MRC Manufactures Wildly Biased Report Portraying Media Literacy As ‘Censorship’

Last year, the Media Research Center conducted a so-called study of a government grant program it claimed was “an effort to destroy conservatives” that was such a mess that even Fox News felt compelled to correct the record. Tim Kilcullen — a co-author of that study — returned for more shoddy and biased work in a so-called “report” that is just as much of a mess. This was summarized in a Jan. 9 post:

The MRC Censorship Investigation Project has uncovered the Biden administration’s latest effort to silence Americans. Utilizing FOIA, state public records laws and other investigative tools, MRC has learned that the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security have funded a censorship effort that trains teachers to “inoculate” students against conservative ideas and American ideals. It also trains educators to turn children into activists and to use censorship tools in classrooms across the nation. 

This report details how the State Department began this censorship push through a year-long series of seminars coordinated by the University of Rhode Island and its German counterpart. These seminars commenced in June of 2021 and concluded in April of 2022. Part 2 of this report will detail how the Department of Homeland Security took over the administration of this endeavor and expanded it nationwide.

The State Department trained educators on how to “inoculate” students against ideas not approved by the left. Over 700 educators participated in a year-long series of State Department seminars hosted by the University of Rhode Island’s Media Education Lab (the “Rhode Island Lab”). These seminars provided tools to train teachers on how to censor speech. Examples include video games designed to entice children to embrace leftist narratives and to compel them to use tech platforms that collude with the government to surveil and censor. 

The State Department seminars detailed how to put censorship tools Ad Fontes and NewsGuard into American classrooms.  The Media Research Center has already detailed how both Ad Fontes and NewsGuard partner with Big Tech to divert people away from conservative media and to media that promote a left-wing agenda. The State Department pushed curricula that included how to use NewsGuard’s “plug-in” (a computer program that displays the hopelessly biased rating NewsGuard gives each media site) and how to incorporate Ad Fontes’s rigged “Media Bias Chart” into lesson plans. The NewsGuard portion of the curricula was funded, in part, by activist billionaires George and Alexander Soros.

• A separate MRC study showed NewsGuard ranks leftist media 26 percentage points higher, on average, than right-leaning media.
• An MRC study found that Ad Fontes favors leftist media by a two to one margin.

A session of the State Department seminars centered on how to train children as political activists. The curriculum pushed in this session included lessons promoting street protests for leftist causes and detailed instructions on how to turn school children into “media producers” who advocate against free speech. Educators were told to reward children with prizes for promoting censorship via social media posts on platforms like Instagram.  

The State Department seminars were co-hosted by a German government institution and focused on bringing German indoctrination strategies into American classrooms.  It is noteworthy that Germany was chosen to co-host the seminars: the nation’s government has been the most aggressive European Union power censoring online speech and restricting individual expression. The Rhode Island Lab’s partner in Germany was the University of Würzburg, a controversial state entity with a long history of censorship; the curricula was often developed with German government funds and was crafted, in part, by a vice chairman of the country’s socialist ruling party. 

In short: The MRC is portraying any attempt at teach students media literacy as “censorship” and “bias,” relying on his own shoddy attacks on NewsGuard and Ad Fontes to frame it. Kilcullen ranted that the project “trained American educators on European socialist strategies for bringing indoctrination into the classroom to “inoculate” students against conservative ideas and turning students into leftist political activists” — but he had to apply a lot of right-wing bias in order to reach that conclusion. For example, this was one claim he made:

In 2017, the Rhode Island Lab unveiled an entire lesson plan — titled “Teaching Conspiracies” — to attack the idea that Google had manipulated search results to favor former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, disparaging a video documenting the bias as coming from “a noted conspiracy theorist” who “was making money from the entertainment value of an anti-Hillary message.” In actuality, studies found Google did manipulate their algorithms to interfere in the 2016 election, and it has only escalated its misconduct in recent years. 

His source for those “studies” is Robert Epstein, an anti-Google activist whose study making that claim about Google really was based on a set of 21 undecided voters, despite his protestations to the contrary. Another complaint from Kulcullen against the Rhode Island Lab:

Also in 2020, the Rhode Island Lab promoted an article wherein the Rhode Island Lab founder boasted that “Trump is the ‘poster child’ of bad information” and that “he doesn’t value evidence.” She offered no evidence for this assertion.

The Washington Post caught Trump making more than 30,000 false claims during his presidency alone, which would seem to be all the evidence one needs that Trump is the poster child for bad information. Kilcullen didn’t mention that, but he lashed out further at the lab:

In 2021, the Rhode Island Lab held a seminar for educators on “how to teach students about the limits of freedom of expression” and how “to limit the harms of dangerous speech.” Promos for the seminar explained “domestic terrorism” was “clearly inspired” by former President Trump and featured tasteless artwork depicting the Jan. 6 Capitol riot as a LEGO set for children.  

Kilcullen didn’t explain what, exactly, was offensive to him about there being limits on freedom of expression — he clearly thinks the Capitol riot Lego set mockup crosses that — or why the Capitol riot apparently does not cross that limit.

