FTC must keep up the fight against NewsGuard and its ‘disinformation’ graft

Federal Trade Commission chief Andrew Ferguson is fighting the good fight as the agency stares down a lawsuit from the “news accuracy rating” company NewsGuard.

We pushed for Ferguson to chair the FTC precisely because “he gets as few others do the insidious ways Big Tech and its handmaidens abuse their enormous economic power to stifle free speech and free thought and the way antitrust law can be marshaled to defeat them.”

The agency was acting on just those principles when it opened its probe of NewsGuard in connection with the $25 billion merger of advertising giants Interpublic and Omnicom.

As our Charles Gasparino reported in late 2024, Trump regulators were sure to scrutinize “the [ad]  agencies’ reliance on so-called news rating services that rank outlets on whether they peddle allegedly inappropriate content such as misinformation,” with concerns they work to steer ad dollars to “left-leaning news sites and networks.”

NewsGuard probably isn’t as awful on this front as the late, unlamented Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM), which closed in the wake of exposés about how it used its “control over some 90% of global marketing spending” to “to go after free speech online,” as a 2024 House Judiciary Committee report put it.

Its execs will even point to how it rates The Post as more accurate than some left-wing outlets — giving us a rating of about 70, even as it handed The Washington Post and New York Times perfect 100s.

Our problem, says NewsGuard, is that we feature “attention-grabbing headlines and gossip” — which has nothing to do with accuracy — and supposedly “inaccurate and misleading claims about politics.”

Strange: Shouldn’t it count for something that the Times and WaPo went hook, line and sinker for the Russiagate misinformation produced at the behest of Hillary Clinton’s campaign?

Nor that they dumped on our 100% accurate reporting on Hunter Biden’s laptop? NewsGuard co-founder Steven Brill called our laptop stories a “hoax” — apparently falling for misinformation planted by the Joe Biden campaign.

Later in 2020, NewsGuard went after sponsors of the Great Barrington Declaration, the warning from top minds in medicine that pandemic lockdowns were doing far more harm than good — a key sign that the company, if not purely serving a lefty agenda, certainly favors establishment narratives that so often come down to the same thing.

Indeed, left-leaning independent journalist Matt Taibbi has slammed NewsGuard’s coziness with government insiders; lefty Lee Fang says it “exemplifies the problem” of self-styled “disinformation” experts demonetizing news publishers “for reporting dissenting views.”

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 NewGuard 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.

Instead, NewsGuard really is just anti-competitive graft dreamt up by opportunists to make money from liberal-driven “misinformation”  mania — a graft designed to give elitist advertising and tech executives (who only vote one way) a reason to censor and defund voices that represent the views of the half of the country they can’t abide.

Chairman Ferguson, do not be deterred.