Americans have been experiencing record levels of inflation. The situation at the southern border has taken a significant toll on the nation’s major cities. Schoolchildren are suffering from substandard education in government-run schools.
So, naturally, the Biden administration is sending taxpayer money to yet another initiative that has nothing to do with improving conditions for the American people. A Judicial Watch report highlighted a $50,000 grant going toward training Pakistani journalists to identify and combat “misinformation.”
The Biden administration’s scandal-plagued initiative to combat misinformation has grown into a dynamic global effort run by handpicked “U.S. subject matter experts” and embedded with a mandate of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility (DEIA). In the latest ploy to counter disinformation the administration is investing $50,000 to train journalists in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. “The project will implement a program to build the capacity of 30 mid-to senior level Pakistani journalists/reporters from relatively new print, broadcast, and digital media outlets, to counter misinformation and disinformation in media reporting,” according to a grant announcement posted this week.
The special training will last six months and consist of three-day quarterly workshops conducted by the so-called U.S. subject matter experts selected by the administration. “The program aims to empower journalists with the skills and knowledge to effectively counter misinformation and disinformation, ensuring accurate and responsible reporting,” the government writes in the grant document. “The series of workshops will be designed to cover the following topics: Understanding misinformation/Disinformation; Digital Verification Tools; Ethical Reporting in the Age of Misinformation/Disinformation; Refutation Methods, Cross-Media Collaboration, Balancing Freedom of Press with Content Regulation, and Building Audience Trust.” The trainings will be in person, which means Uncle Sam will transport—and cover the expenses of—the specially chosen experts to the South Asian country thousands of miles away.
That’s right, folks. Uncle Sam is sending your hard-earned money to educate Pakistani journalists about misinformation, which has become one of the left’s favorite buzzwords as of late.
There are several problems with this initiative.
Let’s start with the whole “misinformation” trope. Over recent years, the Biden administration and its close friends and allies in the activist media have been incessantly caterwauling about false information being disseminated on the internet. Federal agencies have been pressuring social media companies like Facebook, X, and others to suppress dissenting viewpoints on election integrity, COVID-19, and a host of other matters.
The problem is that Democrats label as misinformation any opinion, argument, idea, or viewpoint that contradicts their favored narratives. A social media post does not have to be inaccurate to be characterized as misinformation or disinformation. It needs only to present a right-leaning perspective to be labeled in this fashion.
To put it simply, our government is funding Pakistani journalists to carry water for the hard left and combat opinions that are not in line with progressivism.
The other issue is that U.S. taxpayers should not have their money spent to benefit foreign media or most other overseas endeavors. Judicial Watch refers to this move as “a broader effort to divert public funds for a fictitious crisis created by the Biden administration to control information.”
This is accurate. The idea that misinformation and disinformation are rampant on social media is true. But the notion that our government should be meddling in the issue is absurd, given that it is often the purveyor of fake news. We remember COVID-19, right?
But we can see what is happening here, can’t we? Pakistan will not be the only country whose journalists are going to be trained about misinformation at our expense. This is an effort to control information that is spread using online platforms, nothing more, nothing less.
