Brownstone Institute
Poynter’s Creepy ‘Fact-Based Expression’
From the Brownstone Institute
Fact-based expression.
That is what the once vaunted now openly vile Poynter Institute – a pivot point of the international censorship-industrial complex – wishes to “strengthen…around the globe.”
Pointedly, not “free speech,” but “fact-based expression.”
They’re not the same thing.
This absurd term, floated through the invite to read the institute’s annual and recently released “Impact Report,” may at first blush seem to be yet another silly woke wiggle, like “birthing person (mother) or “involved in the criminal justice system” (a felon) or “experiencing homelessness” (vagrant).
Like many Orwellian neologisms, it might, if you hear it only once or twice, seem to make a tiny bit of sense because “fact-based expression” implies telling the truth.
But like so many other progressive rewordings, it is purely an attempt to sound reasonable so as to mask a deeply ominous intent.
That intent? To control speech and public discourse by being the lone decider as to what is factual and what is not and those decisions are being – and will be – made based on the sociopolitical outlook of the progressive woke elite, the socialite socialist statist global drivers that fund Poynter.
But the Poynter Institute – once the premier media/journalism teaching and thinking, for lack of a better term, organizations – made a significant error in rolling out the term: it appears right after “free press,” inviting the clear comparison.
“…meaningful achievements we have made to help strengthen a free press and fact-based expression around the globe,” is how the email introduction to the report read.
So why not simply say “free speech?”
Because that’s not what they want at all (they don’t really believe in a free press either, noting the importance of the press being “responsible,” i.e..housebroken.)
To the contrary, “fact-based expression” demands both self and external censorship, a political, social, and cultural censorship that will drown out and drone on.
That is the business Poynter is in now – fact-checking. So Poynter will be telling the world what constitutes “fact-based expression” and what is not, what is verboten.
How convenient for Poynter, how wonderful for the globalists, how terrible for everyone else.
And Poynter has the connections to make it stick – take December, 2020 and Covid for example.
The American Medical Association “partnered” with Poynter to spread the gospel of vaccines, of pandemic panic, and the evils of “misinformation.”
Poynter even offered an online course that local (and national) news people from around the country could take that would leverage the trust they have built in the community to convince people to take the “vaccine:”
We know from previous vaccination efforts that local news is critically important: Audiences trust local news the most, and local journalists will be critical in guiding the public to vaccine administration sites and explaining eligibility.
The first rounds of vaccines will be based on new mRNA technology that, while being a scientific breakthrough, may raise questions in the public’s mind about safety and efficacy. We will explain the technology in ways you can pass along to the public.
The course made sure the locals reported how safe the vaccine was, how important it was, and what “misinformation” about the vaccine needed to be shot down.
Oddly enough, it also worked to help journalists “explain to audiences the importance of the second dosage of the vaccines.” On December 4, 2020 – curiously early for that specific topic – the “vaccine” had been out for only a couple of weeks.
As for all of 2020, you can see Poynter’s round-up here. Note it features the term “covidiot.”
(And you can watch a rerun of the webinar here.)
How convenient for Poynter, how wonderful for the globalists, how terrible for everyone else.
Just nine years ago, Poynter had a budget of $3.8 million and, unless you worked in the media, you had no idea it even existed. Today, thanks to massive support from the likes of Google, Meta (Facebook), and others, Poynter is a $15 million a year nexus point for those who wish to control the press and, more importantly, what everyone else says.
Poynter runs PolitiFact, a media outlet that pretends to be in the business of checking facts.
But it does no such thing. It is a global elite swamp third-party validation machine that twists and turns and backflips to put its “FACT” stamp of approval on just about anything that needs to be buttressed.
Or, more importantly, it stamps “FALSE” on a statement or story or concept that is at odds with the current popular narrative that keeps that same global elite in power (a litany of Poynter’s obfuscation and the tricks it uses can be found here).
