Media watchdog fires back at FTC over retaliatory probe

WASHINGTON (CN) — Media reliability organization NewsGuard sued the Federal Trade Commission on Friday, arguing the agency has used its regulatory muscle to attack it in retaliation for its low ratings of conservative outlets.

NewsGuard argues in the lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, that FTC Commissioner Andrew Ferguson has used a meritless antitrust investigation to demand wide swaths of documents and place the organization on an “unprecedented speech blacklist.”

The organization provides “Source Reliability Ratings,” produced by expert analysts and journalists who research news sites and scores them based on their journalistic standards. Conservative outlets such as Newsmax and One America News — favorites of President Donald Trump — have received low ratings, with One America News receiving 22.5 out of 100.

“The FTC has pursued its campaign because Chairman Ferguson does not like NewsGuard’s news ratings, which he views as biased against conservative publications,” NewsGuard argues in the 52-page lawsuit. “That is wrong — NewsGuard’s ratings and journalism about news sources are nonpartisan and based on fully disclosed journalistic criteria.”

Even if the organization were truly biased, the organization said, the FTC’s actions would still be unconstitutional because it cannot “pick and choose speech based on what it likes or dislikes.”

In a statement, co-CEOs Steven Brill and Gordon Crovitz argue the FTC’s actions were instigated by Newsmax in retaliation for their own low ratings.

“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,” Brill and Crovitz said. “Newsmax’s attacks ignored the fact that NewsGuard ratings are based on nonpartisan journalistic criteria and are agnostic to the political or editorial viewpoints of online sources.”

They point out the fact conservative outlets like Fox News, the Washington Examiner and the Daily Caller each outscore certain left-leaning outlets like MSNBC, the Daily Beast and the Daily Kos, respectively.

Ferguson’s public statements make the FTC’s intentions clear, NewsGuard argues, pointing to comments made during an April 2025 interview where Ferguson said the FTC would use its “tremendous array of investigative tools [and] coercive power” to force publishers to “do what we say.”

In May 2025, the FTC targeted NewsGuard with a sweeping, 21-page subpoena demanding documents related to NewsGuard’s reliability ratings, identification of its customers and essentially all communications to or from the organization. The subpoena also seeks reporters’ notes, sources and financial documents dating back to Jan. 1, 2018.

NewsGuard tried to comply, providing over 40,000 pages of responsive documents, trying to explain to FTC staff how its ratings system works and submitting evidence that the company’s share of the market for advertiser brand safety tools is so low — less than 0.1% — that it could not possibly be the legitimate target of an antitrust investigation.

At a meeting last month, the FTC doubled down on demands for some of NewsGuard’s most sensitive information, including its subscribers, communications with customers, lists of all entities to receive a news rating, the particulars of each rating over time and documents showing how NewsGuard developed its methodology.

In addition to the subpoena, the FTC imposed a condition on the merger of Omnicom Group Inc. and The Interpublic Group of Companies Inc. — two of the four largest companies involved in media buying for ad agencies and advertisers — prohibiting them or their affiliates from contracting with NewsGuard or using its rating services.

“NewsGuard was at the top of the FTC’s and Chairman Ferguson’s hit list,” the organization argues. “When the proposed consent order was made public, Ferguson released a statement specifically calling out NewsGuard as an organization that ‘has publicly sought to use the chokepoint of the advertising industry to effect political or ideological goals’ and alleging that NewsGuard steers ‘advertising revenue with ‘an unavoidable partisan lens.’"

NewsGuard compared its targeting to a similar case between Media Matters and the FTCover its reporting on the rise of extremist and racist rhetoric on X after Elon Musk acquired the platform, including the placement of major companies’ ads “next to pro-Nazi content.”

In May 2025, the FTC issued an expansive subpoena seeking documents and communications related to Musk and the discovery exchanged in recent lawsuits between Media Matters and X. In a lawsuit challenging the subpoena, Media Matters argued Ferguson targeted the group out of personal animus.

The FTC did not respond to a request for comment.

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