Florida’s CFO Bill Blocks Funding for NewsGuard and Media Monitoring

Florida CFO Jimmy Patronis has announced a bill for consumer protection on Thursday. The bill aims to prevent state agencies from using taxpayer funds to contract with media censorship companies like NewsGuard.

Florida HB 939 is similar to federal legislation that moved to prevent the Pentagon from contracting with advertising agencies that use NewsGuard to blacklist conservative publications.

“We’ve got state agencies throughout Florida trying to reach the public to provide critical services, and we need to make sure advertisers who partner with the state are doing their very best to reach specific groups,” said Patronis in the announcement.

“NewsGuard’s technology, however, is working its way into the advertising world, and effectively blacklisting media outlets who don’t measure up to their ratings.”

The legislation comes after Patronis’ letter to NewsGuard in March, warning them that he would “not hesitate to use the full force of my office to shed light on the organization you’re running.”

“This is a new dystopian landscape where we’ve got big government, partnering with big business, in using NewsGuard to punish those that don’t parrot the government’s narrative. That’s not the way any of this should work, and I don’t want a single penny of Florida taxpayer money being used to subsidize garbage,” Patronis said in Thursday’s release.

House Republicans won a significant victory in preventing the Pentagon from contracting with NewsGuard and the Global Disinformation Index (GDI), which had been used by major advertising agencies to block military recruitment ads on many conservative media outlets.

The new NDAA provision, included in the final bill which passed Congress last week, expressly prohibits any advertising agency the Defense Department contracts with from using services that engage in “determinations of misinformation.”

NewsGuard, founded by Steve Brill, has been a high-profile Democrat activist and donor. Brill and his wife, Cynthia, have donated to numerous Democrats over decades, including Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

Steve Brill and NewsGuard were vocal advocates that Hunter Biden’s laptop and its revelations represented Russian misinformation, and his organization penalized media groups that reported on the matter.

Newsmax CEO Chris Ruddy months ago called out NewsGuard and the GDI for exerting influence to silence conservative voices.

“People like Steve Brill and groups like NewsGuard masquerade as neutral journalists but they are nothing more than Democratic Party operatives,” Ruddy said.