Deadline: “Claims Unconstitutional Effort “To Censor Speech” – “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. 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…”