Trusted News Initiative set to face scrutiny as RFK Jr’s antitrust lawsuit lingers

The Trusted News Initiative (TNI), a global coalition of news organizations and tech firms with the stated goal of combating fake news that has been compared to the Ministry of Truth, could be under a harsh spotlight on Thursday as an antitrust lawsuit lingers. 

The Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government will hold a hearing to examine the government's role in censoring Americans, and Big Tech’s role in silencing free speech. Journalist Emma-Jo Morris, who helped break the Hunter Biden laptop story for the New York Post in 2020, and Democratic presidential hopeful Robert F. Kennedy Jr. are scheduled to testify.

Kennedy’s organization, Children’s Health Defense, filed a lawsuit earlier this year against news outlets that are members of the Trusted News Initiative, alleging some of the member organizations violated the Sherman Antitrust Act by censoring information. Kennedy's group is known for its advocacy against vaccinations and has come under sharp criticism from much of the medical community.

"When social media companies collude with government to censor critics of government policy, that violates the First Amendment. When they collude with major mainstream news organizations to censor rival online news publishers, that violates antitrust law," Jed Rubenfeld, lead attorney for the plaintiffs, said at the time. 

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In 2019, the BBC set up the Trusted News Initiative and billed the project as an effort "to protect audiences and users from disinformation, particularly around moments of jeopardy, such as elections." Inaugural partners included the Associated Press, Facebook, Microsoft, Reuters, Financial Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post. 

A year later, as the COVID pandemic affected much of the world, the BBC announced it would launch a new launch initiative to help "TNI members to gain an understanding of the effectiveness of interventions to fight misinformation" as vaccines were rolled out globally. 

"TNI members work together to build audience trust and to find solutions to tackle challenges of disinformation. By including media organisations and social media platforms, it is the only forum in the world of its kind designed to take on disinformation in real time," BBC's website states.

Kennedy’s lawsuit accuses TNI of censorship collusion related to content on whether COVID-19 originated in a Wuhan lab, whether COVID vaccines do not prevent infection, if a vaccinated person can transmit the virus and data found on the Hunter Biden laptop. 

Morris was the deputy politics editor at the New York Post when Twitter, Big Tech and media outlets famously suppressed the paper’s "laptop from hell" bombshell ahead of the 2020 election. 

As for Kennedy, he recently explained his beef with the TNI, which he feels helps push anti-free speech propaganda. 

"The Trusted News Initiative was a conspiracy that was initiated by BBC where they call together all of the legacy news sites… they married them to the social media sites… and they all made an agreement with each other that they would censor certain kinds of information. For example, any information about COVID that departed from government orthodoxies," Kennedy said on "The Rubin Report."

"Also, information that challenged any kind of political orthodoxies, any reports on Hunter Biden’s laptop, reports about the Ukraine war that were inconsistent with the official U.S. positions, and this was an extraordinary thing. This has never happened before," he continued, adding that he feels the BBC essentially wants to save itself. 

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Kennedy’s Children’s Health Defense asserts the BBC admitted the economic motivation that was discovered through litigation. The complaint quoted a BBC executive saying, "[I]t’s important that trusted news providers club together. Because, actually, the real rivalry now is not between, for example, the BBC and CNN globally, it’s actually between all trusted news providers and a tidal wave of unchecked [reporting] that’s being piped out mainly through digital platforms."

Kennedy feels the statement reveals that the erosion of trust of legacy media outlets is hurting the BBC’s business model as more and more people consume information from alternative outlets.

"The way it worked was, they would all identify issues, and identify individuals, who were saying things that should be censored. They would notify each other of those posts, or those articles, and of those individuals, they would censor them and the social media sites would not allow those sites that printed them on," Kennedy told Rubin. "Someone who is departing from government orthodoxy, you would find yourself banned on social media."

Attorney Danny Karon, who goes by "Your Loveable Lawyer" when offering legal advice on YouTube, finds it interesting that Kennedy didn’t pursue a First Amendment case. 

