RFK Jr. antitrust lawsuit alleges media ‘colluded to suppress information’ on Covid, elections

For the second time this year, Democratic presidential candidate Robert Kennedy, Jr. has, via his organization, the Children’s Health Defense (CHD), launched an antitrust lawsuit against news outlets belonging to the controversial Trusted News Initiative (TNI), a global partnership of media organizations aimed at tackling the “challenges of disinformation.”

According to the lawsuit, filed at the end of last month in U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana against the BBC, The Washington Post, Reuters, and The Associated Press, TNI members “worked together, to exclude from the world’s dominant Internet platforms rival news publishers who engage in reporting that challenges and competes with TNI members’ reporting on certain issues relating to COVID-19 and U.S. politics.”

“Federal antitrust law has its own name for this kind of ‘industry partnership’: it’s called a ‘group boycott’ and is a per se violation of the Sherman Act,” the lawsuit argues.

According to Lyrissa Lidsky, chair of U.S. Constitutional Law at the University of Florida Levin College of Law, “Media outlets do not get a First Amendment exemption from antitrust laws.”

“One problem is that we rely on the media to be watchdogs of the government,” Lidsky told Fox News Digital. “The allegation here seems to be that powerful actors in the media and the government colluded to suppress information.”

According to its website, “The Trusted News Initiative is a partnership, founded by the BBC, that includes organisations from around the globe including; AP, AFP, BBC, CBC/Radio-Canada, European Broadcasting Union (EBU), Financial Times, Information Futures Lab, Google/YouTube, The Hindu, The Nation Media Group, Meta, Microsoft, Thomson Reuters, Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, Twitter, The Washington Post, Kompas – Indonesia, Dawn – Pakistan, Indian Express, NDTV – India, ABC – Australia, SBS – Australia, NHK – Japan.”

“TNI members work together to build audience trust and to find solutions to tackle challenges of disinformation,” the organization states. “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.”

According to the Children’s Health Defense, “The TNI exists to, in its own words, ‘choke off’ and ‘stamp out’ online news reporting that the TNI or any of its members peremptorily deems ‘misinformation.'”

“TNI members have targeted and suppressed completely accurate online reporting by non-mainstream news publishers concerning both COVID-19 (on matters including treatments, immunity, lab leak, vax injury, and lockdowns/mandates) and U.S. elections (such as the Hunter Biden laptop story),” CHD states.

“The TNI is a massive group boycott,” CHD continues on its website. “Since 2020, it has successfully denied critical market facilities—i.e., the world’s dominant social media platforms—to rival news publishers whose reporting competes with and challenges TNI orthodoxy. Under antitrust law, the victims of a group boycott—like the Plaintiffs in our case—are entitled to treble damages.”

CHD’s first case against TNI, filed in January of this year, was dropped on May 18, after a judge granted a motion by the news outlets to move the case to New York.

“Days later, Kennedy’s group filed a new action in federal court in Louisiana,” Fox News Digital reports.

In a statement, Jed Rubenfeld, lead attorney for the plaintiffs, said, “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.”

“TNI members not only suppressed competition in the online news market but deprived the public of important information on matters of the highest public concern,” the lawsuit alleges. “And they did so out of economic self-interest.”

CHD lawyers quote Jamie Angus, Senior News Controller for BBC News, and argue the “economic motivation was expressly admitted in 2022 by the founder of the TNI, the BBC”:

“Of course, the members of the Trusted News Initiative are . . . rivals. . . . But in a crisis situation like this, absolutely, organizations have to focus on the things they have in common, rather than . . . their commercial . . . rivalries. . . .” Angus said, according to the 108-page complaint.

Angus continued:

[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 . . . . That’s the real competition now in the digital media world. Of course organizations will always compete against one another for audiences. But the existential threat I think is that overall breakdown in trust, so that trusted news organizations lose in the long term if audiences just abandon the idea of a relationship of trust with news organizations. So actually we’ve got a lot more to hold us together than we have to work in competition with one another.

A former senior lawyer with the U.S. Justice Department’s Antitrust Division who asked to remain anonymous told Fox News Digital that he considers Kenned a “crackpot” but admits the case “plausibly alleged that competitors agreed on some common conduct” and took “similar action to the detriment of information sources that in some ways compete with them.”

“The key issue might turn out to be determining precisely what the competitors agreed to. They have a legitimate interest in combating misinformation,” the lawyer continued. “It would not be unreasonable, and therefore would most likely not be unlawful, for the competitors to create a joint mechanism that enhances the ability of each of them to combat misinformation effectively.”

Having said that, the lawyer noted, “An agreement that goes further and entails a commitment to censor (to use a term used throughout the complaint) certain content might cross the line into impermissible restraint of commerce.”

In a statement, Kim Mack Rosenberg, acting general counsel for Children’s Health Defense, said, “People are losing faith in the legacy media and legacy media — rather than reflecting on their shortcomings and making changes — instead, through TNI, doubled down to protect their own economic interests.”

“Sometimes, lawsuits are filed to bring attention to a matter. That is likely the case here,” Lidsky said. “It is hard to say how viable this case is legally, but briefs or discovery could shed light on these media actors.”

Melissa Fine

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