It runs MediaWise, an outfit that claims to train (largely) younger people how to spot “misinformation,” something that does not actually exist but is a pillar of the censor’s claim to their right to exist. And through its “Teen Fact Checking Network,” Poynter is training a new generation of censors.
If Poynter were honestly trying to stop misinformation, it would not practice the art so well.
And Poynter is the home of the International Fact Checking Network, a group of global media and other fact-checking organizations that is dedicated to “fighting repression and misinformation.”
To quote the IFCN chief: “Misinformation is on the march. The politically powerful are using disinformation to confuse the public and control the agenda. And fact-checkers and other journalists face attack and harassment simply for doing their jobs,” said Angie Drobnic Holan, IFCN director. “Yet our work continues. We are on the side of truth. We are on the side of information integrity.”
And the IFCN determines what is the truth, what information has the requisite “integrity” to pass muster?
In other words, doing to the world what it has done to the United States: work with social media and government agencies to stamp out dissent.
April 2 was “International Fact Checking Day.” To honor the occasion, Drobnic Holan took to her blog to claim that fact-checkers are not censors and, it appears, that the Murthy v. Missouri case currently in front of the United States Supreme Court is not really about the basic and immutable American tenet of freedom of speech but about letting misinformers keep muddying the waters of official truth:
The Supreme Court case is primarily about the government’s actions in dealing with tech platforms: Did the Biden administration go too far in asking for takedowns of vaccine-related misinformation? For years, similar attacks have been aimed at fact-checkers. As director of the International Fact-Checking Network, I’ve watched this movement label fact-checkers as part of a “censorship industrial complex,” claiming that fact-checkers are trying to suppress debatable information.
Ironically, this deeply misleading argument itself is aimed at suppressing critique and debate.
Google and Meta (Facebook) and TikTok are, as noted, Poynter funders and use its products to help decide what is or is not allowed on their platforms. That actual fact does not bode well for the neutrality of Poynter’s fact-checking efforts.
Specifically as to TikTok, Poynter proudly claims that “(T)hrough innovative fact-checking partnerships with Meta and TikTok, PolitiFact is slowing the spread of thousands of pieces of false or harmful online content each month — reducing future views of false information by 80% on average.”
And Poynter decides what is “harmful” and “false.”
And just a few days ago, clearly in response to the bill to force the sale of TikTok going through Congress, Poynter decided to “fact check” who really owns TikTok. Poynter decided that the statement that the “Chinese government owns TikTok” is – surprise surprise – false.
Because of its vaunted past, Poynter is the respectable (actually becoming less respectable with each passing million) face of the international movement to determine what the public can talk about.
And it seems being in the “fact” industry is good for business – budget tripled, staff doubled, got far more notoriety, and getting a bit of actual global power, all in the past decade.
Google, Meta, the Omidyar network (lefty media funders), The Just Trust (a spinoff of the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative that focuses on “criminal justice), TikTok, the MacArthur Foundation, and the Stanford Impact Labs, which “invests in teams of researchers working with leaders in government, business, and communities to design, test, and scale interventions that can help us make progress on some of the world’s most pressing and persistent social challenges” are some of the major funders of Poynter.
All of the above are powerful progressive/woke companies and foundations and are intertwined with the global movement to muzzle the freedom of the average person, to create a rental world in which people will simply be interchangeable cogs to be watched, fed, and placated.
Another funder of Poynter is the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), one of the most caustic – and powerful – members of the international “civil society” behemoth that lay somewhere between government and private industry and is now more powerful than either.
Note: NED was specifically founded in the 1980s to do in public what the CIA could no longer do in secret: play international politics, foment revolutions, buy supporters, and influence foreign media.
Another Poynter partner is the Alliance for Securing Democracy (ASD), a stepchild of the still-extant German Marshall Fund.
Reminder – the Marshall Plan was set up after World War II to help rebuild Germany and Europe; the Fund was created by the West German government and is now one of most slithery internationalist think tanks on the planet.
