wrote in response to the employee who complained.

Ben Shapiro testified at the hearing:

This is now. But Legal Insurrection has been around for over 15 years, and in that time we documented and investigated similar the efforts to starve conservative media of revenue as a tactic, dating back to our coverage of the Stop Rush effort organized by Media Matters, Media Matters astroturfed the Limbaugh secondary boycott (March 15, 2012).

That blog post of ours led Rush to tweet for the first time, The Blog Post That Drove Rush Limbaugh to Tweet (The Atlantic, March 15, 2012):

Rush Limbaugh has had a personal Twitter account since 2009, but it has taken him over three years to send his first tweet. He wanted to share a blog post concerning the boycott of advertisers on his show.

Here’s how the opposition astroturfs advertisers. Smart piece from @LegInsurrection Pls. Retweet bit.ly/y6Tnnv @mmfa

— Rush Limbaugh (@limbaugh) March 15, 2012

The link goes to a post on Legal Insurrection, a blog run by Cornell law professor William Jacobson linking the  advertisers who have dropped Limbaugh’s show to the liberal advocates against right-wing media Media Matters. Jacobson argues:

The secondary boycott of Rush Limbaugh advertisers is portrayed in the media as a reaction to a groundswell of public outrage.  In fact, the secondary boycott was initiated by and driven by Media Matters, which had a “Stop Limbaugh” campaign on the shelf waiting to be used, and was executed by Angelo Carusone, Director of Online Strategy for Media Matters.

So we have some deep background on this topic. We weren’t born last night.

So we wrote an op-ed in the NY Post about how GARM is just a new incarnation of an old tactic. The NY Post highlighted our Op-Ed on the Homepage:

And as part of a full-page spread about GARM in the print edition:

Here’s an excerpt from our Op-Ed, GARM’s silencing of conservative media could potentially be devastating:

Bringing dozens of global brands together under one umbrella makes GARM particularly dangerous because collective action magnifies the impact.

But the strategy of choking conservative media of revenue is not new at all.

At our website, Legal Insurrection, we have tracked and investigated the assault on conservative advertising revenue for over a decade.

The most successful innovator of the tactic was Angelo Carusone, who identified that risk-averse advertisers were a vulnerable pressure point on conservative media.

Calling for the public to boycott conservative media was not working, as conservative talk radio and Fox News personalities were too popular.

Rather than trying to win the political argument, deplatforming conservatives by starving them of revenue became the business model.

Carusone launched the “Stop Beck” campaign in 2010-2011, claiming he drove more than 300 advertisers from Glenn Beck’s Fox News show.

Carusone then parlayed the advertiser pressure tactic into a position at Media Matters for America, where he launched the “Stop Rush” effort to drive advertisers from Rush Limbaugh’s syndicated radio show.

That effort, which in many ways was AstroTurfed by Media Matters, failed after several years of harassment of Limbaugh advertisers.

Media Matters also led a decade-long campaign of “Guerilla Warfare and Sabotage” (its own terminology) against Fox News and conservative media. In later years, Media Matters’ efforts spawned copycat groups such as Sleeping Giants and Check My Ads targeting conservative media.

Carusone is now the president of Media Matters, which Musk, in another lawsuit, alleges manipulated X searches to drive away advertisers.

What started with Stop Beck has morphed into an industry trying to deplatform not only conservatives, but free-speech advocates as well.

GARM, like many similar predecessors, has aspirations beyond squelching ad revenue.

It actively works to establish itself as the ultimate arbiters of allowable speech.

From Beck to Rush to Fox News to Musk, leftist activists are not trying to win the argument, they are trying to deprive conservatives and free-speech advocates of platforms on which to make their arguments.

Ultimately, they are trying to deprive you, the audience, of hearing those arguments and coming to conclusions on your own.

GARM presents a particular threat because of the collective global brands it represents, and the fact that until now it operated sight unseen.

But it’s the same well-worn tactic of trying to deplatform and destroy conservative media rather than debating issues on the merits, in order to control what you are allowed to say and what you are allowed to hear.

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