Tim Kilcullen’s second Media Research Center report attempting to dishonestly smear media literacy programs as “censorship” is just as biased and shoddy as his first one — and there’s much more to examine since we left off. Kilcullen went on to rage against another partner:
Another official partner is more overtly partisan: Moms Demand Action (MDA). MDA is a radical gun-confiscation group which has pledged to “fully embrace diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI).” MDA, a part of the umbrella organization Everytown for Gun Safety, is backed by activist billionaire Michael Bloomberg, the owner of Bloomberg News and former New York City Mayor . (Part 1 of this report detailed how Rhode Island Lab’s “affiliated faculty” member Lauren McClanahan, a graduate of the State Department series of seminars, had students in her Bellingham, Washington class create a propaganda video advocating for donations to the Everytown for Gun Safety network.)
While most taxpayers would likely be alarmed that the DHS-created “Courageous RI” partnered with a hyper-partisan activist group like MDA, such an alliance is emblematic of the Biden administration’s “whole of society approach.” The Rhode Island Lab and Media Literacy Now are able to act as a conduit between the government and the more extreme elements of the left in order to enact “systemic change in K-12 education.”
Unsurprisingly, Kilcullen offered no evidence to back up his smear that MDA is “radical” or backs “gun confiscation.” He then served up his employer’s dishonest “censorship” talking points:
The Rhode Island Lab article further argued in favor of censorship along the lines of what the Biden administration has been accused of: strongarming social media companies to silence dissident speech. The blog suggested that “leaders have the capacity to stand up against false narratives in real time, flag inflammatory content for removal by social media companies, and provide non-partisan online spaces for intercommunal engagement.”
This same DHS-funded article wrongly claimed that “the political right enjoys higher amplification” on social media “compared to the political left.” This is untrue. As MRC’s CensorTrack.org shows, conservatives are overwhelmingly more likely to be censored than those on the left.
In fact, CensorTrack is worthless as anything but a partisan number-generating tool. Because CensorTrack collects only examples of “censorship” involving right-wingers, Kilcullen cannot legitimately cite it to assert that “conservatives are overwhelmingly more likely to be censored than those on the left.” In fact, the content that social media companies have subjected to moderation are lies and misinformation, not “dissident speech,” and Kilcullen doesn’t back up his assertion. And he repeated his defense of Rush Limbaugh:
Another of the blogs even disparaged the late Presidential Medal of Freedom-winner Rush Limbaugh, commenting that “Donald Trump was also adopting the shock-jock style that Rush Limbaugh built into a cultural phenomenon, including his misogynistic and racist comments, conspiracy theories, and grievances.” The piece also attacked Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) as “the extreme fringe of the right wing,” and remarked, “It turns out even Fox Media has limits on how much misogyny and racism it will tolerate from its stars–witness the canceling of Tucker Carlson’s show last week.”
Again, Kilcullen did not dispute the accuracy of those assessments. He resumed attacking NewsGuard and Ad Fontes:
The State Department seminars focused on bringing longstanding German censorship strategies to American classrooms. Among the strategies educators were instructed to employ were using videogames to teach children to reject so-called “misinformation,” instructing students to rely on hopelessly biased, anti-conservative fact checking sites like PolitiFact and Snopes and training educators how to use censorship tools like Ad Fontes and NewsGuard to block student access to websites with dissident views. This last aspect is particularly disturbing, as Media Literacy Now — the Rhode Island Lab’s fiscal agent for the grant — received 10 percent kickbacks from certain Ad Fontes subscriptions.
In Courageous RI’s formal announcement, the Rhode Island Lab explained that for Phase 2 of the program, it would conduct a series of seminars for American educators. These seminars, which are currently being conducted, mirror what was done at the State Department events covered in Part 1 of this report — training educators how to implement “media literacy” in American classrooms. However, unlike with the State Department seminars, the work is being done behind closed doors, but evidence shows that these seminars are still being conducted in a hyper-partisan manner.
The application for the DHS seminars reveals that potential participants were asked to rank their ideology on a 1–10 scale from “Strong Red Conservative” to “Strong Blue Liberal.” A teacher who participated in this program told the Media Research Center (MRC) she believed that, after self-identifying as a “conservative,” she was deliberately confined to a breakout group controlled by the director of the Rhode Island Lab so as to limit her access to the most damning material.
Kilcullen refused to identify this person or offer any corroborating evidence for her story. He went on to repeat his biased assertion that media literacy is “a euphemism for censorship” and perpetuated his earlier portrayal of Germans as Nazi-esque censors:
Among the educational programs the Rhode Island Lab promoted at the State Department seminars was one crafted by the organization MEET Tolerance (MEET is an acronym signifying “Media Education for Equity and Tolerance”). As detailed in Part 1 of this report, the MEET Tolerance curriculum explained how to use “children as media producers,” where young students would be “[a]dvocating intercultural values and social justice through [their] own media productions and practices.” Part of MEET Tolerence’s curriculum is a strategy developed by socialist German politician Konstantin von Notz to reward grade school students with prizes for crafting Instagram posts as part of a seemingly grassroots push for censorship laws.