Last November, Poynter hosted a very very poorly attended “United Facts of America” online symposium, which included the participation of the Fund and the ASD. The ASD was the group behind the “Hamilton 68” Russian disinformation dashboard, a tool used countless times by the mainstream media to show how much Russia had warped the American electoral process.
The world can expect to see “fact-based expression” more often in the very near future, can expect to hear “Are you in favor of lying?” arguments if you say you are worried about the new rubric, and can expect to see ‘fact-based expression” in law books soon as an appropriate mitigation of free and unfettered speech.
The concept is already making headway – see the Online Harms Bill proposed in Canada, which “authorizes house arrest and electronic tagging for a person considered likely to commit a future (hate) crime.”
Poynter is a far far distance away from its original mission, but in theory still understands the actual news business. We asked them what exactly is “fact-based expression:”
“What is ‘fact-based expression’ exactly? What does that term mean? It has to be different from ‘free speech’ because (the report intro) would have read ‘free speech’ just as it did ‘free press.’”
The response from the transparent media training foundation?
“We have seen your message and I have shared it with the team. We did see your deadline note in the subject line and in the body text. We’ll try to respond as soon as we can, keeping your deadline in mind.”
No further response – I guess “the team” didn’t want to answer the question or they didn’t have a “fact-based expression” to reply with.
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
By 
Who Controls the Administrative State?
President Trump on March 20, 2025, ordered the following: “The Secretary of Education shall, to the maximum extent appropriate and permitted by law, take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education.”
That is interesting language: to “take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure” is not the same as closing it. And what is “permitted by law” is precisely what is in dispute.
It is meant to feel like abolition, and the media reported it as such, but it is not even close. This is not Trump’s fault. The supposed authoritarian has his hands tied in many directions, even over agencies he supposedly controls, the actions of which he must ultimately bear responsibility.
The Department of Education is an executive agency, created by Congress in 1979. Trump wants it gone forever. So do his voters. Can he do that? No but can he destaff the place and scatter its functions? No one knows for sure. Who decides? Presumably the highest court, eventually.
How this is decided – whether the president is actually in charge or really just a symbolic figure like the King of Sweden – affects not just this one destructive agency but hundreds more. Indeed, the fate of the whole of freedom and functioning of constitutional republics may depend on the answer.
All burning questions of politics today turn on who or what is in charge of the administrative state. No one knows the answer and this is for a reason. The main functioning of the modern state falls to a beast that does not exist in the Constitution.
The public mind has never had great love for bureaucracies. Consistent with Max Weber’s worry, they have put society in an impenetrable “iron cage” built of bloodless rationalism, needling edicts, corporatist corruption, and never-ending empire-building checked by neither budgetary restraint nor plebiscite.
Today’s full consciousness of the authority and ubiquity of the administrative state is rather new. The term itself is a mouthful and doesn’t come close to describing the breadth and depth of the problem, including its root systems and retail branches. The new awareness is that neither the people nor their elected representatives are really in charge of the regime under which we live, which betrays the whole political promise of the Enlightenment.
This dawning awareness is probably 100 years late. The machinery of what is popularly known as the “deep state” – I’ve argued there are deep, middle, and shallow layers – has been growing in the US since the inception of the civil service in 1883 and thoroughly entrenched over two world wars and countless crises at home and abroad.
The edifice of compulsion and control is indescribably huge. No one can agree precisely on how many agencies there are or how many people work for them, much less how many institutions and individuals work on contract for them, either directly or indirectly. And that is just the public face; the subterranean branch is far more elusive.
The revolt against them all came with the Covid controls, when everyone was surrounded on all sides by forces outside our purview and about which the politicians knew not much at all. Then those same institutional forces appear to be involved in overturning the rule of a very popular politician whom they tried to stop from gaining a second term.
The combination of this series of outrages – what Jefferson in his Declaration called “a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object” – has led to a torrent of awareness. This has translated into political action.
A distinguishing mark of Trump’s second term has been an optically concerted effort, at least initially, to take control of and then curb administrative state power, more so than any executive in living memory. At every step in these efforts, there has been some barrier, even many on all sides.
