RFK Jr Sues BBC and Big Media Companies for Hobbling Online Rivals Via ‘Trusted News Initiative’
The British Broadcasting Corporation and many other big media companies around the world have been accused of suppressing “wholly accurate and legitimate reporting” to further their economic interests via the Trusted News Initiative (TNI), a joint project designed to suppress supposedly harmful disinformation. Along with the Washington Post, Associated Press and Reuters, the BBC has been accused in a Texas court of suppressing competition in the online news market, thereby depriving people of vital information about matters of legitimate public concern. These include COVID-19 lockdowns, safety information about the mRNA vaccines and the Hunter Biden laptop story. TNI was set up in 2019 and acts as a gatekeeper on a number of issues, including Net Zero and the ‘climate emergency’.
According to an antitrust suit filed by Robert Kennedy Jr., the nephew of the late President Kennedy, the defendants feared what they described as an “existential threat” to their economic survival. The explosion of rival online news sources is said to have threatened to take audience share away from traditional news organisations “and to undermine consumers’ trust in these organisations”.
The TNI is an international consortium that includes Big Media and Big Tech. It acts as a gatekeeper to stem the flow of what it deems mis- and disinformation, with its tech members removing supposedly false or misleading content from their platforms. (Facebook, Google, Microsoft, LinkedIn and Twitter are all members.) Shadow-banning and de-platforming on social media can have dire consequences for the finances of online publishers, causing their businesses to fail, and TNI is accused of contributing to the collapse of online news publishers that “simply reported” claims made by credible sources such as scientists and physicians.
The Kennedy lawsuit, which claims undefined damages for a number of aggrieved online publishers, says it’s taking legal action to “defend the freedom of speech and of the press”.
According to the lawsuit, the economic motivation behind the TNI was “expressly admitted” by the BBC last year. “Actually, the real rivalry now is not between for example the BBC and CNN globally, it is actually between all trusted news providers and a tidal wave of unchecked [reporting] that’s being piped out mainly through digital platforms,” said Jamie Angus last year, then the senior BBC controller of news, according to Kennedy. To combat this, the lawsuit alleges, TNI members agreed to club together to suppress competition in the digital media world.
“Every news company has the right to decide for itself what to publish, but they have no right to combine together to restrict what their rivals can publish,” states the writ.
The lawsuit alleges that the recent head of TNI, Jessica Cecil, stated that members had signed up to a set of expectations about the actions they would take on their own to suppress reporting identified as false or misleading. So far, only four members of TNI have been named in the suit, but many other international news organisations, including Agence France-Presse, the Financial Times, CBS of America and ABC of Australia, are involved. Cecil is accused of claiming that all members had agreed to “choke off” their online rivals. These clear expectations, it is further alleged, “included a commitment by the TNI’s Big Tech members to censor such reporting on their platforms, to shadow-ban such content, to de-platform publishers who persisted in such reporting, and to work in tandem with one another to accomplish those ends”.
Note 271 in the writ reads: “Cecil took evident pride in the assertion that the TNI’s suppression of other’s online reporting did not ‘in any way muzzl[e] our own journalism’… it was of no consequence that the TNI muzzles other news publishers’ journalism.”
Much of the suppressed content flagged up in the lawsuit concerns the original source of the Covid virus, the need for global lockdowns, the safety and efficacy of the mRNA vaccines and the compulsory wearing of masks. It also included the the Hunter Biden laptop story with its reference to “10% for the big guy” ahead of the U.S. presidential election in 2020. The writ alleges that the TNI collaboration was not ultimately about keeping ‘harmful’ information from the public. Rather, it had an economic motivation. “Much of the information suppressed by the TNI was not false and was well within the bounds of legitimate debate in a vigorous free press,” it says.
A legal challenge like this was always on the cards. A small number of online social media giants have taken over the digital town square and are the beneficiaries of almost all online advertising. They have enormous power to destroy news publishing businesses, as do any media companies that join forces with them. The Texas action would also appear to have implications for all so-called fact-checkers who target publishers that produce content challenging the mainstream narrative in a cluster of sensitive areas (Covid, climate change, Ukraine). These fact-checks are often used by social media platforms to justify punitive action. The Daily Sceptic is regularly attacked by these outfits. Many of the allegations they produce might well be considered libellous since they frequently claim, without justification, that we are knowingly publishing false or misleading information. These ‘fact-checkers’ seem oblivious to the fact that they could be sued for considerable financial damages in a libel-friendly jurisdiction such as the U.K.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
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Has Robert heard of the grassy knoll?
If he fails in Texas, perhaps he should try London
I wish him luck! But i doubt anything will come of it, such is the closed shop of journalism. No such thing as investigative anymore!
Honest adversarial journalism would be a huge improvement.
I hope and pray Robert Kennedy has a very professional personal protection team.
Car accident. Suicide in the kitchen. Drowning. Train, plane crash. Maybe the CIA-Pharma can copy the dreaded Russkies and start using poisons. Oh wait….
‘Freedom’. ‘Democracy’.
Blah blah. Endless lies, wars, scamdemics and control.
The West is as totalitarian as any Oriental despotism.
Witness the coup against Truss, the Rona Fascism, the Warmtarding idiocy, the TNI/Farce checkers aka Pravda and the online Gestapo….it will only accelerate until those among us who are not brain dead set up parallel information systems and even lives.
And the modern equivalent of the STASI to boot, notwithstanding the fact that the invention of the web we now use was around the time the wall came down.