This German astro-turf model, titled the “Youth Media Contest, is “Phase 3” of the TVTP grant program. The Rhode Island Lab is currently offering cash prizes to “high school and college students” who create social media posts “designed to raise public awareness of the harms of hateful extremist propaganda.” In order to “win” their payment, children and young adults must produce “videos, billboards, memes, screencasts, infographics, and simple video productions” to “reduce the power of harmful propaganda and disinformation.”
In its grant proposal to the DHS, the Rhode Island Lab boasted that this third phase would create “[p]ublic demand for media literacy in public education,” as “[p]ropaganda can be used in socially-beneficial ways.” The Rhode Island Lab predicts that as a long-term result of Phase 3’s astroturf push for “media literacy” mandates, “[p]ublic demand for media literacy in public education [will be] increased.”
As Part 1 of this report detailed, Media Literacy Now defines “media literacy” as “a tool to create the society we all deserve: one that nurtures racial equity, social justice, and true democracy. Media literacy equals cultural change.” Its quest for “media literacy” is based on the idea that making too much information available to the public is inherently a threat. Media Literacy Now subscribes to the fringe idea that society is threatened by an “infodemic.” This theory defines “[a]n infodemic [as] an overabundance of information,” and this overabundance could only be corrected by having “media and social media platforms … collaborate with the UN system with Member States and with each other” to censor information with which the collective disagrees.
Kilcullen didn’t explain what, exactly, is purportedly censorious about teaching people to be discerning about the media they consume — unless the goal of him and his fellow right-wingers is to flood the political space with shoddy work, then cry “censorship!” whenever that shoddiness is pointed out. After all, that’s been the MRC’s playbook in attacking NewsGuard and Ad Fontes — portraying the lower scores they gave to some right-wing outlets as evidence of political bias but offering no relevant evidence that those scores weren’t deserved.
On that note, one of Kilcullen’s final “recommendations” is to send parents to attack those purportedly “unscrupulous censorship firms”: “Parents should call their local school boards and check if Ad Fontes and/or NewsGuard have been imposed in their children’s classrooms. If they have, parents should demand their removal.” He also huffed that “Congress must defund all domestic censorship programs, including the TVTP program that targets Sec. Mayorkas’s critics and finance anti-American activism” — but he hid the fact that he lied about the TVTP program.
This was followed by the usual promotion of this wildly biased report. Tim Graham’s Jan. 17 podcast portrayed Kilcullen’s hit job as a “deep state” conspiracy: “But complain about anonymous bureaucrats waging policy war within the ‘deep state,’ and you’re defined as one of those conspiracy kooks who could turn violent.” He also referenced “German-Inspired Censorship” in his headline.
A Jan. 18 post by Gabriela Pariseau touted how “WMAL host Chris Plante highlighted a recent MRC Study exposing how the federal government is using taxpayer money from the Department of Homeland Security’s domestic terrorist prevention program to target conservatives” and “read the Daily Wire’s write-up of the MRC’s report over the airwaves,” then closed with fearmongering: “Free Speech is not their thing, The Bill of Rights is not their thing and they’re using our taxpayer money to launch propaganda efforts from universities and government agencies. These are dangerous people, they’re not on our side. They’re not liberals. They’re the left.”
Kilcullen’s boss, Brent Bozell, did his own radio hit with right-wing host Larry O’Connor, ranting that he federal government is “using fascist tactics against its own people, funded by its own people.” Writer Tom Olohan portrayed Bozell as ridiculously framing media literacy as “leftist indoctrination,” quoting him as saying that ““Media literacy means-if you challenge climate change, you are illiterate.” O’Connor’s show is where Bozell went full Nazi in smearing the program the previous week, calling it an “Aryan youth movement.”
The MRC also found a compliant right-wing senator to parrot the narrative, as described in a Jan. 18 post by Catherine Salgado: “Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) demanded answers from Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas following MRC Free Speech America’s bombshell report uncovering how the agency used taxpayer funds to push for censorship of conservatives.”
Finally, an anonymously written Feb. 7 post featured an early champion of the program reneging on it:
The state representative and former house minority leader who headlined the launch event of a Biden administration-funded censorship and indoctrination program is now disavowing the project after an MRC exposè on the subject.
Rhode Island Rep. Brian Newberry (R) once supported a so-called “media literacy” initiative created with over $700,000 from President Joe Biden’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and initially developed by Biden’s Department of State. Now, the Rhode Island Center for Freedom & Prosperity has revealed that Newberry is calling for government officials to abandon the scandal-plagued program.
But it’s not “scandal-plagued.” The only “scandals” that have been seen are in the overheated and biased rhetoric manufactured by Kilcullen.