There are at least 100 legal challenges making their way through courts. District judges are striking down Trump’s ability to fire workers, redirect funding, curb responsibilities, and otherwise change the way they do business.
Even the signature early achievement of DOGE – the shuttering of USAID – has been stopped by a judge with an attempt to reverse it. A judge has even dared tell the Trump administration who it can and cannot hire at USAID.
Not a day goes by when the New York Times does not manufacture some maudlin defense of the put-upon minions of the tax-funded managerial class. In this worldview, the agencies are always right, whereas any elected or appointed person seeking to rein them in or terminate them is attacking the public interest.
After all, as it turns out, legacy media and the administrative state have worked together for at least a century to cobble together what was conventionally called “the news.” Where would the NYT or the whole legacy media otherwise be?
So ferocious has been the pushback against even the paltry successes and often cosmetic reforms of MAGA/MAHA/DOGE that vigilantes have engaged in terrorism against Teslas and their owners. Not even returning astronauts from being “lost in space” has redeemed Elon Musk from the wrath of the ruling class. Hating him and his companies is the “new thing” for NPCs, on a long list that began with masks, shots, supporting Ukraine, and surgical rights for gender dysphoria.
What is really at stake, more so than any issue in American life (and this applies to states around the world) – far more than any ideological battles over left and right, red and blue, or race and class – is the status, power, and security of the administrative state itself and all its works.
We claim to support democracy yet all the while, empires of command-and-control have arisen among us. The victims have only one mechanism available to fight back: the vote. Can that work? We do not yet know. This question will likely be decided by the highest court.
All of which is awkward. It is impossible to get around this US government organizational chart. All but a handful of agencies live under the category of the executive branch. Article 2, Section 1, says: “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.”
Does the president control the whole of the executive branch in a meaningful way? One would think so. It’s impossible to understand how it could be otherwise. The chief executive is…the chief executive. He is held responsible for what these agencies do – we certainly blasted away at the Trump administration in the first term for everything that happened under his watch. In that case, and if the buck really does stop at the Oval Office desk, the president must have some modicum of control beyond the ability to tag a marionette to get the best parking spot at the agency.
What is the alternative to presidential oversight and management of the agencies listed in this branch of government? They run themselves? That claim means nothing in practice.
For an agency to be deemed “independent” turns out to mean codependency with the industries regulated, subsidized, penalized, or otherwise impacted by its operations. HUD does housing development, FDA does pharmaceuticals, DOA does farming, DOL does unions, DOE does oil and turbines, DOD does tanks and bombs, FAA does airlines, and so on It goes forever.
That’s what “independence” means in practice: total acquiescence to industrial cartels, trade groups, and behind-the-scenes systems of payola, blackmail, and graft, while the powerless among the people live with the results. This much we have learned and cannot unlearn.
That is precisely the problem that cries out for a solution. The solution of elections seems reasonable only if the people we elected actually have the authority over the thing they seek to reform.
There are criticisms of the idea of executive control of executive agencies, which is really nothing other than the system the Founders established.
First, conceding more power to the president raises fears that he will behave like a dictator, a fear that is legitimate. Partisan supporters of Trump won’t be happy when the precedent is cited to reverse Trump’s political priorities and the agencies turn on red-state voters in revenge.
That problem is solved by dismantling agency power itself, which, interestingly, is mostly what Trump’s executive orders have sought to achieve and which the courts and media have worked to stop.
Second, one worries about the return of the “spoils system,” the supposedly corrupt system by which the president hands out favors to friends in the form of emoluments, a practice the establishment of the civil service was supposed to stop.
In reality, the new system of the early 20th century fixed nothing but only added another layer, a permanent ruling class to participate more fully in a new type of spoils system that operated now under the cloak of science and efficiency.
Honestly, can we really compare the petty thievery of Tammany Hall to the global depredations of USAID?
Third, it is said that presidential control of agencies threatens to erode checks and balances. The obvious response is the organizational chart above. That happened long ago as Congress created and funded agency after agency from the Wilson to the Biden administration, all under executive control.
