First Amendment

Jacob Sullum | 2.9.2026 4:00 PM

Andrew Ferguson, chairman of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), thinks NewsGuard, a company that rates the transparency and credibility of online news sources, is biased against conservatives. There is not much evidence to support that claim. But even if it were true, NewsGuard argues in a First Amendment lawsuit it filed last Friday in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, Ferguson would have no business using his regulatory authority to harass the company and discourage advertisers from relying on its ratings.

"Under the guise of a supposed antitrust investigation, the FTC has demanded all documents (memos, emails, texts, reporters' notes, subscriber lists, analyses, financial reports, and more) that NewsGuard has created or received since its founding in 2018," the complaint notes. The FTC also has directly attacked NewsGuard's revenue by conditioning the merger of two advertising agencies on the resulting company's agreement to refrain from subscribing to the rating service.

"NewsGuard's rating service is quintessential journalistic activity protected by the First Amendment," says Robert Corn-Revere, chief counsel at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), which is representing the company. He adds that the Supreme Court, in the 2024 case Moody v. NetChoice, "unanimously affirmed that the government has no legitimate role in saying what counts as the right balance of private expression—to 'un-bias' what it thinks is biased."

NewsGuard was founded by former Wall Street Journal publisher L. Gordon Crovitz and Steven Brill, founder of The American Lawyer and Court TV. Its subscribers include advertisers, who use its ratings to guide ad buys, and online news consumers, who can access browser extensions that incorporate the ratings.

The ratings are based on what Crovitz describes as "nine apolitical journalistic criteria using a transparent process with multiple layers of review and fact-checking." The "transparency" criteria include "discloses ownership and financing," "clearly labels advertising," "reveals who's in charge, including possible conflicts of interest," and "provides the names of content creators, along with either contact or biographical information." The "credibility" criteria include "does not repeatedly publish false or egregiously misleading content," "gathers and presents information responsibly," "has effective practices for correcting errors," "handles the difference between news and opinion responsibly," and "avoids deceptive headlines."

As Ferguson sees it, that ostensibly apolitical process is systematically biased against right-wing voices. As an FTC commissioner in November 2024, he alleged that NewsGuard had "led collusive ad boycotts—possibly in violation of our antitrust laws—to censor the speech of conservative and independent media in the United States."

The following month, Ferguson returned to that theme in a concurring statement. "If a website gets a poor rating on NewsGuard's 'nutrition label,' it can choke off the advertising dollars that are the lifeblood for many websites—including platforms on which millions of Americans every day speak their minds," he wrote. "NewsGuard
'goes to great lengths to create the appearance of nonpartisanship and objectivity,' but it seems to give a free pass to deceptive and biased news coverage by major left-leaning outlets. NewsGuard is, of course, free to rate websites by whatever metric it wants. But the antitrust laws do not permit third parties to facilitate group boycotts among competitors."

Ferguson thought the FTC should take action based on that concern. "Censorship, even if carried out transparently and honestly, is inimical to American democracy," he said. "The Commission must use the full extent of its authority to protect the free speech of all Americans. That authority includes the power to investigate collusion that may suppress competition and, in doing so, suppress free speech online. We ought to conduct such an investigation. And if our investigation reveals anti-competitive cartels that facilitate or promote censorship, we ought to bust them up."

Ferguson followed through on that threat after President Donald Trump appointed him as chairman of the FTC in January 2025. That May, the FTC issued a 21-page "civil investigative demand" (CID) to NewsGuard seeking "vast numbers of confidential and........

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