"He didn't see some sort of freedom of speech case, which is what everybody tends to think when we talk censorship. Not at all, because the First Amendment applies to the government censorship, not private-industry censorship. There's no First Amendment claim here at all. And he didn't sue one. He sued an antitrust claim, a Sherman Act claim for collusion for an agreement among all these media outlets to kick his and his friends out of their platforms, to kick them out of providing any coverage," Karon told Fox News Digital. 

Karon, an Ohio-based attorney who has led antitrust cases and teaches law at the University of Michigan Law School and The Ohio State University, feels that Kennedy was "rubbed the wrong way" because major news outlets wouldn’t let him get his message out.

"These groups, AP, Washington Post, Facebook, Microsoft, whomever, all these folks on the defendant side of the ledger … they can do what they want independently. The issue here… the case here revolves around an alleged agreement to get together to kick RFK and his friends out," Karon said.

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Karon explained that four gas stations at the same corner could be all priced the same, but whether it's legal depends on if they’re working together. If the four gas stations came to an agreement to raise their prices at the same time, it would be an actionable Sherman Act claim. 

"If they did it through happenstance, through competition, through taking a look across the street, that's not an agreement. That's really just competition, trying to get the highest price they can. And that's OK," Karon said. "So, the question is going to come down to this. Did the defendants here, the TNI entities, do they agree to boycott RFK and his friends, or did they just exercise this judgment independently?"

Karon said that if a "TNI bigshot" truly pushed news organizations to collude against Kennedy, then the Democratic presidential hopeful has a strong case. If there wasn’t an agreement between the TNI news organizations, then he’d lose. 

Either way, Kennedy has said the legacy media is supposed to function as "guardians of the First Amendment and free expression," but things have drastically changed. 

"They were supposed to courageously speak truth to power," Kennedy told Rubin. "They’ve not become the opposite. They’ve become propagandists for the powerful and oppressors of free speech and the enemies of the First Amendment."

The BBC did not immediately respond to a request for comment. 

"What’s Killing America" author Jason Rantz blasted TNI as "Woke Media Avengers" who silence opposing views. 

"The ‘trusted’ news organizations that told us rioters burning down buildings were peaceful protesters, that ignored streams of migrants illegally crossing into the U.S. while telling us we had no crisis, and attacked doctors who criticized Anthony Fauci's verifiably false statements about COVID, are coming together to decide what is and isn't disinformation," Rantz told Fox News Digital. 

"In what world should we trust left-wing outlets like BBC, AP, and WaPo to determine truth?" he asked. "It's like a Woke Media Avengers where their powers include shilling for Democrats and silencing opposition."

Rantz said the TNI would be considered well-intentioned if the media "made an attempt to be objective," but he feels that is not the case.

"We've seen for years, post-Trump, that this is another political agenda masquerading as a noble fight for truth," Rantz said. 

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DePauw University journalism professor Jeffrey McCall feels "TNI sounds like a good idea on the surface" because "disinformation is a weed in the public sphere and needs to be addressed." 

"A major concern, however, is whether a group of establishment media outlets can effectively serve to root out disinformation, and further, whether anybody should listen to them," McCall told Fox News Digital. 

"The credibility of establishment media is at all-time lows, of course, and that's because the public views traditional media outlets as self-interested and agenda driven. If anything, instead of a collective media effort to tamp down disinformation, these media outlets should be fact-checking each other and doing it independently," Mccall added. "Otherwise, this TNI effort looks like a collusion in which the media broadly defines and thus controls what is true information and what is not." 

The professor said "the establishment media do not have a corner on truth, as evidenced by how much reporting about Covid turned out to be misguided," but was reported by establishment media with a straight face.  

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"Independent media outlets should report facts as they can best be supported, and media outlets should allow for the reporting of competing perspectives. The public marketplace can ultimately sort things out, and citizens don't need a media monolith to collectively determine what information or ideas are allowed to circulate," he said. 

Fox News’ David Rutz and Fred Lucas contributed to this report.