Congress perhaps wanted the administrative state to be an unannounced and unaccountable fourth branch, but nothing in the founding documents created or imagined such a thing.
If you are worried about being dominated and destroyed by a ravenous beast, the best approach is not to adopt one, feed it to adulthood, train it to attack and eat people, and then unleash it.
The Covid years taught us to fear the power of the agencies and those who control them not just nationally but globally. The question now is two-fold: what can be done about it and how to get from here to there?
Trump’s executive order on the Department of Education illustrates the point precisely. His administration is so uncertain of what it does and can control, even of agencies that are wholly executive agencies, listed clearly under the heading of executive agencies, that it has to dodge and weave practical and legal barriers and land mines, even in its own supposed executive pronouncements, even to urge what might amount to be minor reforms.
Whoever is in charge of such a system, it is clearly not the people.
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
By
“People are reacting because they hear things about me that aren’t true, characterizations of things I have said that are simply not true. When they hear what I have to say, actually, about vaccines, everybody supports it.”
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has been confirmed as Secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services.
Within hours, my news feed was populated with angsty articles hand-wringing about the future of vaccines under Kennedy, whom legacy media and the establishment are certain would confiscate life-saving vaccine programs, raising the spectre of mass waves of illness and death.
In particular, this quote from Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY), the only Republican who voted against Kennedy’s confirmation, appeared over and over again:
“I’m a survivor of childhood polio. In my lifetime, I’ve watched vaccines save millions of lives from devastating diseases across America and around the world. I will not condone the re-litigation of proven cures, and neither will millions of Americans who credit their survival and quality of life to scientific miracles.”
Yet, I could not find one piece of mainstream coverage of this quote that mentioned the astonishing fact that 98% of polio cases in 2023, the most recent year for which we have full data, were caused by the polio vaccine.
You read that correctly. In 2023, 12 wild polio cases were recorded (six in Afghanistan, six in Pakistan), with a further 524 circulating vaccine-derived cases, mostly throughout Africa. This trend is in keeping with data from the previous several years.
An important contextualising detail, wouldn’t you think?
The cause of this polio resurgence is that the world’s poor are given the oral polio vaccine (OPV), which contains a weakened virus that can replicate in the gut and spread in feces, causing vaccine-derived outbreaks.
People in rich countries get the inactivated polio vaccine (IPV), which does not contain live virus and therefore does not carry the risk of spreading the very disease it’s vaccinating against.
The World Health Organization (WHO) and vaccine-promoting organisations say that the way out of the problem is to vaccinate harder, as the argument goes that outbreaks only occur in under-vaccinated communities.
This may be well and good, but the total omission of the fact from media coverage that the goalposts have shifted from eradicating wild polio (not yet complete but nearly there, according to the WHO) to eradicating vaccine-derived polio (the main problem these days) underscores that this is why hardly anyone who knows anything trusts the media anymore.
A member of my extended family has polio. It’s nasty and life-altering and I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.
That’s why I would hope that any vaccines given would be safe – contracting polio from the supposedly preventative vaccine is the worst-case scenario, second only to death.
This is Kennedy’s expressly stated aim.
“When people actually hear what I think about vaccines, which is common sense, which is vaccines should be tested, they should be safe, everyone should have informed consent,” he said at his confirmation press conference.
“People are reacting because they hear things about me that aren’t true, characterisations of things I have said that are simply not true.
“When they hear what I have to say, actually, about vaccines, everybody supports it.”
Grown-ups who support vaccines can walk and chew gum. From the point of view of the public health establishment, the polio vaccine has prevented millions of cases and has nearly eradicated the disease.
At the same time, the world’s poorest are afflicted with polio outbreaks which we can work to prevent, and the safety of all polio vaccine products on the market should be subject to the rigorous standards applied to all other medicines.
Unless you think that poor people don’t matter, in which case the status quo might suit you fine.
Republished from the author’s Substack
Author
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