NewsGuard says it “deploys a team of expert journalists to rate and review the reliability of news sources.”
NewsGuard, a company that rates news outlets’ accuracy using what it calls “apolitical journalistic criteria…to identify reliable sources of information,” has filed a lawsuit to block the Federal Trade Commission’s demand for a list of all its customers.
The FTC in May 2025 launched a wide-ranging probe into NewsGuard and 16 other groups—including left-leaning watch group Media Matters for America, and the Global Disinformation Index, a nonprofit media ratings service. The agency alleged the groups were part of “a conspiracy to boycott conservative and independent media.”
Deadline (2/6/26) reported that FTC chair Andrew “Ferguson has targeted NewsGuard, suggesting that it violated antitrust laws and that it was biased, as NewsGuard had given a low score to Newsmax, the conservative news site.”
‘Straightforward violation’
David Bauder (AP, 3/23/26): “The FTC accuses the company of trying to suppress conservative speech. NewsGuard says it is being forced to kneel before vindictive power.”
NewsGuard’s lawsuit accuses the FTC of “brazenly using its power not for any issue concerning trade or commerce, but rather to censor speech simply because it disagreed with NewsGuard’s judgments about the reliability of news sources” (AP, 3/23/26).
NewsGuard also accused the FTC of holding up a $13 billion merger of advertising heavyweights Omnicom Group and IPG unless the merged company agreed not to use NewsGuard’s services.
Media Matters filed a similar lawsuit last summer to block sweeping FTC demands for documents; a federal judge ruled in the group’s favor, calling that FTC probe “a straightforward First Amendment violation” (Bloomberg, 1/22/26). The FTC has appealed the ruling against it.
Ferguson is yet another representative of the Trump regime trying to silence any criticism of the government or its right-wing support network. For regime apologists, of course, the FTC chief is a sacred warrior against liberals, protecting conservatives from insults and disagreement.
‘NewsGuard can say whatever it wants’
“We have a tremendous array of investigative tools,” says FTC chair Andrew Ferguson (Wall Street Journal, 2/12/26). “Those tools are expensive when applied to you even if we don’t win at the end of the day, so knuckle under.”
The empire of Rupert Murdoch, the most powerful right-wing media conglomerate, is surprisingly split on the FTC’s move. The Wall Street Journal editorial board (2/12/26) lambasted the notion of evaluating media analysis as a form of liberal tone-policing: “Media rating shops…typically have their own mostly leftward biases,” it sniffed.
But it did come down on the side of freedom of the press over partisan bickering: “The First Amendment protects private actors against censorship by the government,” it declared. “NewsGuard can say whatever it wants under the First Amendment.”
The Journal noted that NewsGuard’s 1–100 ratings do not particularly track with ideology—while Newsmax at 20 is down there with China’s Xinhua at 7.5, Murdoch’s Fox News (69.5) came out ahead of MS NOW (49.5), and National Review (92.5) was rated higher than CNN (80).
A factor not noted by the Journal that might make these standings—and the Journal‘s defense of NewsGuard—less surprising: NewsGuard’s co-CEO and co-editor-in-chief is L. Gordon Crovitz, former publisher of (and columnist at) the Journal itself.
Crovitz’s journalistic record (FAIR.org, 4/1/20) raises questions about his value as an accuracy-rater; he applauded (8/22/90) the false convictions in the Central Park jogger case, for instance, and complained (12/6/09) that “the one-sidedness of the views of the most influential scientists had led many to believe in the gospel of global warming.”
There’s also a history of the Journal generally wanting regulatory agencies to simply let all businesses conduct themselves with little oversight, which can overlap with defending free speech. For instance, the Journal board (1/23/26) opposed the Federal Communications Commission’s attempt to silence Trump critics through the “equal time” rule while hailing “the yeoman work [FCC Chair Brendan] Carr is doing rolling back Biden-era regulation.”
‘Designed to control free speech’
According to the New York Post (2/17/26), “tech executives…only vote one way.” And then the paper wonders why it’s accused of publishing misinformation.
By contrast, the New York Post editorial board (2/17/26) said Ferguson was “fighting the good fight.” Funnily enough, the board was honest that its desire to censor NewsGuard was absolutely personal, complaining about NewsGuard “giving us a rating of about 70, even as it handed the Washington Post and New York Times perfect 100s.” The tabloid groused that it had been marked down for offering “‘attention-grabbing headlines and gossip’—which has nothing to do with accuracy — and supposedly ‘inaccurate and misleading claims about politics.’”
The Post whined that “NewsGuard really is just anti-competitive graft dreamt up by opportunists to make money from liberal-driven ‘misinformation’ mania.” It went on:
The company claims it has a First Amendment right to rate as it pleases, but Ferguson from his first days on the job has targeted “misinformation” censorship—flagging how the way the likes of NewsGuard stifle the flow of ad dollars over supposed “brand safety” issues may violate the Sherman Antitrust Act.
If free speech mattered that much to those who run NewsGuard, then it wouldn’t even exist. It is designed to control free speech.
Let’s translate that MAGA talk for regular English speakers: We must destroy free speech we don’t like to protect free speech we do like.
This idiocy is terrifyingly widespread: If a liberal has the free speech to criticize a conservative, that liberal could dissuade others from listening to the conservative, thus violating the conservative’s free speech. Ergo, the liberal should be censored from criticizing the conservative (FAIR.org, 10/23/20, 3/25/22, 10/11/24, 3/4/25).
Laughably ‘left’
Threatening a company’s merger because you don’t like the politics of its board member (Guardian, 2/22/26) is an obvious First Amendment violation—but it worked.
Not that anyone’s political allegiances should decide whether or not constitutional protections apply, but the idea that NewsGuard is a partisan left project is laughable. Crovitz, the former Journal publisher who shares control of the project, has a track record of supporting free-market capitalism (Journal, 7/22/12, 1/28/13; City Journal, 4/1/91). His partner Steven Brill is famous for his hostility toward teachers unions (New Yorker, 8/24/09; New Republic, 9/22/11; New York Times, 11/7/11).
But the MAGA regime is hellbent on using the power of the state to silence media it doesn’t like. Trump has “told Netflix to remove the Democratic foreign policy expert Susan Rice from its board or ‘face the consequences,’ while the streaming platform is locked in an extraordinary corporate battle to take control of Warner Bros Discovery (WBD),” reported the Guardian (2/22/26). The FTC’s intervention comes from the same censorious impulse that weaponized the Trump FCC to stifle criticism (FAIR.org, 2/26/25; Newsweek, 2/19/26; AP, 2/19/26).
This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Ari Paul.