Kilcullen then went after a group called Media Literacy Now, which he huffed “is not an academic institution. It is a lobbying group: a self-described “advocacy nonprofit” dedicated to “ensuring that media literacy is recognized by policymakers and the public as an essential part of K-12 education.” He then manufactured a conspiracy about media literacy, insisting that it’s based on the idea that “too much information available to the public is inherently a threat”

What is “media literacy,” exactly? The term is nebulous and amorphous, providing Media Literacy Now and the Rhode Island Lab cover when they need to obfuscate their agenda. Despite the State Department grant being ostensibly for “promoting media literacy,” the Rhode Island Lab’s final report did not define the term “media literacy” once — despite using the term sixty-four times. Elsewhere, Media Literacy Now pledges it is “committed to elevating media literacy education 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.”

This call for “cultural change” may seem vague, but Media Literacy Now displayed a glossy photo to highlight what it meant. The image, captioned “Democracy Now” and “Media Literacy Now,” depicted an angry mob of protestors waving a variety of presumably media literate signs. One prominently displayed banner read “ACAB,” a profane acronym popular among Antifa rioters. Translation: All Cops Are Bastards.    

Media Literacy Now’s concept of “media literacy” is based on the idea that making too much information available to the public is inherently a threat. “The devastating effects of the pandemic,” Media Literacy Now declared in one propaganda piece, “have been exacerbated by an infodemic.” Media Literacy Now directed its audience to observe a September 2020 proclamation by the World Health Organization (WHO), which is backed by communist China. The WHO statement explained, “An infodemic is 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. 

Building on this infodemic concept, Media Literacy Now promotes research for “inoculation” theory, which posits that “[j]ust as vaccines generate antibodies to resist future viruses,” a society can “inoculate” itself against “misinformation” before the person is even told it. Concerningly, this un-American theory, which treats information as a disease, has been parrotted by Biden’s Department of Homeland Security while promoting social media censorship. 

In fact, the “glossy photo” Kilcullen claims Media LIteracy Now “displayed” appears to be a barely legible and faded black-and-white photo of a protest that’s used as a background for the group’s logo. He didn’t explain why “Democracy Now” is a bad thing. Kilcullen also didn’t explain why it’s a bad thing to teach people how to recognize misinformation.

Kilcullen then rehashed his employer’s old attacks on NewsGuard and Ad Fontes as maker of “censorship tools” instead of their actual purpose of rating websites for reliability:

MRC Free Speech America has previously reported on Ad Fontes Media, a media ratings firm that pushes a “Media Bias Chart” purporting to rank over 3,000 media sources for “bias” and “reliability.” Ad Fontes’s methodology and analysis is rigged to strongarm the public away from media on the right and towards media on the left. Ad Fontes favors leftist media by a two to one margin. Ad Fontes’s chart similarly, and outlandishly, suggests that media on the left are ten times less likely to be “unreliable.” Ad Fontes’s hopelessly broken system traces back to its founder and CEO Vanessa Otero, a left-wing Colorado lawyer whose media analysts must conform to her warped worldview.

Ad Fontes boasts on its website about its partnerships with Big Tech behemoths Meta and Microsoft, for which it steers traffic away from new media and towards left-wing legacy outlets.  Ad Fontes is cagier, though, about its partnership with Media Literacy Now.  

[…]

Media Literacy Now admits that it has a “strategic affiliation” with Ad Fontes. It lists the censorship outlet as one of its “sponsors” and “partners” (along with the Rhode Island Lab and the News Literacy Project, a pro-censorship activist group backed by tech giant Apple). What is less well publicized by Media Literacy Now is that Ad Fontes directs 10 percent of the income earned from its “News Nerd and News Nurturer Memberships” back to the supposedly non-profit lobbying group. Media Literacy Now then uses that money to pressure school districts into purchasing Ad Fontes products.

Kilcullen repeated more employer propaganda, huffing that Otero “celebrated Ad Fontes’s low ratings for Fox News’s Sean Hannity and independent journalist Tucker Carlson — both noted critics of the Biden administration — while emphasizing the higher score given to disgraced left-wing newscaster Chris Cuomo.” Kilcullen provided no evidence that Hannity deserved to be ranked higher by Ad Fontes than they are (or explain why he laughably described right-wing ideologue Carlson as an “independent journalist”), and he hid the fact that the reason the MRC considers Cuomo to be “disgraced” is largely because of his efforts to protect his brother, then-New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, than the overall quality of his work for CNN. He also didn’t mention that his employer suddenly likes Cuomo a lot more these days now that he’s spouting more right-wing-friendly talking points at his new home at right-leaning NewsNation.

Kilcullen also repeated his employer’s narrative that “NewsGuard rates right-leaning media significantly lower than their left-wing counterparts” — but he provided no justification for rating “right-leaning higher” than “left-wing” ones, nor did he explain why he didn’t use the term “right-wing” to match his “left-wing” label.

In other words: This is not actual “media research” — it’s a right-wing screed designed to peddle talking points and attacks against those who point out the shoddiness of right-wing media. And we’re only halfway through this report. More soon.