Latest Ad Industry Censorship Effort Is Over Before It Began: ‘BIG WIN!’

 A key participant in the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) — which collapsed amidst accusations that it functioned as a cartel that was used to try to bankrupt conservative news outlets — says there’s no effort to create a replacement under a different name, despite materials that suggest otherwise.

Earlier this month, Dentsu, a Japanese public relations company, announced the creation of the “Dentsu Coalition,” which says it wants to boost “credible news.” The 614 Group, an advertising consulting firm, is co-leading the coalition, which it said involves a “commitment by leading brands” to “leverag[e] the collective power of the [ad] industry’s foremost players.”

Dentsu was a founding member of GARM, and was warned by the House Judiciary Committee that its efforts would be investigated. But last week a lawyer for the Americas arm of the public relations company told Committee Chairman Jim Jordan that it had no intention of engaging in censorship — instead throwing its consultant under the bus and blaming a poorly-written press release.

“To be clear, Dentsu did not intend or understand that the initiative would replace or succeed GARM,” Susan Zoch wrote in a letter obtained by The Daily Wire on Monday.

“It is clear, with the benefit of hindsight, that some of the language of the press release (drafted by The 614 Group) was hyperbolic in describing what is actually a relatively modest research effort by The 614 Group to better understand advertising spending on digital news sites, the potential returns for doing so, and ways to increase that spending. Dentsu has never viewed this effort as anything other than that—and certainly at no time contemplated the work of a small consulting firm to be anything like GARM,” the letter said.

“To the best of Dentsu’s knowledge, the ‘coalition’ envisioned in the press release to this day has only ever existed conceptually. Dentsu is not a party to any sort of governing documents or principles, there have not been any formal meetings of interested parties, and the only activity was the pursuit of additional partners for the research effort,” it continued.

GARM was an initiative of the World Federation of Advertisers that served to get every major ad-buying firm in the world on the same page — when it came to systematically withholding advertising from news outlets that promoted “misinformation” and social media companies that refused to censor it.

GARM shut down in August after Daily Wire co-founder Ben Shapiro testified to Congress about how its members used “misinformation” as a pretext for financially damaging news outlets that questioned the government and criticized left-wing policy, and after it was sued by Elon Musk’s X and video platform Rumble.

 

At its founding, GARM said it was led by “Experts at Dentsu, GroupM, IPG, Publicis Media, and Omnicom Media Group, representing media agencies.”

Dentsu’s letter was written in reply to Jordan, who wrote to Dentsu Americas CEO Michael Komasinski saying The Dentsu Coalition appears to be pursuing objectives similar to GARM’s. Before dissolving, GARM routinely attempted to delineate which news outlets were credible enough to receive” advertising dollars. The letter demanded that the company provide Congress with relevant documents.

In addition to Dentsu’s involvement in GARM, materials from 614 Group raise questions about how similar its philosophy is to GARM’s. 614 Group’s website contains a significant focus on “brand safety,” the term GARM used to steer the companies actually paying for the ads not to do business with conservative news sites because they might fall victim to a boycott by the left or be accused of bankrolling “disinformation.” Since 2014, 614 Group has held a “Brand Safety Summit,” and it boasted this month that Google, Meta, TikTok, and Snap are all involved in this year’s event.

Its home page features a testimonial from GroupM’s Joe Barone, one of GARM’s most notorious figures, in which Barone praises 614 for its commitment to “brand safety.” In an email obtained by Congress that was central to its probe of bias at GARM, Barone — in an email replete with a rainbow and the phrase “black lives matter” — said, “Fyi we have Daily Wire on our Global High Risk exclusion list, categorized as Conspiracy Theories.”

Another GroupM “brand safety” executive, John Montgomery, said there was “an interesting parallel here with Breitbart,” in which purported “misinformation” rules could be used as a pretext for ideologically-motivated censorship.

“As much as we hated their ideology and bulls***, we couldn’t really justify blocking them for misguided opinion. We watched them very carefully and it didn’t take long for them to cross the line — but it was a useful academic lesson,” he wrote.

The emails also showed a GARM member was upset that Musk did not think the New York Post’s story on Hunter Biden’s laptop should have been censored before the 2020 election. The Department of Justice later acknowledged that the Post’s story was true.

Jordan’s committee called the assurance that Dentsu won’t pursue aims similar to GARM a “BIG WIN!”

Conservatives object to the idea that public relations companies, global corporations, government-aligned nonprofits, and partisan “fact-checkers” can or should make determinations about what news coverage is “credible” and “safe.”

Jordan has argued that anti-trust law, a concept favored by the Left, bars competitors from working together to withhold business from certain actors. That dynamic emerged in emails obtained by the committee, which ad companies expressed ambivalence at withholding advertising from X to protest its lack of censorship because boycotting X meant losing eyeballs — something they only wanted to do if they knew their competitors would be taking the same handicap.