Publicis Groupe, one of the world's largest ad agencies and a major corporate backer of NewsGuard, has received more than $500 million in government contracts, Foundation for Freedom Online reported.
According to the Foundation, Publicis' subsidiary, Plowshare Group LLC, holds a $394.2 million contract with the Department of Health and Human Services for the CDC's national tobacco education campaign.
The government payout to the French advertising conglomerate has raised serious questions about state sponsored censorship. Publicis ranks as one of the world's "big five" ad agencies, with clients including Disney, Samsung, Pfizer, Toyota, and others.
Publicis was an original shareholder and founding supporter of NewsGuard, a for-profit organization that purports to rates news agencies' on accuracy and reliability.
Newsmax reached out to both Publicis Groupe and NewsGuard for comment on the Foundation for Freedom report. NewsGuard initially responded but wanted more detail about the inquiry.
Steve King, a senior Publicis executive, also served on NewsGuard's board of directors through last year.
Publicis has additional ties to the media monitor.
NewsGuard also received an investment from Thomas H. Glocer, former Reuters CEO, Council on Foreign Relations member, and a director at Publicis Groupe, according to the Foundation.
Publicis partnership with NewsGuard appears to have served as a boon for the ad agency's ability to win contracts from the Biden administration.
NewsGuard "exerts influence over the media through blacklists and whitelists," the Foundation for Freedom states.
"In turn, Publicis then sells these exclusion lists back to the advertising industry that created it, financially suffocating the blacklisted websites," including Newsmax, Breitbart News, The Federalist, Prager U, One America News, among many others.
The House Committee on Oversight and Accountability last year opened an investigation into NewsGuard's alleged participation in a government-funded "censorship campaign" to purportedly discredit and even demonetize news outlets by sharing its ratings of their sites with advertisers.
The committee found that the Pentagon, State Department, and other federal agencies and the European Union funded the company. Foundation for Freedom's findings were similar.
"The advertising industry has long been the censorship industry's pressure point of choice," the report said.
Since its beginnings leftwing NewsGuard has been beset with allegations of bias and of violating the very standards of journalism and transparency it claims to uphold.
The Media Research Center in three annual studies found that NewsGuard significantly ranks conservative media much lower than leftwing outlets.
NewsGuard was launched in 2018 by founder Steven Brill. Brill is a longtime Democratic party activist and donor, having supported the campaigns of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Legal expert Jonathan Turley has called Brill a "die-hard liberal."
Brill's co-founder is Gordon Crovitz, a former Wall Street Journal publisher whose wife is Minky Worden, a leader at Human Rights Watch, an organization leading international efforts to have the ICC arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Turley argues that NewsGuard is a sophisticated censorship system and federal funds should be barred for "groups engaged in censoring, rating or blacklisting sites."