Alan Dershowitz says news outlets could sue over lost ad revenues due to federally funded censorship

Harvard Law School Professor Emeritus Alan Dershowitz said Monday that news organizations could potentially take legal action if they were silenced by a government censorship project. 

"I think there are legal remedies that can be made available if you can prove that you were damaged by misuse of federal funding to bring about censorship and harm to your advertising," Dershowitz said on the "Just the News, No Noise" TV show. 

The Global Disinformation Index (GDI) was awarded grants through its U.S.-based affiliate, AN Foundation, and from NED, a congressionally chartered and taxpayer-funded agency in Washington. The grants were paid to develop strategies on how to fight perceived disinformation in foreign countries.

However, GDI's quarterly progress reports often explicitly boasted about the impact of censorship efforts on American targets and audiences.

Tactics were used by a nonprofit that got federal funding to suppress the reach of President Donald Trump's messaging and reduced advertising by $100 million to news outlets it deemed to be "disinformation" spreaders, according to reporting from Just the News.

"For the marketplace of ideas to remain open, and that's the essence of the First Amendment, it has to be equally open to all sides," Dershowitz said. 

"You can't have it [the First Amendment] with money allocated to foreign influences and use it domestically in the United States," he later said. "That's a clear violation of the spirit of the First Amendment."