It was sad to see the sustained hatchet job on Truss being continued on GB News’ Dan Wootton show last night. Conduit in chief was the egregious Kelvin MacKenzie who, true to form was operating at maximum volume and minimum intellect.
It’s true that Truss is a poor communicator, lacking in presentational skills when in front of an audience, however, that can be remedied, unlike May, Johnson and Sunak who have mendacity hard-wired in to their character.
Robert Kennedy Jnr is a real hero in this struggle
A Four Star General
Trying to change things not just jumping up and down squeaking on the touch line
Quite a few are ‘having a good war’ and I suspect if the Angel Gabriel were to appear before them
With the offer of ‘peace + calm’ for all mankind
It would be rejected
his book on Fauci is essential reading.
Unfortunately, this anti-trust complaint seems doomed to failure, unless something damning comes up in discovery (assuming it gets that far). What the BBC et al. were/are doing is extremely dangerous and bad, but for their actions to be a Sherman Act violation, it needs to have been done for commercially self-interested purposes and not social/political ones (see here). While RFK, Jr’s lawyers understand that and make that claim, and while I admit I’ve only skimmed it, the complaint doesn’t seem to provide reasonable prima facie evidence for that – in fact it includes quotes which prove the opposite, e.g. 254. In July 2019, then BBC director-general Tony Hall announced, “Last month I convened, behind closed doors, a Trusted News Summit at the BBC, which brought together global tech platforms and publishers. The goal was to arrive at a practical set of actions we can take together, right now, to tackle the rise of misinformation.” It’s also difficult to see how the various big media companies could have gained any real commercial advantage by squashing the plaintiffs’ media presence in the first place, making it all the more difficult to prove it was done for commercial reasons. And I don’t believe… Read more »
I don’t think that’s so far-fetched: In order to compete sucessfully against the BBC etc independents need to have scoops the established media outlets don’t report about. If any attempt at having one is equivalent to commercial suicide, the BBC etc won’t have any trouble because of independent competitors.
That’s a fair point, but it doesn’t appear that the intent of this group was to destroy these businesses from a purely commercial/competitive perspective, which seems to matter a lot in this case. I don’t doubt the various plaintiffs have been screwed over royally, my point is that I just don’t think they’re going to win on the facts.
Obviously the Daily Sceptic has been affected by this stuff greatly, which I know very well, having been closely involved from the beginning. Google effectively vetoed us from being able to do almost any advertising on the site, Facebook repeatedly suspends Toby, PayPal tried to terminate our contract, and we constantly get disingenuously “fact-checked” by various lazy, arrogant idiots. If it weren’t for the support of donors like you, we simply couldn’t operate, so I know it’s a huge issue. But when it comes to doing something about it, I’m all in for Missouri v. Biden, and whatever we can do here in the UK vis-a-vis PayPal. We have a good chance there. I just try to take a strategic view.
I disagree. The economic arguments at 520-523 regarding benefitting from massive advertising revenues and stock investments seem very strong and provable.
Just consider the recent example of the take-down of the MailOnline article about the Pfizer executive exposé by Project Veritas – why did that happen if not for loss of advertising revenue?
If big profits were made from advertising (which may be demonstrable through discovery), that still doesn’t get around the problem of having to prove that was a commercial goal, rather than just an incidental effect of a social/political policy. But it’s tangled, because couldn’t it be the case that pharma would have had to advertise more, if there were more scepticism out there? Pharma could hardly have cut off WaPo, etc., given their market presence. Also, it’s hard to see how the BBC, as prime mover, could have benefited in that way (although maybe through international licencing agreements they could have… not sure).
And anyway, it’s not clear that said advertising revenue would have gone to sceptical outlets instead, so was anyone competitively disadvantaged in specific regard to that revenue, even if WaPo etc. benefited?
There may be enough for this complaint to get to discovery, which could produce some interesting documents, but thus far I don’t see any “gotcha!”.
The comparison that came to my mind was bringing down Capone for tax evasion rather than murder. This action might be the start of something bigger 🤞
It sounds like TNI should stand for the Totalistic Narrative Initiative.
Clearly the aim is to present the members as being the only source of “truth” while pumping out selective, partial, biased and misleading information in support of a political agenda.
It does seem like more people are starting to wise up to the behaviour of the media conglomerates and social media platforms, because the nonsense they churn out doesn’t tally with lived experience in the real world, and the efforts to censor any information that runs counter to the narrative shows they have something to hide.
I wouldn’t put it past RFK Jr to win the case. He pretty good at what he does.
He was part of the team that won cases against:
Ford Motor Company
Monsanto – $290 million settlement
Dupont 1 – $396 million settlement
Dupont 2 – $670 million settlement
And countless other smaller settlements.
If you have an environmental issue of any kind especially in respect of industrial waste, RFK Jr is your man.
Unfortunately he isn’t just taking on TNI and their woke advertisers. He will effectively be taking on 95% of the Uniparty politicians, the WEF, the woke Billionaires and most of academia.
I honestly wish him the very Best of British Luck. He’ll need it.
Every Briton who believes in freedom of speech and despises corporate censorship in all its ugly guises has a duty to give support to Kennedy’s initiative by cancelling/non payment of their T V licence today.
To take over a country first remove speech.
No one is allowed to criticize or contradict the ‘authorities’, who are presumed to be infallible, are never wrong, and cannot be criticized and scrutinized.