02/06/2026

Why We’ve Just Sued the Government

Statement by NewsGuard Co-CEOs Steven Brill and Gordon Crovitz

February 6, 2026

NewsGuard has always operated as an apolitical news organization that provides consumers and businesses with information about the reliability of online news sources. We believe news consumers, companies, and advertisers should have access to this kind of apolitical journalism so that they can make their own informed decisions about which news to rely on or promote.

This morning, NewsGuard filed suit in federal district court seeking to enjoin the Federal Trade Commission and its chairman, Andrew Ferguson, from continuing an unprecedented year-long campaign to use government power to prevent NewsGuard from producing this journalism.

This campaign was instigated in large part by Newsmax, a publisher that has received a low reliability rating from NewsGuard and even includes a government order forbidding ad agency holding company Omnicom from doing business with NewsGuard.

The complaint narrates in great detail the specifics of this government campaign to censor our journalism. It is a story that should be unimaginable in America.

As these excerpts from the complaint explain:

In a multi-faceted campaign extending more than a year, the Chairman and the FTC have used the Commission’s considerable regulatory powers to attack and punish a private news organization – NewsGuard Technologies, Inc. (“NewsGuard”) – to impose their view of speech nirvana.

Under the guise of a supposed antitrust investigation, the FTC has demanded all documents (memos, emails, texts, reporters’ notes, subscriber lists, analyses, financial reports, and more) that NewsGuard has created or received since its founding in 2018. Then, in the context of a merger review (approving creation of the world’s largest advertising agency holding company, Omnicom), the Commission entered an order requiring that NewsGuard be put on an unprecedented speech-based blacklist—i.e. the merged company had to agree not to subscribe to or rely on NewsGuard’s ratings and journalism….

While the FTC has jurisdiction over unfair competition in commerce and agreements that unreasonably restrain trade, 15 U.S.C. §§ 1, 45, here it 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.

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….     

Chairman Ferguson’s public statements that the Commission would use its “tremendous array of investigative tools [and] coercive power” to force online publishers to “Do what we say’’ led directly to the extraordinarily broad Civil Investigative Demand (“CID”) designed to burden and bleed NewsGuard, as well as the blacklist imposed in the Omnicom Consent Order. This later proscription came at the urging of Newsmax, a conservative media company which has long chafed that it receives lower NewsGuard ratings (for its failures to follow basic journalistic practices) than other conservative news outlets….

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….

Newsmax’s attacks ignored the facts that NewsGuard ratings are based on nonpartisan journalistic criteria and are agnostic to the political or editorial viewpoints of online sources. Many left-leaning outlets receive lower scores than comparable right-leaning sources (e.g., Fox News scores higher than MSNBC, the conservative Washington Examiner outscores the liberal Daily Beast, and the conservative Daily Caller outscores the liberal Daily Kos).

The complaint, brought on NewsGuard’s behalf by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), seeks a temporary restraining order and a permanent injunction forcing the FTC to abandon this blatantly unconstitutional targeting of NewsGuard.

FIRE’s news release is available here.

The complaint is available here.