Prolific conservative commentator Ben Shapiro testified to members of Congress Wednesday about the left’s crusade to eliminate conservative media companies.
During the House Judiciary hearing on “Collusion in the Global Alliance for Responsible Media,” Shapiro testified alongside Unilever USA president Herrish Patel, global CEO of GroupM Christian Juhl and competitive law scholar Spencer Waller.
U.S. Rep. Barry Moore (R-Enterprise) asked Shapiro about how certain organizations are trying to silence conservative media outlets.
.@benshapiro: “While it is true that the amount of money that's being spent in the ad market in news is declining, that does not mean that it is declining proportionately based on politics… A huge percentage of those ad dollars are still going to purportedly objective or… pic.twitter.com/pmgtGLfkiT
— Daily Wire (@realDailyWire) July 10, 2024
“Those organizations like say Global Disinformation Index and NewsGuard, how have they impacted you as a as a business owner?” Moore asked.
“Well, government and other organizations like it have worked in conjunction with GDI and NewsGuard to set standards,” Shapiro responded. “And again, those standards are purportedly objective in practice, [but] they rarely are. And so NewsGuard, for example, has penalized us openly for being a conservative site. And when we mentioned that we are actually honest about our biases, what they say is, ‘well that means you’re not objective,’ as opposed to other outlets which claim to be objective and actually are biased toward the left, for example.”
Shapiro then explained what actions Congress should take in combatting the issue.
“This is part of the the problem that I would hope that Congress would help uncover,” he said. The lack of transparency in the standards is actually a weapon that’s used against one side of the political aisle. And I keep asking the question over and over and over again, can news guard name a major right wing outlet or conservative validated deems brand safe? Can GARM do the same? Because I certainly have seen no evidence that they have deemed say the New York Times or CNN brand unsafe in the same way that they would for conservative outlets.”
“So basically, you think liberal organizations are not being treated the same?” Moore asked.
“They’re being whitelisted,” Shapiro responded. “I think that while it’s clear that it is true that the amount of money that’s being spent in the ad market in news is declining, that does not mean that it is declining proportionally based on politics.”
Moore then asked him about the definition of “hate speech.”
“This happens to be the biggest problem with the label hate speech that it has no specific definition,” Shapiro argued. “and we’ve seen it weaponized by some people on the other side of the aisle today to sort of broadly cover everything from things that we would all agree are disgusting and terrible to things that are essentially mainstream worldviews, like for example, the idea that biological men and biological women are separate categories. These have all been lumped together and this is the danger in setting up what are purportedly objective pseudo objective standards that are far too broad and subjectively applied.”
Yaffee is a contributing writer to Yellowhammer News and hosts “The Yaffee Program” weekdays 9-11 a.m. on WVNN. You can follow him on X @Yaffee
