NewsGuard, the news media rating service, filed suit against the Federal Trade Commission and its chairman Andrew Ferguson on Friday, alleging that the agency was using its regulatory authority to stifle its speech.
The service, launched in 2018 by Steven Brill and Gordon Crovitz, employs a team of journalists to review the reliability of news sites and give them a score of 0-100, information that is used by consumers and clients including AI companies, search engines, news aggregators, brands and researchers.
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.
In the lawsuit, NewsGuard claimed that Ferguson has engaged in a campaign extending almost a year “to impose their view of speech nirvana” on the service.
In the lawsuit, NewsGuard said that “under the guise of a supposed antitrust investigation,” the FTC has demanded all documents, including emails, texts, reporters’ notes and subscriber lists, dating to the time of its founding.
The ratings service also claimed that, in the FTC approval of the merger of Omnicom and Interpublic Group, conditions were placed on the combined company that prohibits them from subscribing or relying on NewsGuard. The merger condition bars Omnicom from doing business with any entity that engages in the “veracity of news reporting or other politically or ideologically contested facts, such as their characterization as ‘misinformation,’ ‘disinformation, ‘bias’ or similar terms.” The provision was added after Newsmax urged a revision to a draft merger order, the lawsuit noted.
The FTC “is brazenly using its power not for any issue concerning trade or commerce, but rather to censor speech. And it has done so simply out of disagreement with NewsGuard’s First Amendment-protected journalistic judgments about the reliability of news sources,” NewsGuard’s attorneys, led by Robert Corn-Revere, chief counsel at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, wrote in the lawsuit.
The lawsuit stated, “The FTC has pursued its campaign because Chairman Ferguson does not like NewsGuard’s news ratings, which he views as biased against conservative publications. That is wrong—NewsGuard’s ratings and journalism about news sources are non-partisan and based on fully disclosed journalistic criteria. But the FTC’s actions are plainly unconstitutional even if that were not the case. The First Amendment does not allow the government to pick and choose speech based on what it likes or dislikes. In our constitutional scheme the government’s legitimate role is not to decide ‘what counts as the right balance of private expression—to ‘un-bias’ what it thinks [is] biased.'”
The lawsuit claimed violations of the First and Fourth amendments.
The lawsuit contended that the FTC’s civil investigation demand for NewsGuard materials, as well as its conditions placed on Omnicom, “came at the urging of Newsmax,” which it said has “long chafed” at NewsGuard pointing out “its failures to follow basic journalistic practices.”
“While Newsmax has a constitutional right to criticize NewsGuard and lobby government officials, the First Amendment bars those officials from acting on Newsmax’s behalf in an attempt to snuff out NewsGuard’s speech,” the lawsuit stated.
NewsGuard has noted that some left-leaning outlets receive lower scores than right-leaning ones, such as Fox News scoring higher than MSNBC.
The lawsuit seeks a declaration that NewsGuard’s First and Fourth amendment rights have been violated, and a prohibition on the Omnicom merger condition and civil investigative demand.
Progressive media watchdog Media Matters sued the FTC last year after it was issued a civil investigative demand. A federal judge found that the action was retaliation in violation of the First Amendment, putting the FTC investigation on hold. In October, an appeals panel declined to reverse the lower court ruling.
English (US) ·