NewsGuard Technologies is asking a federal court to block the Federal Trade Commission’s investigation into the company’s news-rating service, saying the FTC is acting to suppress speech rather than address trade or commerce issues.
In the lawsuit, NewsGuard said it was targeted by the Trump administration’s regulators and that the agency’s demands for documents and information are financially and operationally burdensome, while also raising concerns about the possible use of those materials to pressure or identify the company’s subscribers. NewsGuard filed the case last month in U.S. District Court in the District of Columbia and named the FTC and its chairman, Andrew Ferguson.
The FTC, in court filings cited by The Associated Press, rejected NewsGuard’s characterization and said the company’s accusations are “untethered from both law and fact.” The FTC also portrayed the investigation as focused on whether certain advertiser boycotts violate antitrust laws, and said it had issued more than a dozen orders for information like the ones sought from NewsGuard.
NewsGuard’s lawsuit argues that Ferguson’s agency is “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.” NewsGuard said that as a result, the FTC’s actions are likely to continue until the company “knuckles under,” a claim the company made in the litigation.
NewsGuard said the business depends on independent reviewers assessing thousands of news outlets and websites against credibility and reliability criteria. The company charges a monthly subscription fee of $4.95, and it also sells its ratings to companies that advise advertisers on where to place ads and to artificial intelligence firms seeking information they can trust.
The complaint and Associated Press reporting describe NewsGuard as relatively low-profile compared with more widely known media brands, but say it has nonetheless become a target for Trump-aligned figures and organizations that dispute how the ratings work. Newsmax, a conservative cable and online news network, urged Republican lawmakers and regulators to take steps to silence NewsGuard, the company said in its lawsuit.
Newsmax spokesman Bill Daddi said in response that NewsGuard was created to target conservative media and that it was not a “respected journalist” running a ratings service used by major ad agencies, according to Associated Press reporting. The Associated Press report also says that NewsGuard founder Steve Brill addressed political-history allegations by describing his only political activity as work for Republican John Lindsay in the late 1960s and early 1970s while he was a student, and that federal records show Brill donated to more than a dozen political campaigns in the 1990s and 2000s.
The Associated Press report also puts the NewsGuard dispute in context by describing other court fights involving Trump-era regulators and major media organizations. It says the Trump administration has litigated against the Associated Press over the outlet’s position in a dispute involving the Gulf of Mexico name, settled with CBS News’ corporate parent over editing of “60 Minutes,” sued The Wall Street Journal for reporting about Trump and Jeffrey Epstein, and is in a legal dispute with The New York Times over Pentagon reporting restrictions.
In addition to the NewsGuard case, the Associated Press report describes Ferguson’s approach to federal oversight of media as more active than in prior years, and notes that he previously said policy priorities are set by the person chosen to run the government, according to an interview reported by The Associated Press. The same report describes how a federal judge halted an FTC investigation last summer over efforts to promote advertising boycotts of companies the liberal lobbying group Media Matters for America opposes, saying the inquiry violated Media Matters’ free-speech rights.