At least two Republican state attorneys general are considering legal action against members of a shadowy cabal that allegedly controls 90 percent of global marketing spending over allegations they conspired to withhold advertising money from conservative media, according to information obtained by The Washington Post.
The Republican-led House Judiciary Committee said the Global Alliance for Responsible Media has been accused of leading a coordinated effort to stifle free speech online and restrict advertising at a number of news outlets, including The Washington Post, in a move that likely violated federal antitrust laws. said in a disturbing report this week.
Representatives of the Republican state attorneys general of Montana and Missouri confirmed they are investigating the evidence uncovered by the House committee.
“We believe there may be potential antitrust violations and the Attorney General is evaluating what action he can take,” a spokesman for Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen told The Washington Post.
A spokesman for Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey said his office was aware of the report and was “investigating the matter.”
GARM is an initiative of the Global Alliance of Advertisers, which represents dozens of large corporations and advertising agencies, including Disney, Coca-Cola, Toyota and Walmart. Its members spend around $1 trillion a year on advertising.
The House Judiciary Committee’s ongoing investigation will include requiring certain companies that are members of GARM to turn over relevant information in the near future, a House Republican source told The Post.
As the investigation progresses, the committee will likely issue further reports and hold further hearings to detail its findings, the people added.
“Just because they haven’t targeted us yet doesn’t mean we shouldn’t expect anything,” a House Republican source told The Washington Post on condition of anonymity. “It’s certainly not over yet.”
The report could open the door to larger lawsuits by other states or people like billionaire Elon Musk. The committee’s citations of possible antitrust violations could also pave the way for action by the Justice Department, especially if former President Donald Trump wins the next election.
The investigation focuses on whether GARM and its members violated Section 1 of the Sherman Antitrust Act, which provides for unlawful restraint of trade. Depending on the severity of the alleged misconduct, they may be subject to civil or criminal prosecution.
The committee is considering whether to formally recommend action against the advertising conspiracy to the Justice Department, according to sources.
The House Judiciary Committee report is “the first solid effort to untie this Gordian knot” and could spur more state attorneys general to get involved, said Joel Thayer, a tech policy lawyer and president of the Digital Progress Institute.
The Justice Department is unlikely to get involved and a state or states would need to develop a compelling argument, he added.
“While the report needs to clarify some things, I think it provides a good framework for state attorneys general to issue subpoenas to GARM and potentially other companies to better understand how GARM works and how it makes decisions,” Thayer said. “That way they can build cases around anticompetitive impacts.”
The report includes emails and testimony from Robert Rakowitz, head of the far-left GARM group, who in an interview with investigators “denied organizing the boycott or encouraging GARM members to stop advertising on Twitter.”
But in an internal email dated Feb. 9, 2023, Rakowitz appeared to boast that X had “underperformed revenue projections by 80%” since Garmin challenged Musk about brand safety issues. Rakowitz testified that the email was intended as a “low-key joke.”
The emails also said that Rakowitz had encouraged GARM members to adopt recommendations put forward by “independent fact-checkers” such as the Global Disinformation Index and NewsGuard.
GDI, a UK-based organisation, receives funding from entities linked to the US State Department and George Soros.
NewsGuard, which scans websites and news sources to rate their credibility, is the subject of an investigation by the House Oversight Committee, which said it was concerned about a “censorship campaign” and “planned First Amendment speech.”
John Gable, CEO of the anti-bias group AllSide, said Rakowitz’s reliance on GDI and NewsGuard is akin to a “Ministry of Truth approach” in which the public is exposed to a single political agenda.
Gable told the Post that the House Judiciary Committee had obtained emails showing that Rakowitz had been in direct contact with GroupM, the world’s largest ad buyer and part of the WPP conglomerate.
“Thanks to this congressional report we now know that they were in direct negotiations with Group M about excluding conservative media,” Gable said.
Particularly problematic was Rakowitz’s instruction to turn to GDI.
“GDI may be playing the good game as a progressive Democrat, but it’s too focused on a partisan agenda to be trusted,” Gable said.
Gable said GDI uses “privately shared exclusion and blacklists” that “indirectly and directly shape the flow of potentially billions of dollars of advertising spend.”
“If these lists are applied disproportionately, it’s clear that will have an impact on the national debate,” he said.
Gable also slammed NewsGuard, saying it was, in his words, “not transparent in its ratings.”
NewsGuard “makes every effort to prevent people from seeing their ratings,” he said.
Gable added that it’s reasonable to assume that “each major advertiser maintains its own exclusion and inclusion lists of which advertisers they will do business with.”
According to the report, in October 2021, Rakowitz and John Montgomery, former executive vice president of global brand safety at GroupM, the world’s largest media buying agency, “discussed strategies to block specific news outlets, including Fox News, The Daily Wire and Breitbart News.”
GARM, which reportedly worked with the London-based nonprofit Global Disinformation Index, also classified nine other media outlets, including The Washington Post, Reason magazine and RealClearPolitics, as posing the “highest disinformation risk.”
One GARM employee questioned the effort’s reliance on the GDI rankings, saying he was “baffled” that the group “somehow ranks the NY Post as the ‘highest risk’ newspaper for disinformation in the United States.”
“The extent to which GARM has organized industry associations and coordinated actions to eliminate consumer choice may violate antitrust laws and threaten fundamental American freedoms,” the report said.
In a lengthy statement, the WFA defended its practices and said it had cooperated with the House Judiciary Committee’s investigation.
“The report released on July 10 does not include the transcripts of the 168 pages of interviews that effectively clarify questions about GARM’s compliance with competition law policies and practices, GARM being a voluntary association, and the non-binding nature of guidance from GARM,” the WFA said in a statement. “The transcripts also provide context for the documents selected by the committee and details of the technical aspects of GARM’s activities.”
Rakowitz did not respond to The Washington Post’s request for comment.
Other media outlets targeted by GARM and its members include podcaster Joe Rogan and Musk’s social media site, X. After the report surfaced, Musk tweeted that “X will have no choice but to sue perpetrators and collaborators in the ad boycott scam.”
Rep. Matt Gaetz, a member of the House Judiciary Committee, urged crackdown on GARM in a statement to The Washington Post.
“We’ve seen it time and time again when big corporations conspire with governments to censor speech,” Gaetz said. “They hide their problems with a swarm of shell companies and pretend they’re not colluding, but when Congress shines a light on the system, shell companies like the Stanford Internet Observatory are forced to shut down.”
“The Orwellianally named Global Alliance for Responsible Media is one such group, and it deserves further scrutiny from state and federal regulators and law enforcement,” Gaetz added.
